Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (8 page)

One day, two uniformed soldiers and another man came up the track to our house and rang the little brass bell that was tied with wire to the gate. I opened it, and they took two steps inside. They stood in a stiff row, eyes to the ground, the two soldiers flanking the civilian, a bookseller. He carried a sling bag containing a dozen or so Burmese paperback books, novels and recipe books. He showed me a couple of them with trembling, tattooed hands. ‘Buy, buy!’ said one of the soldiers, his voice low but with an urgency in his command. The men had the searching eyes and hollowed-out cheeks of hunger. The soldier pointed to the badge on the arm of his green army uniform, pulling the sleeve. Wordlessly, he was saying: ‘We are soldiers, you have to buy.’ His colleague, who spoke a little English, tugged at his empty breast pocket. ‘No money, no food,’ he said. I went into the house to fetch them each a thousand kyat note. Under the watch of next-door’s gardener, who had climbed his ladder to look over the wall, I walked slowly back and handed over the money. The soldiers straightened their backs, clicked their heels and saluted.

*

It was the National Day public holiday, with a high sky of wispy clouds and tolerable temperatures under thirty-five degrees. A month since the end of the rains, a touch of moisture still lingered in the air. Driving my husband’s white station wagon, with the logo of his NGO emblazoned on the side, I was on my way to the hair salon, where my humidity-wrecked hair would be tamed and smoothed for just a few dollars.

I drove down the stony track that led from our house, turned right at the small, family-run shop that sold handmade cotton dresses, past the newly built, ostentatious
mansion named Paradise where water flowed in silent, flat panels over its granite surrounding wall, then alongside the wooden kiosks selling instant noodles, bananas and cigarettes, to the shady junction where the trishaw drivers snoozed under the outstretched arms of a banyan tree. I indicated left on the main road and drove by Bahan High School No. 2, deserted for the holiday, the national flag hoisted on a pole in the playground. My route took me down Shwegondine Road, past what had been pointed out to me as the headquarters of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party, housed in a rundown terrace between two furniture shops. After years of harassment, and with hundreds of its members, including Suu Kyi, imprisoned, the party rarely held meetings and its offices were usually padlocked and deserted. But today a crowd of people was gathered outside, men and women wearing red armbands, most with heads bowed, looking uncomfortable, frightened even. It was the first gathering of any kind I had seen in Rangoon. I parked the car and walked towards it.

I was approached by a benevolent-looking man with opaque, pale brown eyes and neatly combed grey hair. He introduced himself as U Hla Thein, a member of parliament (I was confused, surely there was no parliament?), and steered me through the overspill of NLD supporters on the pavement. The crowd of about seventy was mostly quiet; their very presence, in front of the plain-clothed military intelligence officers across the street, was their statement, and a stunningly brave one. ‘Aren’t you scared?’ I asked U Hla Thein. ‘No,’ he said with a smile. ‘We don’t care.’ Inside the gloomy shophouse, with its damp, peeling walls, it was hard to believe I was in the offices of a political party that could, or should, have been running a country of sixty million people.

In May 1990, when Aung San Suu Kyi was already in detention at her home, Burma held its first general elections for thirty years. No one was sure what the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) was expecting, but it seemed the governing generals believed that even after all these years of slow degradation, the people of Burma, subservient for so long, would duly vote in the military’s proxy party. That wasn’t what happened. Suu Kyi’s NLD won the election by a landslide, and the junta, shocked, simply refused to cede power. Parliament was never convened, but candidates like U Hla Thein, elected in their constituencies, continued to introduce themselves as MPs, as he did to me, more than eighteen years later.

We tried to squeeze forward through the mass of bodies. ‘Are you a diplomat?’ someone asked. ‘Er, yes,’ I replied. I was ushered to a plastic chair near the front.

Sitting in front of the NLD central executive committee, comprised mostly of elderly men, I was now stingingly self-conscious, worried about my opportunistic fib and also what I was wearing – a sleeveless top and flimsy, almost see-through skirt, certainly not diplomat’s attire. Worse still, there were several enthusiastic photographers pacing around snapping everything – were they NLD activists, from the media or even intelligence agents? To be photographed in this pariah place would be a nightmare. I crossed my legs and hunched over with my elbow on my knee and my hand shielding my eyes, as if trying to block out the glaring sun.

