Golden Earth (17 page)

While occupied with these reflections, I had gradually become aware of an unmistakable reek, usually described as acrid, as definite but indescribable as the smell of burning feathers or any other pungent odour. The lattice separating us from the next private room was pierced with dimly glowing points of light. Now a murmur sifted through the chinks in the wall; there was a tinkle of laughter, a silence, the sound of a bow drawn tentatively across a single string, producing no more than the rising and falling drone of an insect. This was followed by a rustling, then more laughter. The odour became sharper. An alarmed silence had fallen upon our company. I asked Tin Maung if it was not opium I could smell. After a moment he said, ‘I am perplexed.’ ‘There are Chinese-Shan ladies,’ said the schoolmaster, averting his head in deprecation from the offending quarter. ‘These ladies are not serious.’ The word was used in exactly the way a central European would use it, in harsh condemnation of one who is not right-thinking.

Our waiter had been a small Chinese boy of about twelve, with all the urbanity of a trained hotelier. He was quick to sweep the scattered rice from the table to the floor, where rats of extraordinary tameness made frequent sorties to deal with it. He was swift and merciless in his annihilation of cockroaches which ventured on the table, despite the wincing of the schoolmaster. Having presented the bill – a sheetful of
cavorting ideographs – he astounded me by refusing a rupee tip. I tried to press it upon him, but the rejection was no mere form, although as he retreated before us, bowing, to the door, he was clearly delighted. ‘He does not take money, as a sign of respect,’ Tin Maung said. ‘It is sufficient that you have honoured him by offering it.’ A delightful bartering of compliments, I thought, and I practised it on several further occasions. In the end I stopped trying to tip the Chinese, to whom the idea seemed alien – at least, when they are not sufficiently far from their homeland for the old customs to have quite changed. Tin Maung also informed me that in that part of the country, a Burmese, when he is obliged to accept money to which he does not feel entitled, will mark the note or notes in such a way that he will be able to identify them, and give them in alms as soon as he can.

Lashio’s main street was in pitch darkness as we strolled back. Chinks of light showed through the teahouse doors, but the only sound to be heard came from a Chinese party in an upstairs room somewhere. An orchestra was playing with spasmodic frenzy, but the undertones were suppressed by distance. The only sound which reached us with rhythmic regularity was that, as it seemed, of an iron saucepan being thrown from a height into the street; a hollow and staccato thud, doubtless to be achieved only after infinite practice at whatever the instrument was.

U Thein Zan had just returned from the monastery and was awaiting us, dressed, as usual, for the evening, in a sailor’s blue sweater, which he had put on over his shirt. He had been both chastened and inspired by his visit to the monastery, and it was soon evident that we were to receive a substantial paraphrase of the sermon. First, however, a bottle of rum and two glasses were put on the table, a truly remarkable sight in such a devout household. I felt, indeed, most dubious about committing in the old man’s presence what amounted to a deadly sin. But filling up the glasses and raising his in my direction Tin Maung said that if his father wanted an audience, he would have to put up with its wickedness. Shaking his head in fond reproof, U Thein Zan said, ‘I do not renounce my son’s salvation. Foolishness and laughing is the age and lack of experience. Soon he will come to tell me, “old man, you were right”.’ With sandals
removed, our legs drawn up on the seats of our chairs, and our pernicious glasses before us, we resigned ourselves to U Thein Zan’s exhortations. Since in the Orient no one is distracted by mere noise, the Radio Toulouse programme was left at full strength, although on this night the reception – a concert by the Chasseurs d’Afrique – was fitful and gusty.

Buddhism, as I had gathered from various sermons printed in the Rangoon press, had suddenly become injected with evangelical fervour, a rare phenomenon in the history of the religion. And perhaps with the notion of making the message more palatable to the West, great emphasis was now being laid on its ‘scientific’ character. Having held back, in the way of religions in which the final and perfect revelation is given once and for all, until it has seen itself in danger of being left high and dry by the times – a survival of medievalism – it has now come forward, almost as if an intolerably compressed spring had been released, with something of a jerk. Buddhist sermons now feature such topics as atomic fission, and the Buddha is sometimes referred to as the first atomic scientist. Even before having been subjected to such propaganda, one cannot have helped noticing that primitive Buddhism, in its rarely found, untainted form, could loosely be described as scientific in its attitude, and in its conception – a feat of great intuitive power on the part of its founder – of the soul’s slow evolution through countless ages from lower to higher forms. This foreshadowing of Darwinism is now
belatedly
exploited by his followers. It is much stressed by the organisers of the Third Missionary Movement – the only previous movements recognised being those of Buddha, and the Indian king, Asoka. U Thein Zan’s reconstruction of the sermon was a thick soup; a conventional stock of Buddhist mysticism into which much Freud and Einstein had been stirred. Afterwards he produced a pamphlet by the Venerable Lokanatha of Hong Kong, the leading spirit of this movement, of whose previous announcements I had acquired copies in Rangoon. This worthy monk, described as being in the truth-exporting business, was on his way to the United States, where the construction of an ‘incomparable Skyscraper Pagoda in New York, dedicated to World Peace’ would be the crowning achievement of his work.

