Video Night in Kathmandu (31 page)

Thus reassured, I made my way back past cricket greens and stern libraries, regimental statues and white-columned institutes. Popping into a local bookstore, I found faded copies of Alistair MacLean, Angus Wilson and Trollope. Back at the Strand, black-tied men in curry-stained white coats were serving pots of tea on tarnished silver trays, accompanied by cardboardy pieces of cake last wielded, in my experience, by unsmiling school matrons at elevenses. One entire section of the menu was devoted to “Porridge.” But the pièce de résistance of the hotel was clearly the five-course meal whose centerpiece was bacon and eggs. The bacon arrived in hefty black slabs as thick as expensive chocolate. I set to cutting into my meal, and a piece of meat ricocheted across the table. No wonder, I thought, Burma was such a cult favorite among my friends from British boarding school.

It all, I suppose, made a peculiar kind of sense. For in locking the modern world out, Burma had mostly succeeded in locking in the fading legacy of the long-ago outside world. By now, as a result, Rangoon had been turned into a sepia-colored daguerreotype of the Raj. And what had the Raj been in any case but a classically no-nonsense British institution, a public school writ large and transported to the colonies?

Rangoon had now, therefore, come to resemble a kind of cobwebbed, treasure-laden attic in the home of some imperial Miss Havisham, an anomalous old place cluttered with yellowed letters, ageless heirlooms and moth-eaten keepsakes left over from the days of Empire. The metaphor acquired an almost literal truth in the celebrated Lost-and-Found case at the Strand. The dusty museum case was a veritable treasure trove of ancient objets trouvés: ladies’ fans and officers’ cuff links; fin de siècle pince-nez and rusted fountain pens; grandfatherly razors that reminded me of Kipling’s startling claim that, each night in the tropics, he was shaved by his servant while he slept; and all the
other forgotten props of an age of vanished elegance when military men waltzed with memsahibs before repairing to the veranda for a drink.

By comparison, storied Raffles Hotel in Singapore seemed little more than a tourist’s version of Empire, where sacraments were arranged as studiously as in some period-piece movie: plaques outside the rooms commemorated the stays of Coward and Maugham (and Arthur Hailey!); a home movie at teatime trumpeted forth the raffish history of the place; carefully framed pictures depicted elephants and mustachioed gentlemen; and a signposted trail guided visitors through a tale of the time a tiger was shot in the billiards room. In the Strand, however, the souvenirs were exactly where they belonged—everywhere in sight and nowhere in particular. Like Burma itself, the place brought to mind a down-at-heels wastrel who still preserved a misbegotten kind of propriety, dressing up for every occasion in a three-piece suit and hardly noticing that his clothes were ill-fitting and threadbare and a little sad.

And therein lay the country’s charm. Having sequestered itself for decades from the splendors and sophistries of the modern world, Burma had continued to cultivate a suspicion of the new that was itself old-fashioned. Almost alone among the countries of the Third World, it seemed not to seek more Western sophistication, convenience and flash, but less. Burma was one of the only countries I had ever seen that was not goosestepping (to the sound of the Bee Gees) toward a brave new world of videos and burgers, but was content to mind its own business and go its own way. Having freed itself from servitude to the Empire, it had chosen to commit itself to a self-created ideal. Its dreams might seem wonky or zany or, worse than that, high-and simple-minded, but at least they were not shiny synthetic imports that changed with the seasons. “They do not need the glittering baubles described in the advertisement sections of American magazines,” Norman Lewis had written more than thirty years ago. “The Burmese way of life has never been based on unnecessary consumption, and there is no reason why it ever should. It is as good as any, as it is.”

The astonishing depth of Burma’s innocence hit me fully only as I wandered around the capital. There were no high rises in Rangoon, no glass buildings or fast-food joints; there were no
girls on sale, and no drugs. The massage parlors here offered massages (for innuendo, the shorthand of worldly corruption, was as absent as the corruption itself), and there was no danger, no meanness in the frayed and scruffy streets. Smuggled cans of Coke could, it was whispered, be procured for $3 at a few blue-chip black markets, but for the rest, one had to settle for rusty-capped bottles of “sparkling” Vimto that looked as though they had been fresh on the occasion of Churchill’s final visit. It was rumored that one local newsstand carried
Time
and
Newsweek
, but copies could be purchased only by residents in possession of special vouchers—a possibility so remote that the official price of both magazines was 50 cents, a quarter their cost in every other country of the globe. As for the vendors who lined the roads of Rangoon, they offered nothing more topical than a three-year-old copy of
Good Housekeeping
and some dog-eared issues of
Reader’s Digest.
I did notice the Snow White Pastries shop, the Flying Fish Store, and the Hope TV and Video Service. But the closest thing in Rangoon to a bright new boutique seemed to be a run-down shack with a wooden board outside, on which had been painted, decades ago, “Hollywood Beauty Parlor.”