The speeches had already begun. U Hla Pe, a member of the executive committee, read dryly from a written speech calling for political prisoners to be released and for the junta to review a new constitution which enshrined the military’s role in any future elected government. A woman in the audience, her greying hair pinned back, wiped away silent tears as she listened to demands she probably believed
would never be met. U Hla Pe finished, took a sip from his water glass, his hand shaking, and was helped down from the wooden podium. He rejoined the NLD top brass seated behind him; two rows of noble, old men, their political dreams reduced to empty protocol. Most of the party’s best political minds were behind bars. Communication with their leader Suu Kyi was impossible. ‘We don’t speak to her, we don’t hear from her, no no no,’ said U Hla Thein, who had taken the seat next to me. ‘How can we know what she’s thinking?’ Rudderless and reduced by imprisonments, the remnants of the party were trying to decide whether to contest elections set for 2010, the first to be held since 1990. There was little prospect of a fair vote; everyone expected Burma’s generals would ensure that their puppet party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), would be the winner. Western diplomats had met privately with NLD leaders to urge them to participate in the vote, warning them that the party risked sinking into irrelevance otherwise. But party members had their doubts. ‘In the West you always talk of a level-playing field,’ another disenfranchised MP told me. ‘Here our game is played on the side of a mountain.’ He asked my nationality and thanked me for coming. I felt like a fraud, but I didn’t trust even this man enough to confess that I was a journalist.

The meeting over, there were hugs and laughter and news shared among comrades who saw each other all too rarely. They streamed out, the men holding hands or linking fingers in that comfortable, unconscious gesture that is the preserve of Asian males. They made their way down to the bus stops at Shwegondine junction, with wary sideways glances at the spies across the street.

I weaved through the crowd and crossed the road to my car parked in a small lot on the other side. Beneath the pavement of cracked concrete blocks, a trickling sewer exhaled its fetid gases. While focusing on each careful step, I became aware that
someone was following me. I swung round to see a man in a white shirt and
longyi
, his hair slicked down with oil. It is hard to describe, but regime people had a certain look – swarthy and sullen. They carried satchels for their notebooks. Instead of going straight to the car, with its NGO logo, I walked fast to the Yuzana Hotel, and straight to the hair salon, now an hour late for my appointment. Lying on a cushioned bed with my hair in the sink, next to a backlit mural of an Alpine mountain and sparkling stream, I surrendered to a head massage, turning over what I had seen in the NLD office. Basins of warm water were poured over my hair and my head was gently wrapped in a towel. The image of the man who followed me was fading from my mind, I was thinking about everything else, the privilege of witnessing this extraordinary meeting. By the time my hair had been dried, I had almost forgotten him.

I stepped through the frosted glass door and stopped still. Across the lobby, sitting on a couch, there he was again, a newspaper in hand. Or was it him? I wasn’t completely sure. I couldn’t look again, and I couldn’t turn around as I walked fast, head down, towards the car, parked between the hotel and the NLD building. Horribly aware of the aid agency’s name clearly painted on both sides of the car, I quickly got in, and immediately wished I hadn’t. I could have got a taxi, or walked in the other direction towards the pagoda or a shopping centre, found a group to get lost in. But it was too late. I slammed the door and bumped on to the road, hitting the passenger side on the kerb. I accelerated into the middle lane and indicated right at the empty school. I checked my rear-view mirror and saw there were no cars preparing to turn with me. I breathed out. No tail, I thought. It was only as I pulled the steering wheel down that I spotted the motorbike.

In contrast to other Asian cities, motorcycles were rare in Rangoon. They were banned purportedly for reasons of safety but in fact as a means of control. New cars were the preserve of the very rich, thanks to a massive import duty, and the streets were choked with ancient jalopies coughing out lead-filled exhaust fumes. But even those were unaffordable to most: my taxi driver’s rented car, for example, a 1983 Toyota Sprinter, had a resale value of $27,000. Bicycles too were banned from the main thoroughfares and so every day Rangoonites packed themselves on to decrepit buses. That way, the junta reasoned, mass movement in the city was fully controlled – a flash demonstration would be impossible to organise. So the motorbike I saw in the mirror could mean only one thing: special branch.

