Everything Is Broken (24 page)

The cramped space we sat in was filled with items Mya Win had found in the wreckage of the village or goods that had been given to him since the cyclone. There were a few tools and some building materials—a hammer, a machete, coils of old rope, some plastic tubing of varying lengths, and a rusting sheet of corrugated iron. On a plank of wood, a simple shrine had been set up consisting of a Buddha image, a few candles, and two wooden rosaries for meditation. Also on the shelf was a flashlight with three Chinese batteries placed in a neat row. Together with the sleeping mat, a tin cup, a few melamine plates, and a cooking pot, they represented the sum total of Mya Win’s possessions.

When we stepped out of the hut, Mya Win tied the door shut and looped a padlock through the knot. I wondered why he was locking up so fastidiously; I had seen nothing of value that anyone could possibly have wanted to steal and, besides, a thief could easily pry aside a loose plank or cut through the tarpaulin. As he slipped the padlock key onto a string around his wrist, Mya Win followed my gaze and explained. “This is everything I have,” he said. “I have to try and protect it as best I can.”

 

 

 

MY NOTEBOOKS SOON
filled up with stories. Villagers I met sat with me for hours at a time talking about the cyclone. They recounted dramatic tales of survival and they listed the names and ages of the dead. Though the details of each teller varied (in age, gender, location, number of family members lost), all the stories shared one overriding theme: They described how lives in the delta had been suddenly, violently, and irrevocably changed by Cyclone Nargis.

Ma Pyu, a teenage girl from a village south of Bogale, hit her head during the storm and was knocked out. The story she told me began a short time after the cyclone, when she regained consciousness and found herself lying alone and naked on a muddy stretch of ground. It was dark and she couldn’t see anything, but she could sense something unnatural about the quietness around her. Afraid to disrupt the heavy silence, she lay totally still and waited. After what felt like an eternity, a hazy dawn began to break over the shattered landscape, and Ma Pyu could see that she was surrounded on all sides by snakelike shapes. Her panic subsided momentarily when she realized she was lying among the gnarled roots of a mangrove forest. As more sunlight filtered through the knotted branches, she saw that there were other people lying nearby and noticed that they too were keeping absolutely still, even though some of them lay with their limbs twisted in uncomfortable-looking positions—one man’s leg was flopped next to his ear, another lay facedown in the mud with his arms neatly folded across his back. As Ma Pyu looked up toward the sky she saw that there were also people hanging in the trees. Their bodies were like oversized dolls, lazy and limp among the branches.

Unable to bear the appalling silence for a moment longer, Ma Pyu called out, “Where am I?”

There was no response. Not one of the bodies so much as stirred. She called out again, louder this time, “Where am I?”

Again there was no response, and Ma Pyu started to crawl frantically through the butter-soft mud, heading toward the light at the edge of the mangrove forest. The events of the night before came back to her in disjointed flashes: the wind that kept getting stronger; the flood that swallowed up her home; the boat she climbed into with her parents. She remembered the boat crashing into a tree and breaking apart. She saw her father disappear beneath a wave and her mother clutching on to a piece of wood spinning away from her in the water, calling out her name.

Ma Pyu emerged from the forest onto a sprawling plain and, not knowing what propelled her forward, she began to walk. She walked past the broken pieces of people’s homes—floorboards, palm roofing, cracked mirrors. She found a piece of cloth entwined around the oar of a boat and used the wet fabric to cover her nakedness. The same stillness of the forest had infested the fields she walked through. A dog lay against the trunk of a coconut tree; its eyes were open but it wasn’t breathing. There were buffalo scattered across the land like toy animals, and people were lying there too, but Ma Pyu tried not to look at them. At one point, she came to a river. She felt like she hadn’t eaten for days and didn’t have the energy to swim, but there was a pig floating in the shallows and she nudged it with her foot. It didn’t move, so she put her hands around its belly and kicked her way across. She thought to herself,
There is nothing left. This is the end of the world and I am the only one here.

