Under the Dragon (9 page)

‘That is unfortunate but not a problem,’ said Than as we drove away along Kaba Aye Pagoda Road. ‘I had the forethinking to make a contingent plan.’

‘Maybe we should go to the hotel first, Colonel?’ I suggested. ‘Our flight was quite tiring.’

‘My dear, there’s a rush on,’ he insisted. ‘Time is precious and your visa only lasts for one month. You’ll understand the need to chop-chop when you reach my golden age.’

Our second stop was the Mayangon Orphanage School. Children waved at us through the barred windows as we turned into the drive. ‘Baskets are made here as well,’ Than declared with undiminished confidence. ‘And I am certain that their caff can rustle up a sterling pot of tea.’ But the school director was out too. The inconveniences seemed not to bother Than, for much the same reason that Burmese travellers never ask for arrival times. ‘Anticipation tempts fate,’ he counselled.

When Katrin went off to inspect the deserted workshop Than nodded after her and said, ‘A fair filly my dear, but, alas, you have no children?’

‘Not yet,’ I told him.

‘Forgive me for asking, but is your elegant and petite wife unbearable?’

‘Not in the least, Colonel.’

‘I am fond of children, not only human beings but also animals, all over the world, which has become not very wide nowadays, and I would make a kindly uncle.’ He touched my arm. ‘You should drink malted milk, my dear. It is good for all ailments from my own experience.’

In the workshop the smiling caretaker told Katrin of a Baptist mission near the airport. ‘Good show,’ enthused Than, though he was disappointed to miss tea. ‘Now we are making a fine progression.’ We turned the car around and headed back north.

Thirty minutes later Saw Taung stared beyond the Colonels’ left shoulder and said, ‘Baskets? Of course we do baskets.’ We had found the Self-Supporting Karen Mission at the end of a leafy lane of woven-walled houses and open drains. ‘Our work is the finest in Rangoon.’

We stumbled through the pitch-black rooms, our blind guide having no need of electric light, and I wondered how we would show him the photograph.

‘It is the handles and bases which go first,’ explained Saw Taung, leading us into a murky workshop. A row of weavers, each wearing dark glasses, laboured in the shadows, repairing broken multi-coloured plastic shopping baskets with cane strips. ‘We can fix them for half the cost of a new one.’ He walked across the room, knowing its measure without a stick, and took hold of a restored shopper in his pudgy pale hands. ‘Feel that quality.’ The weaving felt neat and exact, but it was too dark for us to see any detail. ‘Maybe you’ve watched our ads on television?’

The government promoted the mission’s work around the time of International White Cane Day. In return the blind craftsmen and women offered to renew the generals’ wives’ baskets. The offer was not taken up, because Louis Vuitton and Hermès did not sell plastic shoppers. Nevertheless the generals showed their appreciation by arranging for the craft workers to be fed for a week or two.

‘Our repairs are only meant to be ordered through government shops,’ Saw Taung explained to us, his right hand twitching in the dark, ‘but if you have brought a shopper all the way from England then I could make an exception.’

We thanked him and told him about the real object of our quest. ‘Not plastic, then,’ he said, disappointment in his voice. ‘We like working with plastic because of the wonderful colours.’

‘This one is yellow and orange,’ volunteered one of the blind workmen. A poster pinned above him read, ‘Make money from the happy eyes and compensate that money to the blinds.’

Katrin described Scott’s basket to Than, who translated the details. Saw Taung listened carefully and nodded. ‘It sounds traditional,’ he said flatly.

‘It was found over a hundred years ago.’

‘Then I am sorry. Such work takes too much time. No one can afford to make such a complicated piece any more.’

On the drive into town we felt disappointed, as well as drained by the heat. The Colonel on the other hand seemed delighted, humming to himself a few bars of ‘Rule Britannia’. “You should be thankful,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Everyone recognises the basket.’

‘But no one can place it,’ sighed Katrin.

‘You must not want this too much,’ said Than, slipping seamlessly from imperialism to Buddhism. ‘It is not good to pray and ask for anything. One has to do good deeds and transmit pure, clean radiation to all corners of the earth, below and above.’

‘Radiation?’ I asked.

‘
Mettá
, we call it. A sort of loving kindness. A universal kindness.’

