The Piano Tuner (9 page)

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and opened my eyes to find myself
lying by the sea, my legs half submerged in the water. There was a man
squatting beside me. I saw his mouth move, but I couldn’t hear him.
Several others stood along the shore, watching me. The man started to speak
again, but I heard nothing, not his voice, not the wash of the waves as they
lapped over my legs. I pointed to my ears and shook my head. “I cannot
hear you,” I said, “I am deaf.”

Another man
approached me and the two raised me to my feet. There was a small boat, its bow
wedged into the sand, its stern shifting in the waves. They walked me to the
boat and we boarded. If they spoke, I could not hear them. They paddled into
the Red Sea and toward a waiting ship, whose marks I knew as a merchant ship
from Alexandria.

For the entire narration, the old
man’s eyes had not left Edgar’s face. Now he turned to the sea.
“I have told this story to many,” he said. “For I want to
find another soul who has heard the song that made me deaf.”

Edgar touched his arm lightly, so he would turn and see his lips.
“How do you know it wasn’t a dream? That you didn’t hit your
head in the accident? Songs cannot make men deaf.”

“Oh, I
would wish it was a dream. But it couldn’t have been. The moon had
changed, and by the ship’s calendar, which I saw the next morning at
breakfast, it was twenty days after my boat had capsized. But by then I already
knew this, for that night when I undressed for bed, I remarked at how worn my
sandals were. And in Rewesh, our last port of call before the accident, I had
bought a new pair.

“Besides,” he said, “I don’t
believe it was the song that made me deaf. I think that after I had heard
something so beautiful, my ears simply stopped sensing sound, because they knew
that they would never hear such perfection again. I don’t know if this
makes sense to a tuner of strings.”

The sun was now high in the
sky; Edgar felt its heat against his face. The old man spoke. “My One
Story is over, and I have no more stories to tell, for just as there can be no
sound after that song, for me there can be no stories after that one. And now
we must go inside, for the sun has ways of making even the sane
delirious.”

They steamed through the Red Sea.
The waters lightened, and they crossed the straits of Babelmandeb, the shore
washed by waves from the Indian Ocean. They dropped anchor in the port of Aden,
where the harbor was full with steamers destined for all over the world, in
whose shadows tiny Arab dhows darted beneath lateen sails. Edgar Drake stood on
the deck and watched the port and the robed men who clambered to and from the
ship’s hull. He didn’t see the Man with One Story leave, but when
he looked at the spot on the deck where the man always sat, he was gone.

5

T
he journey is faster
now. In two days, the coast appears tentatively, as tiny wooded islands that
dot the shore like shattered fragments of the mainland. They are dark and
green; Edgar can see nothing through the deep foliage, and he wonders if they
are inhabited. He asks a fellow traveler, a retired civil administrator, who
tells him that one of the islands is home to a temple that he calls Elephanta,
where the Hindus worship an “Elephant with Many Arms.”

“It is a strange place, full of superstitions,” says the man,
but Edgar says nothing. Once, in London, he tuned the Erard of a wealthy Indian
banker, the son of a maharaja, who showed him a shrine to an elephant with many
arms, which he kept on a shelf above the piano. He listens to the songs, the
man had said, and Edgar liked this religion, where gods enjoyed music and a
piano could be used to pray.

Faster. Hundreds of tiny fishing boats,
lorchas, ferries, rafts, junks, dhows, swarm at the mouth of Bombay harbor,
parting before the towering hull of the steamer. The steamer slows into port,
squeezing between two smaller merchant ships. The passengers disembark, to be
met on the dock by carriages belonging to the shipping company, which take them
to the railway station. There is no time to walk the streets, a uniformed
representative from the ship’s line says, The train is waiting, Your
steamship is a day late, The wind was strong. They go through the back gate of
the station. Edgar waits as his trunks are unloaded and loaded again. He
watches closely; if his tools are lost, they cannot be replaced. At the far end
of the station, where the third-class cars wait, he sees a mass of bodies
pushing forward on the platform. A hand takes his arm and leads him onto the
train and to his berth and soon they are moving again.

Faster now,
they move past the platforms, and Edgar Drake looks out over crowds such as he
has never seen, not even on the poorest streets of London. The train picks up
speed, passing shantytowns built to the edge of the track, children scattering
before the engine. Edgar presses his face to the glass to watch the jumbled
houses, the peeling tenements stained with mildew, balconies decorated with
hanging plants, and every street filled with thousands of people, pushing
forward, watching the train pass.

The train hurtled
into the interior of India. Nasik, Bhusaval, Jubbulpore, the names of the towns
growing stranger and, thought Edgar, more melodic. They crossed a vast plateau,
where the sun rose and set, and they didn’t see a moving soul.

