Saving Fish From Drowning (25 page)

There were also local Nats in villages, and household Nats that lived in shrines in family homes. People gave them gifts, food and 1 6 8

S A V I N G F I S H F R O M D R O W N I N G

drink. They were everywhere, as were bad luck and the need to find reasons for it.

“What does a Nat look like?” Esmé asked.

“Ah, yes. They can be of many forms,” Walter said. “At festivals that are held for them, you can see statues, large and small, created to represent them—a figure on a white horse, or a man who looks like a monk, royal people dressed in the clothing of yesteryear. And some, like the spirits of nature, are invisible.”

“Are they like ghosts?” Esmé asked.

“There is some similarity,” Walter replied. “You might see them, you might not. But as I understand it, you Americans hire people to remove ghosts, or ‘bust’ them, as I believe you say. Your ghosts are only people or possibly animals. And you don’t create shrines or give offerings to keep them happy. This particular shrine is for this tree.

There were many accidents on the old road, until people realized a Nat was here. After the shrine was placed here, no accidents have happened.”

“So they’re everything and everywhere,” Esmé concluded.

Walter tilted his head slightly to indicate it was a possibility.

“So what else do Nats supposedly do when riled?” Vera asked.

“It could be anything,” Walter answered, “some mischief, at the very least. A valuable object might be broken or snatched. Illness.

And there can be greater calamities, even catastrophes to entire villages. Whatever the misfortune, people might then believe that they weren’t dutiful in propitiating a Nat. But please don’t think that all Nats are bad. If you’ve honored them well, they might be inclined to help you. One of the tourists I guided last year likened them to your concept of mothers-in-law.”

“Do you believe in Nats?” Marlena asked.

Walter turned and smiled. “Educated people generally don’t. But it’s tradition to give an offering. Like presents under your Christmas 1 6 9

A M Y T A N

tree from Santa Claus.” He did not tell them that he had a shrine in his family home, a beautiful one, tended to, and supplied with daily offerings. He now walked up to the tree shrine and, with his back to the tourists, carefully tucked a packet of sunflower seeds inside. A flicker of apprehension ran over his face.

He turned back to them. “If anyone else cares to make an offering—

please.” And he gestured that they could step forward. Mr. Joe stepped forward and took a fresh cigarette from a pack and placed this on the shrine’s little balcony.

“As you can see,” Walter said, “our Nats love to smoke, as well as to drink, everything from palm toddy to Johnnie Walker Black.”

Esmé walked up and solemnly stuffed a mini-bag of M&M’s inside the shrine. Heidi gave a packet of daily vitamins, and Wyatt a postcard. Bennie jokingly whispered to Marlena and Harry that they ought to give it Valium or an antidepressant, and all three chuckled.

Vera came forward and stuffed in an American dollar. She believed one should honor another country’s traditions, and her offering would show that at least one American had. The rest of them offered nothing. The rest of them didn’t think you had to show respect to something that obviously did not exist.

THE ROAD HAD BEGUN to wind and twist, and soon gave way to hairpin turns. Only Walter was awake. He glanced back at the passengers behind him. Heads lolled left and right, up and down in rhythm with the bumps and bounces of the bus. The jiggling heads looked as if their owners were performing the puppet dance of the dead. He stared out the window.

Cloud shadows passed over bushy hills, leaving dark bruises on the bright green slopes. The Nats lived in nature, in trees and stumps, fields, and rocks. Beneath this visible surface was an earlier stratum of beliefs, the molten core and shifting plates belonging to animism.

1 7 0

S A V I N G F I S H F R O M D R O W N I N G

Some of those animistic beliefs came from China more than a thousand years ago, when sprites and demons headed south, as my friends were doing now. The peripatetic Nats clung like burrs to the robes of persecuted tribes and defeated armies taking a back road into Burma.

Were bad-tempered hitchhikers now riding on the tailpipe of the bus, sitting on the bumper? Nats have always been tied to disaster. They were the coincidence of accidents. And they grew with a never-ending supply of tragedy and death. No religion would eject them, not Buddhist or Baptist, not Methodist or Mormon.

