Orwell (4 page)

I saw five places that surface in
Burmese Days.
Katha's old English Club, the social center of colonial life and the scene of a Burmese riot in the novel, was now a musty office with sales figures chalked on an old blackboard. It was adjacent to a wretched tennis court, hidden away where the river curves back around the town. A Western-style building, it had sliding windows with fixed metal grilles, a corrugated-tin roof and four pillars at the entrance. The lower story had a concrete floor that was once used for dances. At one end stood an ancient billiard table that had once distracted bored Englishmen.

The Anglican Church of the Province of Mandalay, where the protagonist John Flory's Burmese mistress denounces him in front of his English colleagues, was built in 1912. It collapsed in 1994 and was rebuilt on the same site with bricks, timber and a metal roof in time for services on Christmas Day in 1999. The Burmese priest opened the church and showed me around. His family lived in a house on the grounds, where a young woman sat on a raised platform, suckling her baby in the warm rain. The English cemetery—not next to the church, as described in the novel—was large, square, fenced and locked, overgrown with three feet of foliage that completely covered the old gravestones of those who'd died of bullets or fever. Though I found a hole in the fence, I was warned not to wander amid the poisonous snakes and spiders. The railroad station—where, in the novel, Lieutenant Verrall departs on an early train, jilting Elizabeth Lackersteen and bilking the Hindu merchants—was built in 1898. Surrounded by shabby food stalls, the tin-roofed building with grilled ticket windows stood across from the stationmaster's house. The open, doorless, second-class train cars, which average about fifteen miles an hour, were filthy. Although the railroad was still in service, oxen grazed on the grass that grew between the tracks.

Significantly, the prison at Katha was still an impressive structure, kept in
good condition. Surrounded by a barbed wire fence, it had 15-foot-high, fortresslike stone walls and wooden watchtowers at all four corners. I entered the front gate but was not allowed to take photos or approach the main entrance. I later heard that the trishaw driver got into trouble for taking me to the prison, though I was actually led there by the schoolteacher/government agent, who carefully took down my name and address. At the end of the Orwell tour, the teacher refused a donation for his school, putting his hand on his chest and rather unconvincingly insisting: “My heart is your heart.” Later on, when immigration officials boarded our ship and made a show of scrutinizing the passenger list, one of the ship's guides teased me, whispering, “They're looking for you!”

Outside Katha, where Orwell's Flory toiled as a timber merchant, I saw working elephants dragging chained teak logs out of the forest, bathing in the river with their mahouts, and even carrying some of my fellow passengers. One elephant had had half his trunk bitten off; another had lost control of her bladder and dripped like a leaking faucet. Some towns had satellite television, and some village teahouses showed videos of violent American-made films. But the landscape and the people still looked much as they had when Orwell saw them. The bullock cart was the main form of transport, the fields were still plowed with water buffalo, the rice was planted and harvested by hand.

Unlike wet and crowded Rangoon, Mandalay, in central Burma, was dry and sunny, a spacious, sprawling city of artisans and craftsmen: silk weavers, gold beaters, wood-carvers, stonecutters and bronze casters. A rare British memorial tablet on Mandalay Hill, which has the usual pagoda and spectacular view, marked the bitter, costly Gurkha assault on that Japanese stronghold in March 1945. From aboard the plane I had taken to join the cruise, I had seen a fine view of Mandalay Hill and Fort, with its high, crenellated walls surrounded by a huge moat. The Burmese Royal Palace (which represented the center of the world in Buddhist cosmology) and the English police barracks inside the fort were destroyed by British bombers in May 1945.

When I reached Mandalay Fort, I paid an entrance fee and then walked across a wooden bridge, past guards, through a tall gate and down one of the wide avenues to inspect the place where Orwell trained and recklessly rode his motorbike. Hawkers at the souvenir stalls, calling out “Geo' Orwe,'” sold pirated copies of the Penguin
Burmese Days
, with the print sometimes slanting right off the edge of the page. In the Maha Muni pagoda, an enormous Buddha was placed on a platform high up in a narrow niche. Only men are allowed to approach. The high platform has no railing, so
as I walked around it, I had to clutch the shoulders of kneeling Buddhists who were gaining merit by pasting layers of gold leaf on the statue. The gold, thickened over the centuries, has now distorted the original shape of the Buddha.