I kept driving towards home, checking my mirror as the bike followed me at each turn. I couldn’t lead him to my house, with our names registered at the neighbourhood SPDC office – that would make us instantly identifiable, as if the NGO logo wasn’t enough. Panicked, I drove to a small bakery tucked up a lane close to our house, parked and went inside the shop. It wasn’t a very good manoeuvre; I had taken myself into a dead end. In fact, it was laughably bad. I waited as long as I could, examining the different breads and imported jams and homemade cheeses. When I ran out of time to be plausibly selecting a loaf of bread, I drove out again, expecting to see the motorbike at the end of the driveway, but he was gone. I suppose an address in his notebook was all he needed to feel his work was done. The thing I discovered about the special branch agents was that although as a whole they were dangerous, individually they seemed rather ineffectual, buzzing around town on their orange motorbikes with helmets askew.

*

‘You did what?’ my husband Dan shouted, furious at my stupidity. And now it did seem really stupid. As enthralled as I had been by this rare glimpse of the opposition’s clandestine world, my actions now had the potential to cause a lot of trouble. It was a deeply sensitive time for aid agencies in Burma. In the aftermath of the cyclone international organisations were trying to scale up their operations, a process that involved painstaking negotiations with government ministries mistrustful of foreign organisations. International NGOs like my husband’s had worked hard to cultivate an apolitical stance in order to get aid through to the hundreds of thousands of people in dire need. Visiting the offices of the outlawed NLD was not something their staff should be seen to be doing.

Shaken up, and keen to get out of the house, I remembered I was due at the Girls’ Tea Party, an annual expatriate fundraising event in Golden Valley, just half a mile or so from where the NLD meeting had taken place. The women-only sale of rather pricey, pretty purses, table mats, scented candles, jewellery and other nick-nacks, with sparkling white wine for refreshment, was laid out on trestle tables on the rolling lawn of a wooden colonial villa, home to a French-American family. The trees were festooned with lanterns and strings of fairy lights and the family’s multitude of pet rabbits hopped around the grass. This was another side to Rangoon, carefree and frivolous. It was little more than an hour since my brush with a special branch agent. Now I was back in familiar territory, but felt strangely removed. I hurried up the driveway, grabbed my flute of prosecco, and gratefully fell into conversation with some friends.

FOUR

The Fixer

‘Did you know that we are all addicted to gambling?’ Zayar asked cheerfully. The young reporter and I were discussing ideas for a newspaper piece. I recalled Mu Mu’s story, and the damage gambling had wrought on her family. In my neighbourhood in Rangoon, I had seen hand-pushed lottery carts, blaring loud, perky music in an effort to entice people out of their homes to buy tickets. The lottery was run by the government, and didn’t seem to get anyone too excited. ‘No, that’s not it, this isn’t the government’s thing, it’s run by the people,’ Zayar said. ‘Tomorrow I can show you.’

*

By 10 a.m. it was getting hot, even in the shade of the colonial apartment blocks along Mahabandoola Street. Stepping around the little plastic stools that encircled the pop-up eateries selling fried rice pancakes, Zayar and I walked down to the busy bus stop at the end of Bogolay Zay Street. The buses wheezed up, their tattooed conductors hanging out of the side doors clutching dirty wads of twenty kyat notes, shouting out their destinations. Unadventurous as this may sound, I was about to take my first trip on a Burmese bus. Up to then, I had not thought of Rangoon buses as a potential means of transport. A Burmese woman friend of mine, who worked in a city centre office, had told me that her forty-minute morning and evening bus commutes were the worst part of her day. Aggressive conductors packed the buses as full as possible, and she would invariably find herself standing, wedged in, and at the mercy of belchers and gropers. The city’s ancient bus fleet included snub-nosed, Second World War-era models, which we expatriates considered quaint, and would buy painted wooden replicas of them as souvenirs. But jumping aboard one of those heaving, suffocatingly
hot and possibly dangerous wrecks was another matter. In truth, with buses so packed and intimidating and the city’s taxis plentiful and cheap, the only foreigners you would see braving Rangoon’s public transport were a few hardened backpackers.