Walter faced forward in the bus. While he appeared calm to his charges, he was, in fact, troubled by what Bennie had told him in their morning phone conversation. It is impossible that Miss Chen is dead, Walter thought.
I talked to her just yesterday
. He tried to rationalize and recalculate how he had known ahead of time to change the documents for an earlier entrance into Burma. Had her death been gruesome? (It was.) Had she been angry that the tour continued without her? (No, I was with them.)

Walter heard Bennie mumble. He had partially opened his eyes to check his watch. “Mr. Bennie,” Walter said softly, and Bennie turned to acknowledge him. “I beg your pardon, but could I trouble you to tell me how Miss Bibi Chen died?”

Bennie bit his lips as the vision of my body sprang into his mind.

“Nobody really knows,” he said. “Some say that she was murdered.

She was found with her windpipe slashed. She either bled to death or suffocated.”

“Oh, dear.” Walter’s heart raced. For certain, Miss Bibi was a disturbed spirit.

“It was horrible, a total nightmare for all of us. We almost canceled the trip.”

“I see. . . . Was Miss Bibi of any particular religion?”

“Religion? I don’t think so. . . . To be honest, I don’t really know.

Isn’t that awful? I knew her really well, but religion wasn’t something 1 7 1

A M Y T A N

we ever talked about. I would have to guess that she wasn’t devout about anything in particular. You know how it is. I’m a lapsed Baptist on my mother’s side. Are you familiar with them?”

“Quite. Many a Baptist missionary has come through Burma.

They were successful in recruiting many converts, particularly the hill-tribe people.”

“No kidding. Is that how you learned your English?”

“I grew up with English spoken in the home, along with Burmese.

It was part of our inheritance.”

“How do you
inherit
English?”

“My family has spoken English for generations. My great-greatgrandparents worked for the British Raj, and later generations of my family found employment with missionaries, but English was already their public parlance.”

“Well, you speak it beautifully.”

“You’re too kind. And thank you for answering my questions

about Miss Bibi. I appreciate your frank answers on this difficult subject. And now I won’t interrupt your rest any longer.”

“No problem. If you have any other questions, fire away.” Bennie settled back and closed his eyes.

Walter stared out the window. He mused: In the last five generations of his family, all had had reasons to use English as part of their work. And at least one person in each generation before his had died as a consequence. English was their inheritance, the purveyor of opportunities. But it was also their curse.

WALTER ’S GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER had learned English as

a lad when he did chores for a British teacher who ran a one-room school for colonial boys in Mandalay. As he went about sweeping in the courtyard, he listened to the voices of the teacher and his pupils floating out the windows. Later, he would trace the words written on 1 7 2

S A V I N G F I S H F R O M D R O W N I N G

the chalkboard before washing it clean. He was adept at learning, and the teacher recognized this, and eventually allowed him to sit at the back of the classroom. His English grew to be as beautiful as that of his employer’s children, with the right amount of crispness at the ends of words and roundness within. When he was twenty-seven, he was recruited as an interpreter for the British Raj. His command of the languages did not win him alliances with other tribes, however.

In one remote outpost, neither the British nor the Burman presence was tolerated, and one day a hail of wild gunfire spattered trees and bushes, birds and monkeys, and Walter’s great-great-grandfather. It was amazing that no one else was killed.

As compensation for the interpreter’s death, his son was sent to study at a secular school for native boys, run by British educators.

Thirty years later, this same boy, now grown, returned to that school as its first Burmese headmaster. While the academics were first-rate, the headmaster was just as proud that the school’s cricket team was undefeated among other native schools. One day, the team was invited to play against its British counterpart. The foreigners sat on the shaded side, in seats under awnings. The Burmese were seated in the sun. It was an especially hot day, and when the Burmese team won, the headmaster cried out, “Huzzah! Huzzah!” and then collapsed and died. Likely it was heatstroke, but that is not how the story of Walter’s great-grandfather was told. By the evidence of his last words, he died of English joy.

