Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (18 page)

It was hard to imagine the separation they had endured. Many around me had tears in their eyes; some looked away, so as not to intrude on this very personal family scene. But Suu Kyi did not cry. She threaded her arm through her son’s and looked up at his fine-featured face, so similar to hers, and beamed.

TEN

Written in the Stars

On an airless Sunday morning, I was sitting on a wooden chair next to an open window with my right hand upturned on the table in front of me. Min Wai had grasped my fingers tightly, and, with a magnifying glass to his eye, had bent his head low over my palm. There was a long silence before he spoke and I was suddenly worried about what he was going to say. Min Wai lit a cigarette and exhaled towards the open window, but the smoke hung like a cloud in the still air. I looked at him expectantly. He smiled. I need not have worried. The lines on my palm foretold only good things. My health was good and would remain so. In my mid-forties, I would enjoy great success and riches, followed, twenty years later, by overwhelming, unprecedented, astounding success. My visit to the palm reader was going well.

One of the easier ways to go about being an undercover journalist, I had discovered, was to do the ordinary, touristy things that the Burmese would expect foreigners to do anyway. A visit to Rangoon’s fetid zoo, a trishaw ride around the colonial downtown, or a tour of a pagoda were unlikely to attract undue attention, but could give me an ear on the city’s background chatter. Conversations with the elephant keeper, my favourite
saiq-ka
driver (the octogenarian Mr Coconut) or a Buddhist monk keen to practise his English, while not startling in isolation, could be pieced together to build a truer picture of Burmese life. I liked to think of it as work, and my visit to one of Rangoon’s most celebrated palm readers was part of the same exercise.

The Burmese are fascinated by palmistry, astrology, numerology and fortune telling of any kind. The vast majority of the Burmese population are Buddhist, but
many mix their practice of Theravada Buddhism with the worship of nats, or spirits, and an array of superstitious beliefs including the interpretation of planetary movements or earthly phenomena to predict the future and explain the past. Great store is set by astrological readings in determining the correct dates for weddings, funerals and other important events, and wealthy Burmese women may even book in their Caesarean sections on auspicious dates.

In Burmese history, superstition has been a constant and powerful force. In the nineteenth century, the demise of King Thibaw’s white elephant, a species revered as a symbol of power and good fortune (the elephant lived in extravagant surroundings, adorned with diamonds and fed from a gold trough), was regarded as an unpropitious omen, and was soon followed by the monarch’s ousting by British colonisers. At Burma’s independence in 1948, the exact timing of the handover of power – 4.20 in the morning on 4 January – was decided after intense consultations with the country’s leading soothsayers. In 1987, General Ne Win introduced the unconventional kyat denominations of forty-five and ninety, having decided that the value of the notes had to be divisible by his lucky number, nine.

In more recent history, the wrath of Cyclone Nargis unleashed countless prophesies, including the imminent downfall of the military regime, a prediction that turned out to have substance. And on one memorable, clear Burmese night in March 2009, the crescent moon, which in the northern tropics sits upturned like a bowl, was joined in the black sky by two bright stars above it, creating a celestial smiley face. The wondrous sight drew awestruck families out of their houses and sparked a frenzy of positive omens.

*

Min Wai saw clients seven days a week in his dishevelled wooden house in the northern Rangoon suburb of Okkalapa, and charged 4,000 kyats (about four dollars) for a half- hour reading. By Burmese standards he was pretty well off. His two-storey house had several bedrooms and a well-equipped kitchen with a gas-burning stove. On the carpeted floor of his living room sat three voltage regulators, devices bought by those who could afford them to tame the city’s erratic electricity supply and to prevent sudden power surges from blowing up appliances such as DVD players or rice cookers, a common and frustrating occurrence in Rangoon households. In a white T-shirt and sarong, Min Wai was sitting on a plastic chair at his desk, with a powerful anglepoise lamp, a glass ashtray and three magnifying glasses set before him. On the wall behind him were several posters of the Lord Buddha and a framed black-and-white photograph of his wife, taken just before their wedding, a beautiful woman with her hair pinned up with flowers, gazing intently at the camera. She had died thirty years earlier.

