Saving Fish From Drowning (22 page)

The truth is, I’ve always preferred the old fictions about any ancient land. I read to escape to a more interesting world, not to be locked up in a sweltering prison and find myself vicariously standing among people who are tortured beyond the limits of sanity. I have 1 4 6

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loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author’s sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left, the funny monkeys chattering in the tree branches and not the poachers and their empty shell casings below.

In Burma, despite the sad reports, it is still quite possible to enjoy what is just in the right hand: the art, first and foremost, the festivals and tribal clothing, the charming religiosity of taking your shoes off before stepping into a temple. That’s what we visitors love, a rustic romanticism and antiquated prettiness, no electric power lines, telephone poles, or satellite television dishes to mar the view. Seek and you shall find your illusions through the magic of tourism.

Illusions, in fact, are practically sanctified in Burma, or rather, the notion that all is an illusion. That is what the Buddha taught after all, that the world is illusory, and since nearly ninety percent of the Burmese are Buddhist, I would say most live in a Land of Illusions.

They are taught to shed their human desires like a snake its mortal coil, and once free they can achieve nibbana, nothingness, the ultimate goal for those who follow the old Pali scriptures, or even a military dictatorship. Granted, it’s mostly only the monks who follow this Theravada Buddhism in its strictest sense, yet the illusions are still there and can disappear at any moment—people included, as we shall soon see.

Let me hasten to add that although I was raised a Buddhist during childhood, it was a Chinese kind of Buddhism, which is a bit of this, that, and the other—ancestor worship, a belief in ghosts, bad fate, all the frightful things. But it was not the Burmese version that desires nothing. With our kind of Buddhism, we desired everything—

riches, fame, good luck at gambling, a large number of sons, good dishes to eat with rare ingredients and subtle flavors, and first place in anything and not just honorable mention. Certainly we desired to ascend to heaven, the topmost level in the wheel of life. O hear me 1 4 7

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now: If there is anyone listening with influence in these matters, please know that oblivion has never been high on my list of places to reside after death. Don’t send me there!

Can you imagine anyone
wishing
to be obliterated for eternity if there were another choice besides hell? And who can honestly desire nothing—no aspirations for fame or fortune, no family jewels or great legacy to pass along to the next generation, not even a comfortable place to sit with your legs crossed for hours on end? Well, then, if you don’t want anything, you’ll certainly never get any bargains, and in my opinion, getting a good bargain is one of the happiest feelings a person can have.

All this talk of oblivion, of wanting nothing and becoming nobody, seems rather contradictory from a Buddhist sense. The Buddha did all this and he became so much a nobody that he became famous, the biggest nobody of them all. And he will never disappear, because fame has made him immortal. But I do admire him for his attitude and discipline. He was a good Indian son.

Not that all Indian families would want such a son—famous but desiring none of the rewards. Most of the Indians I know are Hindu, and they tell me Hinduism is an older religion that includes many of the precepts in Buddhism, and a lot to do with getting rid of illusions and desires and all that. But I must say, all the Hindus I know are vastly fond of their twenty-four-karat–gold jewelry. And they desire that their sons and daughters go to Oxford or Yale and become radiologists not beggar monks. They see to it that their daughters receive more than glass bangles at their weddings and their sons at least a Rolex and not the other watch that ends in an
x
. They want them to marry, if not within their caste or higher, then at least someone with a family home in a good area. It is not my opinion. I have seen it.

All I am saying is, no matter what the religious beliefs in a country, a certain degree of acquisitiveness is always there. And Buddhist though Burma may be, there is still plenty to acquire in the Golden 1 4 8

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Land. Look here, the country is studded with six thousand stupas and elaborate pagodas! They’re certainly ironic monuments for a religion based on ridding itself of worldly attachments. At almost every stupa, where they store relics of their dead holy ones, you can find a vendor who will sell you nibbana goods, a miniature pagoda, a hand-carved Buddha, or green lacquerware, that art of patient layering. You can get them at below half the asking price, which is practically nothing compared with what you would have paid back home. The trinkets are a means to different ends, one for the seller, one for the buyer. We all need to survive, we all need to remember.