Still, Ma Pyu carried on walking and, after some hours, she was startled to hear a male voice say, “Sister! Sister! Who are you?” She couldn’t work out where the voice was coming from, but she responded with the names of her parents and asked, “Who are you?” A man’s head emerged from behind a grounded boat. There were two other men with him, and they politely identified themselves and the villages they were from. They explained that they couldn’t step out from behind the boat because they were naked; their
longyi
had been ripped off as they tried to swim through the raging waters the previous night. Ma Pyu duly averted her gaze until they had found scraps of cloth to tie around themselves.

Though none of them knew where they were or where they were going, they agreed to walk together and, eventually, they came to a place that must once have been a village. There was the wreckage of a monastery and huge piles of timber and thatch. A one-story cement building remained standing, and scores of people clad only in wet rags or torn rice sacks were gathered in and around it.

As they approached the gathering, someone pushed a coconut against Ma Pyu’s lips and she drank the juice and gnawed at the flesh inside. She listened to the people talking about a big storm, a storm bigger than anyone could ever have imagined possible. People came up to her and asked her where she was from and if she knew what had happened to their father or uncle or daughter or brother. Lots of people were crying, though there was one man who giggled oddly whenever anyone approached him. A young girl clasped a jerrican as tightly as if she was still using it to keep afloat; she had not uttered a word to anyone and no one knew who she was or where she was from. There were injured people, too; in the churning waters limbs had been crushed by logs and loose zinc roofing had sliced through flesh.

Ma Pyu spent two nights among this gathering of the shell-shocked. She searched for fallen coconuts to drink from and scavenged for dead animals that might still be edible. Someone managed to light a fire and they were able to roast the meat, but it had to be shared among so many people that there was only ever enough for a few mouthfuls each. There was no way of knowing how to get help or where to go; some people believed that the entire world had been engulfed by the monster storm.

But Ma Pyu needed to find her parents, so she joined some people who had decided to walk to Bogale, where they hoped they would be able to find help. Ma Pyu’s odyssey is not unique. I heard many tales of survivors who walked for days after the storm in search of food, shelter, and lost family. Some died along the way, of dehydration or open wounds. Some were picked up by boats. Others just kept walking through the wasteland. They ended up in one of the bigger delta towns—like Bogale or Laputta—where they sought shelter among the thousands of survivors who had crowded into school buildings and monastery compounds. Ma Pyu made it to Bogale in the end, and there she told her story to anyone who would listen. But she never found her parents or learned what had happened to them.

 

 

 

AT A TRADITIONAL
village funeral in Burma, the body of the deceased is bathed, wrapped in white cloth, and laid out on a bamboo mat. A coin is placed into the dead person’s mouth so that he can pay his way to the afterworld. A meal of curry and rice is laid out next to the body and, if the person was a smoker, cigarettes or cheroots and a lighter are placed within easy reach. Merit-making ceremonies are performed at a monastery during which family members offer meals to the resident monks. In some cases, lengths of thread measuring the exact height of the deceased person’s children may be laid out beside them—a symbolic protective measure to ensure that strong emotional attachments do not enable them to snatch the souls of their children to take with them into the next life.

The body is either cremated or buried, after which someone from the family will snap a twig off a tree and take it into their house in the belief that the dead person’s spirit will follow them. For a further seven days, the spirit stays temporarily in the home as it adjusts to the afterlife, and then a final farewell ceremony is held to accrue additional merit for the deceased and signal his release from earthly attachments.

It is a Buddhist belief that those who die while still attached to people or possessions will enter the realm of
peta
, or hungry ghosts, where they take on a ghostly form and remain trapped on earth, unable to move to the next realm. Some believe that all those who died a violent death are relegated to this realm, as they were killed suddenly without time to mentally prepare for death and relinquish their attachments to family and material possessions. The correct funeral arrangements are conducted not only to aid the deceased by providing them with increased merit for their next rebirth, but also to ensure that they do not reappear as ghosts and remain to haunt the living.