We turned onto Prome Road and drove into a traffic jam. The SLORC traffic policeman had turned his back on the waiting cars. An ice lorry fumed at the head of the queue, its load melting away in the afternoon sun. Grey clouds of exhaust puffed from an idle Win cigarette bus. Two girls yawned under parasols in the back of an ancient pick-up truck. It was 27 March – Armed Forces Day – and distorted martial music warbled from a distant loudspeaker.

‘I am sorry, my dears,’ apologised the Colonel, ‘but the delay is because of the parade in Resistance Park. “The
Tatmadaw
Shall Never Betray the National Cause,”’ he quoted, without a hint of sarcasm. But when our driver stepped out of the car to light a cheroot Than hissed, ‘This lot had bugger all to do with our liberation.’ Once called Resistance Day to celebrate the start of the campaign to expel the Japanese, the date had been hijacked by the regime to substantiate its erroneous claims of legitimacy. ‘They stole it, like every damn thing else in the country.’

A fruit vendor working the queue offered us grimy bagfuls of sliced papaya. Then a gleaming khaki Jeep with a flashing red light and four yellow-kerchiefed, rifle-toting soldiers escorted a black Mazda VIP 929 saloon around the snarl. Our driver slipped back behind the wheel.

‘Listen please, Burma is a faithful country,’ Than told us now that he could again be overheard. ‘We try to refrain from all evil, to do what is good, to purify the mind. This is the Buddha’s teaching.’

The SLORC policeman flourished a salute at the official limousine’s tinted windows and then, almost as an afterthought, deigned to let the other traffic proceed.

‘Here, please,’ Than said to the driver. ‘This will suit me fine.’ He climbed out onto the Pyay Road and, while straightening his robes, offered to help us search for the basket again the following afternoon. ‘I wonder,’ he added, ‘if you received my last letter?’ He cast a cautionary glance toward the driver.

‘I’m sorry,’ I replied. I had been too hot, and too rushed by Than’s anarchic runaround, to remember the gifts. ‘They’re in here somewhere,’ I said, rummaging in the bottom of our bag.

‘I favour simple cooking,’ Than told Katrin. ‘Poached eggs and sausages with mashed potatoes; a throw-up to my days as a gentleman-cadet at the RMAS.’

‘A throwback,’ I suggested, though many Burmans might disagree, and passed him three glass bottles and a jar.

‘But you have kindly imported from England that most essential ingredient! Yes, thank you. Crosse & Blackwell Fruit Sauce.’ He examined the jar. ‘And this is most excellent too. Colman’s. You appreciate that I am still quite young so very much care for the adult mustard. Now please will you forgive me for not providing you with tea-like refreshment but the driver will converse you to your hotel. I must call on old pals who have gone over to the other side of the world.’

‘America?’ I asked.

‘No, my dear. Comrades-in-arms who long ago went for a Burton beer.’ He flapped his umbrella toward the mauve bougainvillaea that marked the Pyay Road war cemetery. ‘And who are now pushing up daffodils. I always drop by when I’m in this part of town,’ he explained before leaving us.

A helicopter shuddered overhead and, passing within sight of the Shwedagon Pagoda, we heard the marching song of the loyal
Tatmadaw
. As we paused at a traffic light for another military convoy the driver asked us what our nationality was. All afternoon he had given no indication of having understood our conversation. I told him, then pointed out the window and said, ‘That’s quite a contrast. The military here, and Buddhism there.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, feigning incomprehension, ‘but sometimes my English isn’t too good.’ The light changed and we moved forward, not to exchange another word.

Night fell and shutters were thrown open to catch any breath of wind. Apartment blocks, which had been sealed against heat and sun by day, spilt their lives and washing lines out onto the street. Families sat cross-legged on broad armchairs of woven rattan, watching vast colour televisions, easting crispies and peanuts. As Katrin and I picked our way around the pavement living rooms, around old men reading newspapers and children asleep on bamboo mats, I tried to reach back to the Rangoon of ten years ago. I wanted to recall my first visit, to hold its mirror up to the present day. Vignettes did come back to me: the squawk of parrots and quarrel of sparrows in the trees; the laughter of an outspoken friend who had vanished one Sunday evening; the cries of beggars in the darkness, ‘Please, saah. Give us food. We have nothing to eat.’ I wanted to remember and to write them down, every thought and encounter, so that they would not be forgotten, so that I might hold onto the memory for ever.