But I am getting ahead of myself. As I was saying, we had only just arrived over the border into Burma, and what lay before us was what the magician prefers to hide in his left hand.

THE BUS HAD STOPPED next to a plain building that housed the customs-and-immigration checkpoint, a small shack made of plywood, painted mint green. The roof was corrugated tin, a remnant of missionary architecture, a thriftier style that contrasted with the former timber mansions built as colonial outposts in the hill stations. The method by which my friends had to make their presence officially known in Burma was also a throwback to a British age of convoluted rules and officialdom achieved with the flourish of a pen held by an unsmiling authority.

That authority would be the soldiers of Myanmar’s government administration, the head honchos of the cabinet known as SLORC, which, I think, sounds like an evil opponent in a James Bond movie.

The acronym stands for “State Law and Order Restoration Council,”

an entity put into place, as one can guess, when there was less in the way of law and order, which is precisely what happened when sixty-seven ethnic groups disagreed on how Burma should be governed, especially after the military overturned election results, claimed tribal 1 4 9

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territory as national land, and placed Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. SLORC also gave Burma its new name, Myanmar, and

changed Rangoon into Yangon, the Irrawaddy into the Ayeyarwaddy.

And thus practically no one in the Western world knows what those new names refer to.

It’s true. Ask ten of your friends what and where Myanmar is, and I would wager nine would not know. But if you said Burma, they would say, “Oh,
Burma
!”—vaguely remembered in the way we say,

“Oh,
Barbara
—how is she doing?” Like the Burmese dissenters who disappeared, the country formerly calling itself Burma is invisible to most of the Western world, an illusion. Well, I still call it Burma, so does the U.S. government. I’ve never been able to call it the other, even though more and more people do, like the newspapers and TV

networks that have succumbed to the names, as if to say, “This is the new reality, now get over it.” But to me, “Myanmar” sounds sneaky, Myanmar, like the twitchy
miao-miao
of a cat before it pounces on a trapped mouse.

A few years ago, with the help of a public relations firm, SLORC

changed its own name in order to appear friendlier. As a matter of fact, it was an image-consulting company based in Washington, D.C.—yes, shameful, isn’t it? State Peace and Development Council—

SPDC—that’s how they renamed themselves. But some find it too hard to say four syllables when one does nicely. “SLORC” rolls off the tongue more easily and sounds more fitting, suggesting a semantic and onomatopoetic accuracy. Some have noted that the sibilant-liquid combination is also the beginning of like-minded words: sly, slippery, slayers. They say it is impossible to keep up with shifting and shifty terminologies. And so SLORC is what they still call it.

Not so with people in Burma, and especially journalists. It does not behoove them to be out of fashion with terminology. Most of Asia has adapted to the new names. Meanwhile, some Westerners 1 5 0

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don’t even know that there’s a history to the names and that others must make a deliberate choice.

As for myself, I say Burma because it’s been my habit for too long.

I say SLORC because it is one syllable and easier to pronounce than S-P-D-C. I say Rangoon, because I’d have to think a second or two longer to remember the other. I am too old to change with the times.

But enough of this prattle, and back to the bus.

WALTER AND BENNIE disembarked and greeted the border police.

The new driver, Kjau, or Mr. Joe, as my friends called him, stepped out to smoke a cheroot. The authorities at the customs-andimmigration shack treated Walter, a fellow Burmese, with suspicion.

But customs people, no matter the country, are like that. There are never any jovial greetings of welcome and enjoy yourselves. Letter by letter, the names and addresses of each of our twelve visitors had to be compared with a set of approved documents, before being handwritten in an enormous ledger, and then hand-copied into an identical ledger. This was bureaucracy before computers, before carbon copies even. Dear God, this could take hours, Bennie realized.