The son of the headmaster also found work in education. He

taught in schools established by the missionaries who had flocked to Burma once the Japanese were run out. Through the mission school, he met a Burmese nurse with bright shining eyes who worked at the surgery. She, too, spoke impeccable English, having been raised since toddlerhood under the guardianship of a British couple, whose automobile accelerated for no apparent reason, then struck and killed her parents, who had been their devoted servants. One day, the nurse and 1 7 3

A M Y T A N

three missionaries rode out to a village where there was a malaria outbreak among the new American teachers. On the way, their car ran off the road and overturned in a ravine. The nurse, Walter’s grandmother, was the only one killed—taken, some said, by the Nats of her parents. How else would one explain this third death by automobile in the family?

The nurse left behind her husband, three sons, and a daughter.

Walter’s father was the oldest. He went on to become a journalist and a university professor. Walter remembered that his father, who was a stickler for grammar, had a favorite saying, which clarified the proper use of “good” and “well”: “While it is good to speak well, it is better to speak the truth.” Walter’s father had valued the truth more than his own life. In 1989, he was arrested after he joined students and other teachers in protesting the military. The fact that he spoke English was enough to convict him as a spy. Walter’s father was arrested and taken away, and a year later, a man who had been released from prison told Walter’s family that their father had died after a beating that collapsed his lungs.

Sixteen-year-old Walter, his sisters, and their widowed mother went to live with the children’s grandfather. It became a divided household. The grandfather now believed that English had been the cause of these tragic deaths in the family—his own dear wife’s, for one. Why hadn’t he recognized the pattern sooner? He forbade his daughter-in-law and grandchildren to speak English. The novels by Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen and all the other works by trouble-mongers were cast out, and Nat shrines replaced them on the bookshelves.

Walter’s mother, however, refused to give up English. She had not received it effortlessly as an inheritance. As a girl, she had struggled to learn the difficult twists of the tongue, and had passed one examination after another in the European code. By listening to her husband speak, she had improved her pronunciation, so that it was no 1 7 4

S A V I N G F I S H F R O M D R O W N I N G

longer like that of those students with the pidgin diction of their native teachers. Her mastery of the language was a blissful expression of the spirit to her, like playing a musical instrument. And her most intimate and private memories of her husband were in that language. What books and periodicals her husband’s father had not hacked to pieces, she locked away for safekeeping. On special occasions she took them out and read the stale news of magazines many years old, savoring them sparingly, as she did the waxy bonbons given to her one Christmas by a visiting professor from an American university, before it was illegal to let foreigners in one’s house.

For the past ten years, Walter’s grandfather and mother had

refused to talk to each other, except through Walter. He spoke Burmese to his grandfather and English to his mother. There had been no better preparation for him in his career as tour guide, a career that required him to be adept at managing the misunderstandings of two people who spoke separate languages, while circumnavigating the same place at the same time.

But now and then, Walter wondered about his family’s curse by the English language. Was he next? How would it happen? And when?

THE BUS HAD STOPPED . Slowly, my friends roused themselves and straightened their cramped necks. Walter stood up: “This is not a photo opportunity, I’m afraid. We are at another checkpoint. We will be here for half an hour or so. For your safety and security, please remain on the bus.”

Safety? Security? The mention of those words caused my friends to feel unsafe and insecure.

Walter gathered his packet of passports, then stepped off the bus and headed for a booth. Outside, rifle-toting solders in camouflage were opening car trunks, removing boxes and suitcases tied to the roofs. Clothes lay strewn about, picked through by the soldiers.

1 7 5

A M Y T A N

Boxes containing foodstuffs were opened. Some soldiers poked at a foam sofa that had been compressed and covered in plastic tarp, then wound in string, and strapped atop a station wagon. A flick of a knife, and the strings were cut, the tarp sliced through. The sofa was excised like a tumor, and freed from its confines, it expanded until it seemed impossible that it had ever been in such a small package.

The passengers—three men and a woman—looked nervous and unhappy. An old woman approached the station wagon, offering eggs as snacks for sale. The occupants did not look at her. The sofa cushions were unzipped, and hands shot in and brushed back and forth.