On 2 March 1962, Min Wai graduated from teacher training college in Mandalay. At dawn the same day, tanks rolled into Rangoon and soldiers seized Prime Minister U Nu and senior government ministers from their beds and took them into custody. This was the
coup d’état
that would launch half a century of dictatorial rule. The instigator of the coup, army chief General Ne Win, installed himself as head of the Revolutionary Council. Like many of Burma’s leaders before him, he was a superstitious man, fascinated by palmistry, astrology and numerology. Up in Mandalay, Min Wai was already deeply immersed in the teachings of the renowned Irish palmist Cheiro and had begun to meet practitioners in the Ponnar Kone quarter of the city. There he had befriended the great-grandchildren of Rama, the palmist of King Mindon, Thibaw’s father. In exchange for knowledge of Cheiro’s art of reading
the lines of the hand, Rama’s descendants taught the young teacher their ancient Indian technique, focusing on the palm’s ridges.

After his graduation, Min Wai taught in a primary school by day, and read palms in the evening. Within a few years his client base had expanded hugely, to the extent that he had a waiting list for appointments. He decided to quit his teaching position and concentrate full time on palm reading and astrological interpretations. One of his early clients in Mandalay was Ni Ni Myint, a young history student living in a university dorm. ‘When I told her she would become a queen, she was very excited,’ Min Wai said. ‘She kept coming back to see me.’ In the early 1970s, true to the prediction, Ni Ni Myint married the dictator Ne Win, becoming his fourth wife and Burma’s first lady. Min Wai became an indispensible member of her entourage and relocated with her to Rangoon.

A decade later, Ni Ni Myint, by now a respected history professor as well as the president’s consort, arrived at Min Wai’s house in a state of high excitement, bringing with her a fragment of a dream recalled by her husband. As the economic disaster wrought by Ne Win’s ill-conceived ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’ had unfolded, the general’s reaction had not been to cede governance to a more competent, civilian administration, but to blunder on, ruthlessly eliminating dissent along the way. The night before his wife visited the fortune teller, Ne Win had had an unusual dream. He had dreamt of a pagoda in which the
hti
, the gem-encrusted umbrella that sits at the tip of the spire, was double layered. ‘It took me a while to interpret that dream. It was very unusual, and I knew it was very significant,’ said Min Wai. ‘I contemplated its meaning, I referred to many teachings. Then I saw the meaning. I told Ni Ni Myint that General San Yu would become president in Ne
Win’s place, but Ne Win would stay in power, he would have control from behind the throne. And that is exactly what happened.’

In this tense, backbiting atmosphere, several of the most powerful generals in the Burmese junta turned to Win Mai for consultations about their future. One of his most notable clients was Prime Minister Khin Nyunt, the feared military intelligence chief and the mastermind of Burma’s web of spies who kept the nation under suffocating surveillance. Like most of the senior generals, Khin Nyunt was highly superstitious. For luck, he kept a white elephant, captured in the jungles of Arakan, dressed in royal regalia at his private temple near Rangoon’s airport. Did Min Wai feel intimidated? ‘I was honest,’ he said. ‘I just told him what I saw. And I was correct. All my readings were correct. I still have records. I predicted that he would be ousted, and he was.’ In 2004, the junta’s strongman Than Shwe decided that the rising power of Khin Nyunt had become a threat to his authority. The prime minister was arrested and his military intelligence network dismantled. Khin Nyunt spent more than seven years under house arrest at his home in Rangoon’s Mingaladon district. The purge was good news for Burmese dissidents, and for people like me, trying to stay under the regime’s radar. The wounded MI unit limped on, but was never the same slick, all-pervasive operation that it had been under Khin Nyunt.

Allowing himself to become so intimately entangled in the underhand dealings of Burmese politics in the dark days of the military’s rule must have held dangers for the palm reader. Many of those close to the regime, who for one reason or another fell out of favour, found themselves imprisoned and wiped from the official memory. But Min Wai never felt the need for caution. Jail was not his destiny, he was sure of it. ‘I have never been afraid,’ he told me. ‘Not of politicians or leaders, soldiers or anyone. My palm doesn’t say that I will be arrested and I have faith in that.’