Esmé placed Pup-pup in her baseball cap, where the sweet thing slept soundly, its tummy full of rice gruel. Marlena had a scarf at the ready, in case their new canine cargo needed to be hidden from the authorities. Actually, she needn’t have worried. In Burma, dogs are not contraband, and there is no quarantine; however, getting them into hotels might be another matter. Harry sat beside Marlena, his right hand holding her left. It was a small gesture of affection, a symbol of attachment. He had won the privilege to touch her after dinner the night before.

“Marlena, dear, would you like a mint?” Harry now asked as the three of them sat like monkeys on a log in the back of the bus. In his 1 5 1

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younger years, this presentation of the mint was a cryptogram for wishing to engage in more kissing. Now he no longer had to speak in ridiculous codes. He could say what he meant. A mint was a mint.

A kiss was a kiss. Yes indeed, he was well on his way to love, perfect understanding.

Marlena took the mint, hoping Harry would not try to act too amorous in front of her daughter. Esmé, meanwhile, threw sidelong glances at her mother holding Harry’s hand. She wrinkled her nose, but this time it was not because she disapproved of Harry. He was her hero of sorts. But handholding, no matter who was doing it, was embarrassing. That woman Wendy had glanced back, Esmé noted, and seen what her mother and Harry were doing. Now she and her boyfriend were flashing knowing smiles at each other. What did they know that she did not? Had her mother and Harry done
it
? Whatever they did, the handholding stuff looked pathetic and possessive, not to mention that their palms were probably sweaty in this heat.

An hour later, Walter and Bennie returned from the checkpoint shack. Bennie spoke first: “We’re provisionally approved, but we have to go to another town to record the paperwork line by line, and we’ll need everyone’s passports.”

Groans emanated from the bus.

Walter held up his hand. “Once we reach this town, while I take care of these tedious details, you will be free to explore the town of Muse for an hour or so. There is a rather lively market, many shopkeepers with textiles and the like—”

“We’ll be free to get off the bus?” Wendy said.

“Yes, it is quite all right. You can go about and wander. As Mr.

Bennie said, you are all provisionally approved to enter. We simply need to copy the information about your itinerary and dot the
i
’s and cross the
t
’s, as you Americans say. But before you go, I suggest you change your money with me. I will give you the highest legal rate allowed, three hundred and eighty kyats per dollar. This is the same 1 5 2

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rate you would get in a bank. Without a doubt, you could do better on the black market. But it would also be doing worse, for if the police catch you, the consequences would be most regrettable, I can assure you.”

“I wonder how much better,” Wyatt whispered to Wendy.

In Muse, my twelve friends, flush with money, their pockets dangerously bulging with Burmese kyat notes, jumped off the bus and into the warm December sun. They walked toward the center of town and were soon engulfed in the everyday life of the marketplace: milling shoppers, open stalls of cloth, clothing, and plastic shoes, all in styles that suggested unwanted seconds from China. Around them moneychangers crouched on the ground, trying to catch their attention. Farther ahead, beckoning to them like the seventh heaven of bargains, was a gigantic tent that housed the food market.

As they made their way through the crowd, they remarked how different Burmese people seemed from Chinese. Here women smeared the yellow thanaka paste on their face as both sunscreen and beauty symbol. Atop their heads, they wore a length of cloth that had been swaddled into a turban. “It’s almost tribal-looking,” Roxanne said.

“That’s because they
are
a tribe,” Vera said. “It’s in the notes Bibi prepared.”

Wendy caught the eye of a Burmese woman who looked about her age. The woman was wearing a conical rattan hat with red piping.

When she gazed downward, the hat obscured her face entirely. But when she looked up, her face conveyed desperation and anguish, or so Wendy thought. It was as if the woman wanted to say something to her, convey an urgent message. Sure enough, the woman started to step toward her, but then saw, on the shaded side of the street, two military policemen in their frog-green uniforms. The young woman blinked hard, turned, and scurried away. Was that sweat on her cheeks, or tears? What had the woman intended to say? Was it a 1 5 3