Occasionally they stopped, the engine slowing, screeching into windbeaten,
lonely stations. There, from the shadows, vendors would descend on the train,
pushing up against the windows, thrusting in pungent plates of curried meat,
the sour smell of lime and betel, jewelry, fans, picture postcards of castles
and camels and Hindu gods, fruits and dusted sweets, beggars’ bowls,
cracked pots filled with dirty coins. Through the windows would come the wares
and the voices, Buy, sir, please, Buy, sir, for you, sir, special for you, and
the train would start to move again, and some of the vendors, young men
usually, would hang on, laughing, until they were pried off by a
policeman’s baton. Sometimes they made it further, jumping off only when
the train started moving too fast.

One night Edgar
awoke as the train pulled into a small, dark station, somewhere south of
Allahabad. Bodies huddled in the crevices of the buildings that lined the
tracks. The platform was empty except for a few vendors who marched along the
windows, peeking in to see if anyone was awake. One by one they stopped at
Edgar’s window, Mangoes, sir, for you, Do you want your shoes polished,
sir, just pass them through the window, Samosas, They are delicious, sir. This
is a lonely place for a shoeblack, thought Edgar, and a young man walked up to
the window and stopped. He said nothing, but looked in and waited. At last
Edgar began to feel uncomfortable beneath the boy’s gaze. What are you
selling, he asked. I am a Poet-Wallah, sir. A Poet-Wallah. Yes, sir, give me an
anna and I will recite for you a poem. What poem. Any poem, sir, I know them
all, but for you I have a special poem, the poem is old and it is from Burma,
where they call it “The Tale of the Journey of the
Leip-bya,
” but I only call it “The
Butterfly-Spirit,” for I have adapted it myself, It is only one anna. You
know I am going to Burma, How? I know, for I know the direction of stories, my
poems are daughters of prophecy. Here is an anna, quick now, the train is
moving. And it was, groaning as the wheels turned. Tell me quickly, said Edgar,
suddenly feeling a swell of panic, There is a reason you chose my car. The
train was moving faster, the young man’s hair began to whip with the
wind. It is a tale of dreams, he yelled, They are all tales of dreams. Faster
now, and Edgar could hear the sounds of other voices, Hey boy, get off the
train, You, stowaway, Get off, and Edgar wanted to shout back when briefly
there appeared at the window the form of a turbaned policeman, also running,
and the flash of a baton, and the boy broke off and fell into the night.

The land fell and became forested and soon their route
approached that of the Ganges, passing the holy city of Benares, where, as the
passengers slept, men rose at dawn to sink themselves into the water of the
river and pray. They reached Calcutta after three days, and once again climbed
into carriages that pushed through the swarms of people to the docks. There
Edgar boarded a new ship, smaller now, for there were fewer people traveling to
Rangoon.

Once again the steam engines rumbled. They followed the muddy
outflow of the Ganges into the Bay of Bengal.

Gulls circled overhead,
and the air was heavy and humid. Edgar peeled his shirt from his body and
fanned himself with his hat. To the south, storm clouds hovered, waiting.
Calcutta soon disappeared from the horizon. The brown waters of the Ganges
faded, spinning off into the sea in spirals of sediment.

He knew from
his itinerary that only three days remained before they would reach Rangoon. He
began to read again. His bag was packed with papers, with equal contributions
from Katherine and the War Office. He read military briefings and newspaper
clippings, personal reports and chapters of gazetteers. He pored over maps, and
he tried to study some phrases of Burmese. There was an envelope addressed
“To the Piano Tuner, to be opened only upon arriving in Mae Lwin,
A.C.” He had been tempted to read it since leaving England but had
resisted only out of respect for the Doctor; surely Carroll had good reason to
ask him to wait. There were two longer pieces, histories of Burma and the Shan.
The first he had read in his workshop back in London, and he continued to
return to it. It was intimidating, he thought, there were so many unfamiliar
names. Now he remembered the second history as the one Katherine had
recommended, written by Anthony Carroll himself. He was surprised he
hadn’t recalled this earlier, and carried the report to his bed to read.
Within the first few lines, he saw how different it was from the others.

A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE SHAN PEOPLES, WITH SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THE
POLITICAL SITUATION OF THE REVOLT IN THE SHAN STATES

Submitted by
Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll,
Mae Lwin, Southern Shan States

(From the War Office: Please be advised that the content of this report
is subject to change. It is recommended that all concerned parties closely
follow amendments to these reports, available upon request from the War
Office.)

