The Glass Palace (83 page)

‘But look at Burma,' Dinu went on, still teasing. ‘We are a universe on our own . . . Look at all our people . . . Karen, Kayah, Kachin, Shan, Rakhine, Wa, Pa-O, Chin, Mon . . . Wouldn't it be wonderful if your stories could contain each language, each dialect? If your reader could hear the vastness of the music? the surprise?'

‘But they do,' she said. ‘Why do you think they don't? A word on the page is like a string on an instrument. My readers sound the music in their heads, and for each it sounds different.'

At this point in his life, photography was no longer a passion for Dinu. He did only commercial work, making studio portraits and printing other people's negatives. He bestowed a
great deal of care and attention on what he did, but took no particular pleasure in it: mainly he was grateful for possessing a skill that could be parlayed into a livelihood. When people asked him why he no longer photographed outside his studio, he told them that his eyes had lost the habit of looking; his vision had withered for lack of practice.

The photographs that he thought of as his real work, he rarely showed. These pictures were, in any case, very few in number. His early prints and negatives had been destroyed when the Kemendine house went up in flames; the work he'd done in Malaya was still at Morningside. All he possessed of his own work were a few pictures taken in Loikaw—of his mother, of Doh Say and Raymond and their families. Some of these he'd framed and hung on the walls of his apartment. He fought shy of inviting Ma Thin Thin Aye upstairs to see them. She was so young—more than ten years his junior. It mattered very much that she not think badly of him.

A year went by and every day Ma Thin Thin Aye left and entered the studio by the door that led to the street. One day she said: ‘U Tun Pe, do you know what I find hardest in my writing?'

‘What?'

‘The moment when I have to step off the street and go into a house.'

He frowned. ‘Why . . .? Why that?'

She wrung her hands together in her lap, looking exactly like the serious student that she was. ‘It is very hard,' she said. ‘And to you it may seem like a small thing. But I do believe that it is this moment that marks the difference between classical and modern writing.'

‘Of all things . . .! How so?'

‘You see, in classical writing, everything happens outside— on streets, in public squares and battlefields, in palaces and gardens—in places that everyone can imagine.'

‘But that is not how you write?'

‘No.' She laughed. ‘And to this day, even though I do it only in my mind, nothing is more difficult for me than this—
going into a house, intruding, violating. Even though it's only in my head, I feel afraid—I feel a kind of terror—and that's when I know I must keep going, step in, past the threshold, into the house.'

He nodded but made no comment. He gave himself a little time to think about what she'd said. One afternoon he bought biryani from Mughal Street and invited her up.

A few months later, they were married. The ceremony was a quiet one and they invited very few people. Afterwards, Ma Thin Thin Aye moved into Dinu's two rooms. She marked off a corner for herself and set up a desk. She began to teach literature at the university. In the afternoons, she still helped at the studio. They were happy, content with the smallness and privacy of their world. Their childlessness did not seem a great lack. Her work began to gain notice, even beyond literary circles. She became one of the select group of Burmese writers whose presence was regularly sought at festivals in the countryside.

One morning, Daw Thin Thin Aye was tutoring a promising young student at the university, when she heard a burst of gunfire close at hand. She went to the window and saw hundreds of young men and women running by, some covered in blood.

Her student pulled her away from the window. They hid under a desk. After a couple of hours they were found by one of Daw Thin Thin Aye's colleagues. There had been a coup, they learnt. General Ne Win had seized power. Dozens of students had been shot down, right inside the university.

Neither Dinu nor Daw Thin Thin Aye had ever been directly involved in politics. After the coup, they kept to themselves and waited for the winds to change. It was not until many years had passed that they realised that this was a storm that had come to stay.

U Thiha Saw was arrested and his newspaper was shut down. General Ne Win, the new dictator, began to juggle with
the currency. Notes of certain denominations were declared to be valueless; overnight, millions of kyats became waste paper. Thousands of the country's brightest young people fled into the countryside. Rebellions multiplied and flourished. Raymond went underground with several hundred followers. In the east, on the Thai border, the insurgents gave a name to the territories under their control: they became a Karen Free State— Kwathoolei, with its capital at the riverbank town of Manerplaw.

With each year the generals seemed to grow more powerful while the rest of the country grew ever feebler: the military was like an incubus, sucking the life from its host. U Thiha Saw died at Insein gaol, in circumstances that were not explained. His body was brought home bearing marks of torture and the family was not permitted a public funeral. A new censorship regime developed, growing out of the foundations of the system that had been left behind by the old Imperial Government. Every book and magazine had to be presented to the Press Scrutiny Board, for the perusal of a small army of captains and majors.

One day Daw Thin Thin Aye was ordered to report to the Scrutiny Board's office. The building was plain and functional, like a school, and its long corridors smelt of toilets and disinfectant. She went to an office with a plywood door and sat for several hours on a bench. When at last she was shown in, she found herself facing an officer who looked to be in his late twenties. He was sitting at a desk and the manuscript of one of her stories was lying in front of him. His hands were in his lap and he seemed to be toying with something—she could not tell what it was.

She stood at the desk, fidgeting with the hem of her blouse. He did not ask her to sit. He stared, looking her up and down. Then he jabbed a finger at the manuscript. ‘Why have you sent this here?'