Pagan was once one of Southeast Asia's architectural glories. Its distant mountains and dry flat plain, with palm, neem and tamarind trees, reminded me of Marrakech. Spread over twenty square miles, it has more than two thousand temples and pagodas. After climbing to the top of a high pagoda, I watched flocks of sheep and goats pass through the temple gates as a sudden, dramatic tropical sunset illuminated the spectacular landscape. The “Visit Myanmar 1996” campaign, which promised to attract half a million tourists, spawned more than fifty guesthouses in Pagan—all of them quite empty. Souvenir shops were attached to all of the major pagodas, and peddlers mobbed me wherever I went. Most of Pagan's pagodas are in ruins or are crudely restored, and I was rather disappointed by my visit. The site was certainly worth seeing, like Borobudur in Indonesia, but not nearly as thrilling as Cambodia's Angkor Wat.

I was much more impressed by Mount Popa, thirty miles and two hours east of Pagan, tucked into the high hills like a Himalayan retreat. As I drove toward the town, the desertlike plain turned into a luxuriant green landscape. Herds of spindly goats wandered along the road, and water buffalo immersed themselves in mud. From a distance, the enticing pagoda, perched atop a 5,000-foot mountain, looked like the Greek monastery on Mount Athos. As I climbed the 777 smooth steps (the last 500 in bare feet), grasping the handrail and shaded by a snaking roof, monkeys scampered about me. There were fine views along the way and a rewarding vista from the top of the mountain.

The cruise concluded with a flight back to Rangoon and an abrupt end to my pampered existence. I wanted to go south to Moulmein, the third-largest city in Burma, but it was nearly impossible to reach by plane, train or ship. The crowded twelve-hour “express bus” had (I was told) arctic airconditioning and Burmese videos that blasted all night, so I hired my own car and driver for $50 a day. Ali—a half-Indian, half-Chinese Muslim—owned a ten-year-old Toyota, a used car discarded from Japan, with a steering wheel on the wrong side for driving on the right side of the road. Ali drove very fast and constantly blew his horn while passing buses, trucks, cars, pedicabs, bicycles, tongas, bullock carts, pedestrians, road menders, goats, pigs, dogs and chickens, as well as sheets of rice drying on the road. Although he never actually hit anything, there were hundreds of near misses. As he plowed through the endless potholes at top speed, I found it impossible to relax or
find a comfortable position in the cramped car, and felt as though I were bouncing on a bucking horse.

Ali's English was rudimentary, and he called all foreign women “sir.” But his comical face was immensely expressive, he was ebullient and eager to please, and he cared for me tenderly. After establishing that I was older than he—an important distinction in Burma, where age and status are enshrined in forms of address—he showed heightened respect for my age as well as my status as a client. When asking directions to the next town, Ali would shout out its name and ask the startled bystander:
“Ya, le-le?”
which meant “Yes, or no?” The roads were not only full of holes (even washed out altogether in some places, where water from the flooded rice paddies spread over the rough surface) but also had frequent roadblocks, manned sometimes by police or soldiers, sometimes by a nodding toll collector. Ali often went around or under the barrier (if the guard wasn't vigilant), and occasionally halted to pay a small fee. It was impossible to tell why he stopped at one gate or shot past another with a dismissive wave of the hand.

The government, obsessed with security and afraid of terrorist attacks, had set up a dozen of these roadblocks over the two-hundred-mile, ten-hour drive from Rangoon to Moulmein. America is demonized in the official press, but the armed soldiers who checked my passport and took down my name at the two new bridges across the Salween River were pleasant and polite.

After Pegu, the landscape changed dramatically from a flat plain with tall rows of fenced rubber trees to oval-shaped mountains—like those near Guilin, portrayed on Chinese screens—which surged above the emerald rice paddies. The road was flooded near Pa-an, so I hired a boat to see the deep painted caves and hilltop monastery. I glided there past high rocks and through a silent, spooky mangrove swamp. One cave depicted a local legend, with statues of chained and bloody prisoners brought before a merciful king; others had Buddhas placed in dark niches. One monk greeted me by sounding a gong, and another read his prayers aloud while a group of boys chanted their lessons in school. As I passed through the damp caves, water dripped from the ceiling, formed pools on the ground and created a strange, eerie atmosphere.