There were, I discovered, two English-language newspapers in Burma,
The Guardian
and
The Working People’s Daily.
Each contained six pages, one of which was filled with lists of Model Workers Grade III, one of which concerned the minutes and seconds of sundry committees and one of which discussed, in elaborate detail, the world of golf. Both papers were entirely indistinguishable, and both were written in the featureless style of an
Izvestia
account of a town-hall meeting. For avid readers, however, that had to suffice: in Burma there were no libraries.

Television had come to the country in 1980, but both national stations came on the air only at 7:30 each night and closed down by 9:30. When I consulted the viewing schedule one day, the main attractions were “Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy” and “Cat Happy Pappy.”

A local cinema had decorated its walls with posters of such former triumphs as
A Man, a Woman and a Bank, The Story of the Mountain of Dreams
, and
The Girl in Gold Boots.
But when I went to the movies in Burma, the best picture on offer was an aging native classic. I paid my fee and entered. The place was
almost empty. It reeked of spices and strong tea. A few children were slithering over parents and crawling under seats. Hardly had I sat down, however, when the few doughty souls around me sprang suddenly to their feet. A somber tune came scratchily up on the sound system and a few flags began flapping on screen. Then, just as suddenly—and well before the national anthem had concluded—everyone sat down again.

Frames flickered, numbers whirled and onto the screen came a Pathé-newsreelish documentary on Burmese dancing. For twenty minutes, a stately troupe glided, with precise delicacy, around a stage, and then the screen shook again, and shivered, and whirred, and on came the middle of the black-and-white main feature. Gangs of naked-chested hunks with caveman coiffures performed, somewhat ponderously, a handful of kung fu routines. A pair of perfumed Osrics tiptoed into view, swapping catty barbs about something or other. There was a marriage, and a parental heart attack. Two young lovers astride a motorcycle rode cheerfully through the empty streets of a travelogue-perfect Rangoon. A ten-month-old baby stared out at the audience in bemusement. The audience stared back, snickering. The martial artists, to dramatize their deaths, pounded heavily on their hearts and then, with a thump, keeled over. It was a violent genre, but the treatment seemed quite amiable.

Apart from such entertainment, there was just about nothing to do at night in Rangoon. A Burmese teenager asked me once if there were discos where I lived. Accustomed to such wistful inquiries and always ready to smuggle in a few images of the Good Life, I assured him that there were plenty of snazzy, loud, laser-beamed places. Then, almost rhetorically, I asked him whether he would like one day to see one. “What is the point?” he said quietly. “Why go to disco?”

Small wonder, then, that the only neon in town flashed above the heads of the giant Buddhas in the Sule Pagoda. For even as the streets emptied after nightfall, the central pagoda grew ever more frantic, jostling, high-spirited. Part bustling bazaar, part amusement park, part town square and part central shrine, it turned, each evening, into a beehive of frenzied activity. The neon lights blinked above the statues, prayer wheels with fortune-cookie compartments began spinning, groups of gossips clucked to themselves in corners, white-robed nuns knelt in
silent prayer, palmists muttered, teenage kids tittered and paraded, what looked like an adult-education class recited slogans in what seemed to be a classroom, puppies for sale barked feebly and lines of citizens padded around antechapels wallpapered with photos of shaven-headed monks.

This, of course, was the metropolitan capital; as I traveled up-country, I realized that Rangoon marked the zenith of Burmese sophistication. Along the road to Mandalay, Burma’s second city—its Leningrad or Chicago—the favored mode of transport was a horse-drawn tonga. There was a golf course in Taunggyi, but it was equipped with nothing but a tiny hut around which a few locals shuffled in their
longyis.
And Pagan, the country’s main tourist sight—regarded by many as the most remarkable site in all Asia, with its thousands upon thousands of eleventh-century temples, golden and ocher and a blinding white, jutting up in lonely splendor across plains as flat and open as the scrubland of New Mexico—consisted of nothing but a puddly, one-lane village. One thatched hut had a sign outside that said “Post and Telegraph,” but it was, in my experience, always open and never manned. The water that gushed out of the hotel taps was black.