I.  General History of the Shan

If
one were to ask a Burman about the geography of his land, perhaps he would
first answer with a description of the
nga-hlyin,
the four giants who
live beneath the earth. Sadly, official memoranda afford no space for such
complexities. Yet it is impossible to understand the history of the Shan
without considering briefly the physiognomy of their home. The area currently
referred to as “the Shan States” consists of a large plateau that
floats to the east above the dusty central valley of the Irrawaddy River. It is
a vast and green Elysian plain, which extends north to the border of Yunnan and
east to Siam. Through this plateau cut powerful rivers, twisting south like
tails of the Himalayan dragon. The largest of these is the Salween River. The
importance of this geography to history (and thus to the current political
situation) lies in the affinity of the Shan to other races of the plateau, as
well as their isolation from the lowland Burmans. Here, a sometimes confusing
terminology merits explanation: I use “Burman” to refer to an
ethnic group, while I use “Burmese” to describe the kingdom and
government of Burma, as well as the language. Although these words are often
used interchangeably, here I have chosen to stress this distinction: not all
Burmese kings were Burman; all Burmese kings had non-Burman subjects,
including, among many others, the Kachin, the Karen, and the Shan, each of whom
once had their own kingdoms within the present borders of “Burma.”
Today, although these tribes are racked by internal divisions, they still
resent the rule of others. As will become clear from the remainder of this
report, the Shan revolt against British rule finds its beginnings in an
incipient revolt against a Burman king.

The Shan, who refer to
themselves as the Tai or Thai, share a common historical heritage with their
eastern neighbors, the Siamese, the Lao, and the Yunnanese. The Shan believe
their ancestral home was in southern China. Although some scholars question
this, there is ample evidence that by the late twelfth century, at the time of
the Mongol invasions, the Tai-Thai people had established a number of kingdoms.
These included the fabled Yunnanese kingdom of Xipsongbanna, whose name means
“kingdom of ten thousand rice fields,” the ancient Siamese capital
at Sukhothai, and—more importantly for the subject of this
briefing—two kingdoms within the present borders of Burma: the kingdom of
Tai Mao in the north, and the kingdom of Ava in the vicinity of present-day
Mandalay. The power of these kingdoms was substantial indeed; the Shan ruled
much of Burma for over three centuries, from the fall of the great Burman
capital of Pagan (whose vast wind-worn temples still sit in lonely vigil on the
banks of the Irrawaddy River) at the turn of the thirteenth century, until
1555, when the Burman state of Pegu eclipsed the Shan empire at Ava, beginning
three centuries of rule that grew into the recent kingdom of Burma.

Following the fall of the Shan kingdom of Ava in 1555 and the destruction
of the Tai Mao kingdom by Chinese invaders in 1604, the Shan splintered into
small principalities, like shards of a once beautiful porcelain vase. This
fragmentation continues to mark the Shan States to this day. Despite this
general disunity, however, the Shan were occasionally able to mobilize against
their common Burman enemy, notably in a popular Shan revolt in Hanthawaddy in
1564 or, more recently, in a rebellion following the execution of a popular
leader in the northern Shan city of Hsenwi. While these events may seem of
distant memory, their importance cannot be underestimated, for at times of war,
these legends spread out over the plateau like flames through a
drought-stricken land, rising on the smoke of campfire tales, whispered on the
lips of elders to circles of wide-eyed children.

The result of this
fragmentation was the development of unique political structures that are
important to consider because they play a great role in our current situation.
Shan principalities (of which there were forty-one by the 1870s) were the
highest order of political organization in a highly hierarchical system of
local rule. Such principalities, termed
muang
by the Shan, were ruled
by a
sawbwa
(Burmese transliteration, which I will adopt in the
remainder of this report). Immediately below the
sawbwa
were other
divisions, from districts to groups of villages to individual hamlets, each
ultimately subservient to the rule of the
sawbwa.
This fragmentation
of rule resulted in frequent internecine wars on the Shan Plateau and a failure
to unite to throw off the yoke of Burman rule. Here the analogy of the
shattered vase grows useful: just as fragments of porcelain cannot hold water,
the fragments of governments could do little to control a growing anarchy. As a
result, much of the Shan countryside is plagued by bands of
dacoits
(a
Hindustani word meaning bandits), a great challenge to the administration of
this region, although distinct from the organized resistance known as the
Limbin Confederacy, which is the subject of the remainder of this report.

II.  The Limbin Confederacy, Twet Nga Lu, and the Current
Situation

In 1880, an organized Shan movement against Burmese rule
emerged, which still persists today. (Note that at this time, England only
controlled Lower Burma. Upper Burma and Mandalay were still ruled by the
Burmese king.) In that year, the
sawbwas
of the states of Mongnai,
Lawksawk, Mongpawn, and Mongnawng refused to appear before the Burmese king
Thibaw in an annual act of New Year’s obeisance. A column sent by Thibaw
failed to capture the upstart
sawbwas.
Then, in 1882, this defiance
became violent. In that year, the
sawbwa
of Kengtung attacked and
killed the Burmese resident in Kengtung. Inspired by the boldness of the
Kengtung
sawbwa,
the
sawbwa
of Mongnai and his allies broke
into open revolt. In November 1883, they attacked the Burmese garrison at
Mongnai, killing four hundred. But their success was short-lived. The Burmese
counterattacked, forcing the rebellious Shan chiefs to flee to Kengtung, across
the Salween River, whose steep defiles and dense jungles gave them shelter
against further incursions.