Rangoon became Burma’s young capital in 1885, when gunboats completed Britain’s conquest of the country. A century before, King Alaungpaya had named the city Dagon, or ‘end-of-strife’, to celebrate his dynasty’s military invincibility. He would have been displeased by his descendants losing it in the Anglo-Burmese wars. During their brief stewardship the British transformed the city into an imperial capital and major port. Its strategic position, facing the ocean and served by a river navigable for nine hundred fertile miles, enabled the country to become the world’s largest exporter of rice. It was a way-station for KLM, Air France and British flying-boats. Its high literacy rate was a source of national pride. Then in 1942 the Japanese invaded, and half a million people fled for their lives. Three years later, at the end of the Second World War, the ‘scorched earth’ policy practised by both the invader and the Allies had rendered a third of all cultivated land unusable.

For the next forty years, Burma was a place out of time, unable to progress, racked by rebel insurgents and impoverished by Ne Win’s disastrous ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’. Paddy fields lay fallow, Majestic buildings were left to rot. Everyday goods became unavailable. Once the rice bowl of Asia, the country began to import food to feed its children. By 1987 it ranked among the world’s ten poorest nations. When I arrived milk was too scarce to be left in jugs on tea-house tables. A single bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label whisky sold on the black market would finance a week’s travel, including flights, accommodation and food. Writers scribbled their stories on strips of paper torn from the blank margins of old newspapers, and shopkeepers made paper bags by pasting together sheets from wormy issues of the
British Medical Journal
. The desperate, destitute conditions had incited the 1988 uprising, which was crushed by the heinous massacre.

An ice vendor hauling oversized blocks flecked with rice-chaff insulation lay down his load to shake our hands. From street kitchens women smiled at us, pausing from mulching curry into fistfuls of noodles, pressing through the flavours with their fingers. Diners squatted beside them, eating over open drains on kerbsides stained by sanguinary pools of betel-nut spit. Chilli-spiced mango slices glistened beneath candles flickering in cellophane bags. A
palata
vendor waved, then slapped a thumb of dough onto his platter and shaped it like a pizza. He slipped in onto the griddle, cracked an egg on top, then flipped and cut the fried flatbread into bite-size mouthfuls with a pair of old scissors. We pushed through the busy night market, stepping over a display of second-hand Thai denim, and into a noisy biryani bar illuminated by car-battery lamps. We squeezed onto a table beside a young Indian family. A shy, walnut-skinned woman looked down at her plate. Her husband in a sweat-stained singlet offered to buy our dinner. ‘Friends. First time. Myanma Drinking Water,’ said the restaurant owner, placing a plastic bottle before us. His white teeth flashed and a mouse-sized cockroach ran up the wall.

‘I don’t understand how after all that has happened these people can still laugh,’ I said to Katrin. ‘Don’t they remember?’

‘What has changed since 1988?’ she asked me.

‘Everything and nothing. Back then there was no Pepsi or high-rises. No one had a television. Now there’s much more food. But somehow all the changes feel physical, superficial.’

‘The Burmese want to survive, like everyone else,’ said Katrin. ‘Maybe it’s better to be quiet and alive than outspoken and dead.’

‘You heard Than this morning. I don’t believe that the people’s acquiescence has been bought by reruns of
Dallas
and a few extra measures of rice.’

We watched the family eat with their hands, using fingertips bunched like utensils, organising and mixing the
puris
and
dosa
on the stainless steel
thali
plate. The owner came over again to ensure that we were enjoying our meal.

‘The
biryani
is delicious,’ said Katrin.

‘You are welcome here,’ he nodded, pleased that we had chosen to visit his restaurant, his country. ‘You would like some more water? It is on the house.’

‘Thank you, yes,’ I replied. The night air cloaked us like a wet blanket in a sauna. ‘But only if we can pay.’

‘It is good that you see our life,’ he said, choosing his words with care. His three sons paused from cleaning dishes to come up too and stare at us. ‘To us you tourists are like the stars in the night sky. We hope a little of that light will shine on us.’

On the drive back to our hotel the bus did not use its headlamps. The street lighting too had been turned off, to conserve electricity. A stranger riding with us tried to pay our fare. We walked the last few hundred yards past soldiers standing guard under
hkayayban
trees. Children darted out between the passing cars to gather the falling star-flowers. One youngster, bolder than the rest, held my hand. ‘You very beautiful,’ he told me, too bashful to look at Katrin.