In the entire country, I later discovered, there were only a third as many hotel rooms as in the Las Vegas Hilton. Most of them in any case were empty. I saw a few bearded, earringed young men accompanied by stringy-haired girls with sun-bleached shoulder bags. For them, it seemed, Burma was just another stop on a life they didn’t want to get started; they were happy to go anywhere so long as it was not home. I saw some mad dogs and Englishmen who were paying tribute to the last outpost of the Empire and had come to inspect the national style of shabby gentility, and sometimes to incarnate it too. Beyond that, nothing.

THROUGHOUT ALL THIS
, whether as cause or effect of its indifference to Western frippery, Burma seemed to bump along with a winning blend of merriment and strictness. If it was a malfunctioning guinea pig of fundamentalist socialism, that may have been because it was a model of strict Buddhism. And, one way or another, Buddhist precepts of compassion seemed always to subvert the rat-a-tat-tat of socialist slogans. One favorite
sign, seen everywhere, advised: “Be Kind to Animals by not Eating Them.” Another, on a hotel reception desk, implored foreigners to return the smiles they received. On a blackboard inside a tiny riverside inn was chalked up an even more plaintive appeal: “Please do not take photographs which create a bad impression for the village.” And even more engaging than the boastful mottoes (“The King of Cars”) daubed across the sides of bilious old wrecks were the injunctions of skewed firmness with which the authorities went about enforcing their regulations. “No Feet Wearing,” said the sign at the entrance to every pagoda. “Smoking, Drinking and Flesh is Strictly Prohibited with in the Sikh Temple premises,” read a sign outside a shrine, before adding, in a footnote that nicely covered an option ignored by the first injunction, “A Drunk Person is not Allowed Admission.”

The signs, I thought, were apt reflections of their makers. For the Burmese seemed an uncommonly jolly and guileless people, not veiled or stealthy as other Southeast Asians could be, but sunny and open as their plains. Even the black marketeers had more mischief about them than malice. Generally, they approached me with respectful diffidence (“If I may, sir …”) before treating me to a few housewifely maxims, a lecture or two on topics Burmese and an inquiry after my particulars (“If I am not being too inquisitive please, what is your age and where is your home?”). Only after the pleasantries had been observed would they get down to business. Could I sell some Johnnie Walker Red and a carton of 555 cigarettes? Would I like to exchange dollars? Could I buy them cigarettes from the Diplomatic Stores where only foreigners could shop? Should I not take a ride around Rangoon? Even then, however, a strict sense of decency was preserved: the irregulars cheerfully informed me exactly how much profit they stood to make before they fell into bargaining. Then, with undisguised pride, they chaperoned me toward their waiting chariots. “This,” said the beaming owner of a 1952 Chevrolet, “cost only six thousand dollars.”

Hardly was I installed in the back seat of one of these jalopies when a friendly rapscallion would hop behind the wheel, two of his cronies would bundle into the passenger seat, and off we would bounce through the sleepy streets, the Rangoon-squadders furnishing a running commentary of piquant perceptions,
loony anecdotes and antic fables. Two topics were forbidden, they said: politics and drugs. But did I know that Ne Win was born in the same year as Reagan and Chernenko? And had I seen Rangoon’s most efficient and prosperous industry—its black market? It was a wondrous thing, and indispensable. “Alas,” said one shadow economist, “you can’t just live on love and fresh air.”

One day, during another such jaunt in an ailing thirty-year-old Morris, a typically amiable soul named Harry elected to deliver an irresistible defense of the system that had supported him, after a fashion, for eleven of his twenty-four years. “You,” he said, “are rich and can buy many things. But we cannot. Therefore, if you buy for us, everyone is happy.” Taken by this jabber-wocky logic, I agreed to buy Harry some Burmese cigarettes. Instantly, his accomplice spun the wheel, and we whizzed—or rumbled, at least—across town to a hotel, where Harry instructed me to buy two cartons. Then we drove back to the Strand, and Harry, whispering prompts over my shoulder, asked me to get five more. The storekeeper objected; Harry stepped forward and fired back a riposte; the merchant protested; the two chattered excitedly; money was slipped from one palm to the next; Harry assured me that the manager had agreed not to enter the transaction on my currency form; I picked up the cigarettes, paid in dollars, and we left. Not everyone was happy, exactly, but the system seemed to work. Once outside, Harry addressed me as patiently as if I were a child. “In my country,” he said, “it is, I am afraid, always necessary to bribe.”