The dead have returned in many forms since Cyclone Nargis, most commonly during the night. Sometimes people hear distraught cries for help. Terrible screams echo across the paddy fields. At other times, the noises are more gentle; a newlywed couple is often heard murmuring to each other in the corner of one village, though they both died during the cyclone. Lights flit along pathways where no one is walking. People wake up with the sensation that someone has been grasping at their arms or legs, in the same way people held on to each other during the storm.

Some people see members of their family. Early one evening, in the melting light that follows sunset, a man heard his name called from above. He looked up to see his dead aunt sitting high up in a coconut tree; she waved at him and kicked her legs playfully, as if she were frolicking in a swing. Lost children repeatedly walk through their parents’ fitful dreams. Though they sometimes linger after their mother or father has woken up, they never stay long enough to provide any solace. Mostly the dead manifest in disturbing ways that seem to imply they are not there to help the living.

The bodies of those who died in Cyclone Nargis were never systematically cleared or properly buried. They decayed where the storm had left them or were disposed of without ceremony. A group of twenty unpaid workers from a village south of Laputta was given an incomplete set of masks and gloves by the township authorities and sent out to clear away any corpses that remained some two weeks after the storm. They were instructed that any bodies found close to the river should be thrown into the water and that those too far away should be buried or burned. A navy boat was said to have collected bodies into a net and sailed out to sea to disperse them in deep water. A man from Ah Mat village described how the corpses in his village had piled up against a low hill. The surviving villagers had tried to cremate them, but they wouldn’t burn—there were too many of them and what kindling could be found was too damp. The villagers left to seek shelter in Laputta, and when they returned to the village a month later, the pile of decaying bodies was still there.

For survivors living in the delta, it was impossible to erase these gruesome images. In a village not far from the delta town of Mawlamyainggyun, I walked past a large drinking water pond that seemed to me a beautiful and tranquil spot. It was early morning and vivid pink lotus buds were opening on the surface of the water. But the villagers shuddered as they passed it. Many dead bodies had been found floating in the pond after Cyclone Nargis and, no matter how many times it was cleaned and washed out with lime powder, people still found that the water had a peculiar taste. As no one in the village was willing to use the water for drinking, cooking, or even to wash their clothes, it had become an ornamental pond—an unmarked and unintentional memorial to those who died there.

The dead had become indelibly etched into people’s memories and onto the landscape. The bodies of people and carcasses of farm animals that floated in the waterways during the weeks after the cyclone had now sunk beneath the surface, but at low tide the waters would recede and reveal anonymous piles of bones slick with the fertile, alluvial mud of the delta.

As I traveled from village to village, mostly by boat, I imagined that the riverbeds must be lined with bones. After a while, I began to see the dead everywhere, even in places they were not. When we sailed down a deserted creek, I mistook a fallen coconut embedded in the mud for a human skull. Blinking into the midday sun, palm fronds on the ground looked to me like rib cages, and fallen sun-bleached branches took on the appearance of femurs, ulnae, loose vertebrae.

 

 

 

AFTER LONG DAYS
in the villages, it was with a guilty sense of relief that I returned each night to Bogale. In contrast to the desolation of the villages, the activity on the streets of Bogale felt enlivening and gave the impression that the aid effort was progressing and that life could somehow recover, even after so much had been lost.

Once a trading outpost for the agricultural and fishery products of the delta, Bogale had a well-worn, old-world atmosphere. Aged houses built of timber had been weather-proofed repeatedly over the years and now had an obsidian glow. The paint on Soviet-style concrete shop-houses constructed in the 1960s had faded beneath the harsh delta sun to pastel blushes that contained barely a hint of the original green, blue, or yellow. The few more modern structures were scrappy low-rise buildings no more than three or four stories high, with tiled exteriors and cheaply tinted windows. There were still reminders of the cosmopolitan mix of people once drawn to the delta for its business opportunities—in the center of town there was a mosque, a Hindu temple, and a number of Chinese shrines carved with writhing, rainbow-colored dragons.