Under the Dragon (8 page)

The friend had been an agent. The debt which enslaved Ni Ni was his fee, plus her transport, clothes and protection money, compounded by 100 per cent interest. She was required to wear high heels and a mini-skirt instead of her silk
longyi
. In lieu of money she received red plastic chips; one for every client. Each morning she counted them twice to calculate the amount that had been subtracted from her debt. She kept them under the cement bunk on which she was forced to prostitute herself. Under it also was the secret door to a locker where she hid during police raids. The abrupt arrival of a dozen armed officers never failed to alarm the brothel owner. More often though the policemen came in ones and twos after work. However they arrived, the girls were always theirs for free.

The cubicle measuring six feet square was her home. Here Ni Ni slept and worked, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Only two days a month were allowed off, during her period. The clients were mostly Asian, although Westerners paid for her too, flying in from Frankfurt and Brussels on ‘sex bomber’ package holidays. She served five or six men each weekday. On weekends she often had as many as thirty customers.

The demand for new faces dictated that every few months she be moved to a different brothel. Each was the same as the last. The neon-lit rooms were dingy, the walls always stained grimy grey along the edge of the bunk. There were never any proper toilets. Once, in one cubicle she thought she heard the sea, though it could have been a passing
tuk-tuk
, and from another, if she stood on the bed and peered through a grille, she could make out the graceful spires of the Royal Palace. The frequent displacement left her no time to get to know the other girls or to consider escape, especially as she never knew where she was incarcerated. Those who did run away were often caught by their police clients and returned to be punished, or locked up for months without trial, subjected to abuse, in a Thai immigration detention centre. The few who managed to reach Burma risked the possibility of arrest for ‘illegal departure’, and even, it was rumoured, execution if they were found to be HIV positive. Their only choice was to work until they were told their debt was paid, then to rely on an agent to escort them back through the checkpoints and over the border.

The years crept up on her, ageing Ni Ni’s firm young body. Men chose her less often, and those who did were less particular. One client put a gun to her head when she asked him to wear a condom. It wasn’t because she was afraid of pregnancy – she had often paid the owner’s wife to give her Depo-Prevera injections – or even because he was filthy. It was simply that he frightened her. In life there is a path of fear and a path of love, and Ni Ni had been unable to follow the latter one alone. The owner threatened her with a beating if she ever came out of the room before her client again.

Ni Ni’s hands touched and stroked and satisfied the men, but she felt nothing, sensed nothing through the empty years. Only sometimes in an Englishman’s clumsy white embrace did she remember Louis. But he never came to rescue her. At eighteen she was overhandled and utterly misused. Her life had been stolen. She had lost control of her body. She possessed nothing more than a sense of hopelessness.

It is estimated that two million people are employed in Thailand’s sex trade. The business is probably the most valuable sector of the tourist industry, which itself exceeds all exports as a source of foreign exchange. In 1988 4.3 million people visited the country, three-quarters of whom were unaccompanied males. But it is local patronage that makes the greater demand. Half of all Thai men have their first sexual experience with a prostitute; three out of four have visited a brothel. The majority of commercial sex workers are natives, but there are also Filipinos, Indonesians, even Europeans – five thousand Russian prostitutes are working in Bangkok. And every year ten thousand Burmese women, young and infection-free, are trafficked across the border, enticed by false promises, imprisoned by debt bondage. Their great hope is to go home, but their greater fear is deportation.

Often, in the quiet of morning when Ni Ni was left alone, she fell into the same dream. In her cubicle a miniature black spider, no bigger than a pinhead, crawled up her hand. She watched it spin between her thumb and forefinger a silky thread which glistened and grew until it twisted together her five fingers. She felt its tickle as both her hands were enmeshed. The bonds became tighter and she tried to free herself. But the industrious spider, so friendly and engaging at first, continued its labours, stitched its weave, wrapped the corners, until all her body, the bunk on which she lay, even the red plastic chips were wrapped in its cobweb, dusty and dirty, and her life was snuffed out.