Min Wai developed the tact necessary for delivering unwelcome news. ‘I never tell someone he will lose his power, rather I say their luck has run out or going forward will be difficult. I never tell a woman that she will become a widow. I tell her your husband will die before you. It’s the same thing but it sounds softer. I have to be tactful with the words I use.’ A few days earlier, Min Wai had had a consultation with a couple from Mandalay, a man of about fifty and his wife who was around thirty-five. ‘When they married, he told her he was single. Together they had three children,’ the palm reader said. ‘But actually he has nine children and two other wives. From her side, he has three children but from his side he has nine children. I can see all this in his palm. If I tell the wife the truth, they will fight. Sometimes I decide to keep things to myself.’

*

My host chain-smoked cigarettes as part of his breathing pattern, but he was not a jittery man; he exuded the contented aura of someone satisfied with their life’s work. His clients came from all over the country, from Pathein in the west, Myitkyina in the north and Tarchilek in the east. If he was fully booked, they would stay overnight with relatives, or even sleep in their car and come back the next day. Min Wai read about twenty palms a day. He saw himself as an educator. ‘I feel like I am performing a service to my community like a doctor or a teacher. I am here to educate people,’ Min Wai told me. ‘I make people see they have to make corrections in their life. I am proud of that.’ Min Wai has always made himself popular with people who matter. He read the palms of local commanders who ensured he was not subjected to the same kind of intimidation and extortion that most people had to put up with. He advised entrepreneurs on the right time to start their businesses. If they found success, they would always remember how they got there. The white Toyota Corolla station wagon
in front of his house, sheltered from the sun and rain by a sheet of corrugated iron, was a gift from a grateful client.

Min Wai traded in fatalism, an important part of the Burmese psyche. Did a belief in a predetermined life infantilise the Burmese people, keep their expectations low, hold them back from revolution? It certainly set them apart from Western thinking. The foreigners who came to see him didn’t really believe in the concept of a past life, he said. ‘What will happen in this life is already determined by what you have done in a previous life. This is what we Buddhists believe. For the Burmese the past life is really important. Foreigners only believe in the present life, they don’t really understand the past life. For example, if a person digs up a ruby, that is because of what they did in a past life. But what they do with their ruby, that is up to them, that’s their present life. You could pass it straight to the foreman and he would give you one lakh, but you could get five lakh at the ruby market, ten lakh in Rangoon, twenty lakh in Thailand, fifty lakh in Hong Kong and by the time it reached London it would be worth two hundred lakh. I can tell you if you are going to find the ruby, but I cannot tell you what to do with it. You have to make your own luck in the present life.’

When I visited Min Wai, Burma’s new, nominally civilian government was in its infancy. It was six months after Burma’s November 2010 elections, which, although flawed and unfair, had created a new administration led by former generals who had retired their commissions to run for office. The State Peace and Development Council had been officially dissolved. The despised junta leader Than Shwe had stepped down. The two-house
hlutthaw
had become the country’s first functioning parliament since the 1962 coup, although its chambers were dominated by the military’s proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).

Across North Africa, the street revolutions of the Arab Spring were unseating long-entrenched autocratic leaders. What was unfolding in Burma, however, was a transformation from the top down, managed by the very people who had ruled with ineptitude and cruelty for so long. The Burmese people wanted to believe in change, but years of disappointment and countless false dawns had tempered their optimism. In his readings, Min Wai saw cause for hope. Diplomacy was useless, he said, these things were beyond the control of politicians. The Arab Spring was triggered by an auspicious planetary alignment, and when the right stars shone in Burmese skies, change would come. ‘I have published my readings that something will happen,’ he said. ‘Right now is so-called democracy, but it is not real. The reign of the army will come to an end in 2015. True democracy will come then. If you talk about it at the UN, it will be useless. It’s the stars and planets that dominate fate. Things change as the stars change. According to my calculation, there will be peace in 2015.’