‘I was told,' she said quietly, ‘that that is the law.'

‘The law is for writers,' he said. ‘Not for people like you.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You do not know how to write Burmese. Look at all these mistakes.'

She glanced at her manuscript and saw that it was covered with red pencil marks, like a badly filled schoolbook.

‘I've wasted a lot of time correcting this,' he said. ‘It's not my job to teach you people how to write.'

He got up from his chair and she saw that he was holding a golf club in his hands. It struck her now that the room was full of golfing paraphernalia—caps, balls, clubs. He reached for her manuscript and crumpled it into a ball, with one hand. Then he put it on the ground between his feet. He took many little steps, swinging the head of his club back and forth. He swung, and the ball of paper went sailing across the room. He held the pose for a moment, admiring his swing— the bent knee, the flexed leg. He turned to her. ‘Pick it up,' he said. ‘Take it home and study it. Don't send anything to this office again until you've learnt to write proper Burmese.'

In the bus, on the way home, she smoothed out the pages, one by one. His vocabulary, she realised, was that of a child; he was barely literate. He had run his pencil through everything he hadn't understood—puns, allusions, archaisms.

She stopped writing. Nothing could be published unless it had undergone the board's scrutiny. Writing was hard enough, even with nothing to deal with except yourself. The thought of another such encounter made those hours at the desk seem unendurable. The newspapers were full of strident denunciations of imperialism. It was because of the imperialists that Burma had to be shut off from the world; the country had to be defended against neo-colonialism and foreign aggression.

These tirades sickened Dinu. One day he said to his wife: ‘Look at the way in which these thugs use the past to justify the present. And they themselves are much worse than the colonialists; at least in the old days, you could read and write.'

Daw Thin Thin Aye smiled and shook her head in reproof. She said: ‘To use the past to justify the present is bad enough— but it's just as bad to use the present to justify the past. And
you can be sure that there are plenty of people to do that too: it's just that we don't have to put up with them.'

Their lives became very quiet and stunted: they were like plants whose roots had been trimmed to contain them inside tiny pots. They mixed with very few people, and were always careful about what they said, even with friends. They grew gnarled with age, inside and outside: they moved round their rooms with slow deliberation, like people who are afraid of knocking things over.

But all was not quiet around them. There were changes under way that they did not know about. Their lives were so quiet, so shut off that they didn't feel the first rumbles under the volcano. The eruption, when it came, took them by surprise.

It started with another of the general's crazed whims— another juggling of the currency. But this time people were not content to see their life's savings turned into waste paper. There were protests, quiet and hesitant at first. One day, in the university, there was a brawl in a teashop—a small, apparently innocuous event. But suddenly classrooms emptied, students came pouring out into the streets; leaders emerged and with astonishing speed, organisations developed.

One day Daw Thin Thin Aye was taken to a meeting. She went unwillingly, pushed on by her students. Afterwards, she helped write a pamphlet. When she picked up the pen her hand was shaking—she saw herself in the censor's office again. But as she began to write, a strange thing happened. With every sentence she saw her crumpled pages coming alive, rising off the floor and hitting back at the golf club, knocking it out of the major's hands.

She began to go to meetings all over town. She tried to get Dinu to come but he resisted. Then one day there was news of a new speaker: she was to address a huge gathering, near the Shwe Dagon—her name was Aung San Suu Kyi and she was the daughter of Dinu's old acquaintance from the university, General Aung San.

Dinu was seventy-four at the time; with age his right leg had grown stiffer and he walked with difficulty, but this new
name had an energising effect on him. He went to the meeting and after that he was not able to stay at home again. He began to take pictures; he travelled with his camera, putting together a pictorial record of the movement in its headiest and most joyful days.

On August 8, 1988 Dinu woke up with a mild fever. Daw Thin Thin Aye made him a meal and told him to stay in bed. There was to be an important march in the city that day: she left early in the morning. Some three or four hours later, Dinu heard repeated volleys of gunfire in the distance. He was too ill to go out; he lay in bed and waited for his wife to come home. In the late afternoon there was a knock on the door. He dragged himself out of bed and threw the door open.

There were three or four uniformed policemen standing on the stairs. Behind them were several longyi-clad plain-clothes men.

‘Yes?' said Dinu. ‘What do you want?'

They pushed past him without a word. He looked on helplessly as they went through the flat, opening cupboards and closets, rifling through their possessions. Then a plain-clothes man pointed to a framed picture of Raymond. The others gathered around, whispering.

One of the policemen came over to Dinu, with the framed photograph in his hand. ‘Do you know this man?' he said to Dinu.

‘Yes.' Dinu nodded.

‘Do you know who he is?'

Dinu picked his words carefully. ‘I know his name.'

‘Do you know that he's the leader of an insurgency? Did you know that he's one of the most wanted terrorists in the country?'

‘No.' Dinu's answer was non-committal.

‘Anyway—you will have to come with us.'

‘Not right now,' said Dinu. ‘I can't. I'm ill and I'm waiting for my wife.'

‘Don't worry about her,' said the man in the uniform. ‘She's already been taken to a place where she will be safe.'

forty-seven