Moulmein was once the most beautiful town in Burma, and the
Imperial Gazetteer
of 1908 praised its gorgeous setting: “The river banks are crowded with the most varied of ever-green foliage…. To the north and west lies the meeting place of the rivers, the shipping in the stream, the wooded islands in the channel, Moulmein with its glistening pagoda overlooking the water, and the dark hills of Bilugyun.” Kyaikthanlan, the “old Moulmein Pagoda” in Kipling's “Mandalay,” is still a meeting place for young lovers. I saw
what Kipling called a pretty “Burma girl a-settin” there. But, attached to a young man, she did not seem to be pining for a British soldier. The U Zina pagoda, on the hill above the city, also offers splendid views of the bustling town and the ships in the river. But the city, decayed since colonial times and with no electricity at night, now has a squalid market and a riverfront filled with garbage.

I stayed at the “best” hotel—very rundown (but with its own generator!) and situated in a park across from a little island where pilgrims meditate and Buddhist nuns tend the neat gardens. The hotel's hopeless waiters never changed the dirty-to-begin-with tablecloth, and brought food that was on hand rather than the dishes I'd ordered. My room featured squashed bugs on the walls, a large puddle in the bathroom, a filthy bath mat, two nonfunctioning lights, and a planklike bed. It was decorated with a gaudy elephant tapestry in high relief and green satin curtains that clashed with the bright red blankets. I was, for several days, the only tourist in the hotel—indeed, in the entire town of 250,000.

Bored with the hotel food, I had a decent meal at the Peking Restaurant. Decorated with cigarette and beer posters, it had a cement floor, bathroom-tile walls, worn Formica tables and low stools. While a young man massaged his friend by treading on his back with bare feet, I ate duck, vegetables, noodles, bananas and beer for $2 (paid in U.S. currency). I went to the Mon State Museum and found the gate ajar and the doors padlocked. But the museum was opened especially for me. The sleepy adolescent caretaker was too short to reach the switches for the lights and fans, so I turned them on myself. The toilet (always on your mind in Asia) was unspeakable. Though sadly neglected, the museum had an unusual emaciated Buddha, a stringed musical instrument in the shape of an alligator, and some royal robes and thrones, melancholy reminders of the Burmese princely families.

While in Moulmein, I made some new discoveries about Orwell's ancestors and the family business. His French grandfather, Frank Limouzin, was a teak merchant in Moulmein, and his mother grew up there in luxurious surroundings. The first sawmill was built in 1833, just south of the town in Mudon, and logs were floated down from the forestry stations to the Salween River. Most of the timber was exported to India and Europe; some was used by the local shipbuilding industry.

The Gymkhana Club and the English cemetery have both been destroyed, and no maps or tourist information were available. But traces of Orwell remain. “Shooting an Elephant” opens: “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” It then describes how he
had to shoot an animal that had run wild and killed a coolie. Moulmein was, for a time, one of the main penal settlements for Indian convicts. The original jail—a collection of barracks within four walls, guarded by peons by day and soldiers at night—was replaced in 1908 by the Central Jail (now a municipal building), where Orwell worked. In his time, the police headquarters was an impressive colonial building with a covered veranda, high wooden shutters and tiled floors. Built in 1826 on a hill in Than Lwin Park, it had a fine view of the river and is still used for the same purpose. Nine friendly policemen watched me while I waited for permission to enter and photograph the view from the front entrance.

Despite the pervasive fear of foreigners and the usual reluctance to take responsibility for them, the police chief was surprisingly generous and allowed me to inspect the building. Inside the sanctum, the office girls, taking their morning tiffin of rice and tea, stopped to stare at me and giggle. There were mountains of yellowed paper tied with rough string, ancient typewriters, uneven floorboards, curtained-off partitions and crumbling sleeping quarters in the overgrown garden. The second floor could no longer be used because the roof was leaking and the twenty-foot-high ceiling was severely damaged.

Lyndhurst, a large two-story brown wooden villa in an unruly garden near the corner of Morten Lane and Judson Road, in the colonial quarter of town, may have been Orwell's house, I was told—or was very like the one he'd lived in. The present owner, the grandson of a Burmese district commissioner who'd bought it in 1949, invited me inside and showed me some faded photographs of his grandfather at a garden party in Buckingham Palace. Now fallen on hard times, he lived alone, served by a cook and a boy, in the damp, decrepit, Poe-esque house.