It was from this dream that Ni Ni was awoken by the sound of English voices. The Crime Suppression Division – in cooperation with the Commission for the Protection of Children’s Rights – raided her hotel in an operation stage-managed for the world’s press. The girls were arrested and interrogated for the cameras, though they were not asked questions about the brothel owner. He had been allowed to go, along with the pimps and the clients. Ni Ni and the other Burmese nationals were sent to the penal reform institution in Pakkret, from where they were deported. In that brief period when Rangoon sanctioned repatriation, no brothel agents or Thai border-patrol officers could lure the women back to Bangkok’s red-light districts. They were not harassed in local jails or raped in reform houses. There was no need for them to buy their release papers. The Shan and hill-tribe prostitutes, not being ethnic Burmans, were less fortunate. The Burmese authorities forbade their return because they were members of a racial minority. They, like the fresh-faced girls who arrived every morning at Bangkok’s Northern Bus Terminal, were left to their fates in Thailand.

On the flight home Ni Ni caught sight of golden Shwedagon. She watched the red earth of Rangoon rush up to meet the aircraft. She saw the delta-winged shadow flash over the dusty plain. She was taken to the North Okkalapa Female Police Training Academy. A doctor tested her blood. There were injections and tablets to be taken every day. The girls were told that they could go home as soon as their parents came to collect them. Some families were too poor to travel to the capital. There was no one to claim Ni Ni, and almost a year passed before she was released from the barracks.

In front, behind. In front, behind. She worked the bamboo in pairs, picked up the right-hand weaver, moved it around the border. In 1994 Ni Ni had returned to Wayba-gi to find neither news of her father nor word from Louis. Her old neighbours had either died or been moved on. She needed to find work, and might have fallen back into prostitution, for in the intervening years the local sex trade had expanded to serve tourists and businessmen at the new hotels, but for the assistance of a foreign charity. In the absence of any government aid, it had established a sheltered workshop to reintegrate those who had been repatriated into society. There in its peaceful studio Ni Ni trained to be a basket-maker, picking up the right-hand stakes, weaving the frayed strands of her life back into order. Her small, sensitive fingers produced the workshop’s finest, most detailed work. The other women, who had chosen to learn to become secretaries or tailors, teased her, for the Burmese word
hpa
translates as both basket and whore. But Ni Ni worked on unbothered, even volunteering to draw other vulnerable girls into the training programme, so that they too might have a choice, so that they need never be trapped. In front, behind. Shape the form, trim off the ends. In the last summer of her short life Ni Ni had discovered that there were three things which matter most.

First, how well did she love?

‘With both my hands,’ she might have answered, not lifting her eyes from the weaving, but laughing at herself for an instant.

Second, how fully did she live?

‘As best I could,’ she could only reply.

Third, how much did she learn to let go?

‘Not enough. Not enough.’

There is an old story of a poor woman who came to Buddha weeping. ‘O Enlightened One,’ she cried, ‘my only daughter has died. Is there any way to bring her back to me?’

Lord Buddha looked at her with compassion and replied, ‘If you bring me a basket from a house where neither parent or child, relative or servant has ever died, I shall bring your daughter back to life.’ The woman searched for many months, travelled to many villages and towns, and when she returned Buddha asked her, ‘My daughter, have you found the container?’

The woman shook her head and said, ‘No, I have not. The people tell me that the living are few, but the dead are many.’

‘YOU ARE RATHER LATE, MY DEARS,’ said Colonel Than in clipped Sandhurst English, tucking his burnished pocket watch back into his robes. ‘We shall miss tea.’ He let go of my hand then bowed to Katrin, a monk being forbidden to touch a woman, and his small round spectacles caught the reflection of sweating French oilmen and cool Taiwanese traders. ‘Charmed girl, may I introduce myself as someone who still maintains a soft spot for the British Royal Family and the people of UK.’

‘And of Canada,’ I reminded him, shouting above the screech of the next arriving aircraft.

‘Another nation to prosper from Imperial rule,’ he assured us, and whispered when Katrin turned away to pick up her rucksack, ‘If I may be permitted the compliment, your woman is a cracker. You are the luckiest man in the worlds.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. Than’s fine eye for ladies was at odds with his faulty ear for language.

‘It is never good for a man to be alone. I am glad that you are now wed,’ he continued with parade-ground projection. ‘If you would care to follow me our taxi cab conveyance awaits.’

Colonel Than, properly Khin Mg Than, Colonel (Ret’d) Artillery Regiment, strode forth into the throng, his step purposeful, his back bent like a storm-lashed palm. His black umbrella, its tie broken, flapped wildly at his side. Ten years before, in the same arrivals lounge, I had stumbled off my mistaken flight and into his care. ‘It is my duty to offer a helping hand to visitors,’ he had announced, then added in a conspiratorial tone, ‘My dear, I have just had the good fortune to be graciously smiled upon by the Duke of Hussey’s daughter.’

‘The Duke of Hussey?’ I had asked. I would learn later that Than considered it his responsibility, as a former King’s commissioned officer, to scoop up lost anglophones.

‘Of course,’ he had replied, pleased to illuminate a colonial’s scant knowledge of the British aristocracy. ‘The Chairman of the BBC; Marmaduke Hussey.’

We followed his short, rust-robed form past the hotel touts and German package tourists, out of the low terminal building and into the dazzling afternoon light. At the time of our first meeting the Colonel had been a devout Christian, exchanging Christmas cards with the Bishop of Rangoon and singing God’s praises as the senior chorister at St Mary’s Cathedral. But after the 1988 uprising he had converted to Buddhism, ‘because I need to know my people better’. Over the following decade we had become faithful correspondents, even though he could rarely afford the bribes demanded by the postman to deliver my letters. His outspoken missives on the other hand had always reached me, though in envelopes slit open by prying censors. The often incomprehensible turns of phrase must have baffled them, while preserving him, but they helped me to see how strong loyalties – like poignant memories – sometimes do not age. Instead they hold their value and leave their mark on the present.

‘I try to instruct the younger monks,’ he had once written in his stilted, archaic English, ‘by embracing and receiving with open arms any and every one who wishes on his or her own account to listen.’ It was a miracle both that he had survived the years of terror and that he had received word of our impending arrival.

The humid Rangoon heat engulfed us in viscous air, turning our walking into wading, our city shoes into leaded diving boots. I smelt jasmine and diesel, heard cicadas and sirens. A boy with black mica eyes took hold of my sleeve and asked, ‘Change money? Sell clothes?’ A dozen children with shaven heads held out grimy hands and wailed, ‘Bic! Bic!’ Than swept them all out of our path with brash confidence.

‘Handicrafts aren’t my kettle of tea,’ he declared, uncertain of the sanity of our travelling halfway around the world in the hope of tracing a basket. ‘So my intelligence gathering will be cronky at best.’ He woke our driver, who was dozing beneath a vast hand-cut billboard. It read, ‘Enjoy the Distinctive Myanmar Quality: Smiles, Warmth, Peace and Abundance’. ‘All I know is that almost every occupation in our country requires baskets. We have a mess of different sorts. Drive on,’ Than told the driver, ‘it’s high time for tea.’

The dusty taxi whisked us away from the airport and onto broad Prome Road. There did seem to be baskets everywhere: atop women’s heads and on bicycle handlebars, used as cradles and colanders, fashioned into furniture and braided around saplings as protection from goats. We saw vast bamboo shoppers and dainty palm-leaf whisks, plaited hats and a wheelbarrow with woven sides. A multi-storey basket loomed out of the polluted haze. The undulating lines of bamboo scaffolding created the illusion of movement. A glittering, sequined sign acclaimed the glory of the Sedona Hotel, the biggest of the new tourist developments overlooking Inya Lake. At the foot of the woven hoarding a girl knocked chunks of grey mortar off old bricks before stacking them in a platter basket.

Katrin leaned forward, her shirt sticking to the baking back seat, and handed Than a photograph we had taken at the museum store-room. ‘Hello,’ he chirped. ‘I know this type.’

‘It was found towards the end of the last century, somewhere in Burma.’

‘The design is damn familiar.’

It was a response, though not an idiom, that we would hear often over the next four weeks.

‘Then you can place it?’

‘Not me, gentle good woman. But calm your worries. I know a chap who can.’

Ten minutes later the taxi swept into the Kyimyindine township and, avoiding the potholes, stopped in front of the School for the Blind. ‘Here,’ Than stated with authority, ‘baskets are made.’ But once we were inside the cool building he began to apologise. The school was closed. The pupils had been sent away until the monsoon. The basketry tutor had gone to the monastery for a week’s retreat.