As in many Buddhist sermons, there was an earthiness, a downright manner in the attack. This was strong stuff for the squeamish. There were no airy abstractions here. Briskly the venerable monk settled down to a classification of the body’s ‘thirty-two filthy parts’. He seeks to shatter the image of fleshly beauty and does so in a few, shrewd blows. The body is ‘a foul latrine on two legs’ he begins, then, warming to his subject with the relish of an Aldous Huxley, he invites our attention to a dead body, ‘… an excellent subject for meditation. The swollen, stinking corpse,
bluish-black
, with swarms of worms issuing from the nine holes is enough to make any one disgusted with the foul nature of the body. We should sit down and identify ourselves with the horrible corpse, with the following reflection: “As I am now, so once was he; as he is now, so shall I be.” By thinking in this way the idea will finally dawn on us that our body is a corpse bound to our neck. And we shall loathe and hate our body and the bodies of others. This is the way to destroy lust for ever.’ But in case this exercise in meditation should fail to work we are presented with a monkish technique of taming this disturbing and disgusting machine. It reads a little like one of those slightly repellent chats about fitness and the body beautiful in a sunbathing journal – the note of obsession is common to both – except of course, in reverse. All you do is take as little sleep as you can – four hours at the most, avoid nourishing food, and above all, never relax. In this way you can be sure of building-up the body unbeautiful in a reasonably short time.

But as the Reverend Lokanatha’s appeal is directed above all to the citizens of the New World, he feels it necessary to put in a word about how to get rich. ‘Men are born poor because they were stingy in the past. Men are born rich because they were generous in the past. Therefore don’t be jealous of the rich man driving in a fancy limousine car. Give as he did, and you too will become rich …’ A yardstick for calculation is thoughtfully provided in a quotation from the Master’s words: ‘Herein Ananda, the yield to be looked for from a donation to an animal is a hundredfold, to an ordinary non-virtuous man a thousandfold, to the Saint, incalculable and beyond all measure.’

It is extraordinary how the fascination of America is felt equally by
Burmese bobby-soxers and venerable monks. There is no doubt that the USA has become the Cathay of our times. ‘The scientific American will readily embrace Scientific Buddhism. They are eagerly awaiting for our Atomic Bomb of Love. Our incomparable Skyscraper Pagoda in New York dedicated to World Peace will surely crown the world. The year 2500 (a.d. 1956) will see the rise of Buddhism, and we must start now by preaching in America …’ The wheel has turned a full circle and now the Marco Polos and the Francis Xaviers of the Orient set out for the Hang-chow of the West, on Manhattan Island.

That night, I dealt with the sleeping problem more efficiently, tucking the mosquito net under the bedding so that it was under a continuous even strain all round. Shoulders, ankles and outsides of arms, where they might touch the net, were smeared with insect-repellent cream, which I now used for the first time. A few baffled cockroaches soon appeared, silhouetted like coracles on the outside of the net, but after mooching about for a while they went away. Rats rustled behind the shrine and ran squeaking along the timbers. From all quarters of the night horizon came the muffled hallooing of owls. In pleasant anticipation of the next day’s journey, I fell asleep.

But the next day brought no hope of leaving Lashio. At the market we learned that the only movement signalled was the return of a lorry to Mandalay. The trouble was that there was nobody who could be approached for definite information, no set point of departure. If a driver got a load, he was likely to move off at short notice, and only those who hung about the market continually could be sure of a seat. Then again an owner might announce his intention of going to a town on my route, and then for any one of a number of reasons, suddenly change his mind, and go off in the other direction. This happened in the case of an Indian who had to make the run to Nam Hkam at some time, to pick up some goods there. But there was a rumour that the Chinese bandits had cut the road; so he said, with a kind of jellied smile, that the Nam Hkam trip could wait for another day. The only offer I got that day
was of a ride on a bullock-cart going to Mong Pang, about twenty miles along the road. I was warned that although Burmese bullock-carts are a rather more rapid form of transport than one would imagine, this journey might take two days.

At this moment the market was full of rumours. Without particular excitement the knowledgeable hangers-on who foregathered there spoke of heavy fighting to the south, where a Chinese Nationalist division had been split up by Burmese forces, supported by planes. To lend colour to this account, we had at one time, with the stirring of the breeze, heard a distant thudding which might have been the sound of falling bombs. The incident on the Mandalay road came back to us in thunderous and distorted echoes of slaughter, rapine and destroyed convoys. More
ominous
was the fact that the post-lorry from Nam Hkam was long overdue, and it was generally assumed that the driver and guard were lying somewhere in a ditch, with their throats cut. Merchants are most phlegmatic and enterprising people, but it was clear that their present attitude to journeyings was tinged with unwonted caution. Into such a state had Burma, and indeed most of South-East Asia fallen! Travel had become almost as slow as in the days of Marco Polo, and probably more hazardous. Certainly the security of the roads under the Mongols’ dominion, when the Venetians made their great Eastern journey, was much superior to that of twentieth-century Burma.

And now as the days passed a pattern of life in Lashio began to evolve. There were the hours immediately following the dawn, when the town emerged from mist like the image on a photographic plate, and when I was now permitted to assist the youngest brother in the serious passage with the watering-can from plant to plant. Then would follow the morning walk down to the market to interrogate drivers on their
intentions
, followed by a ritual drinking of tea, with its accompanying saffron-cake, undesired but bought out of decency because plain tea was always free of charge. Before midday a shower bath was taken in a shed in the garden. I was attended by the youngest brother, who brought the pitchers of water. At this point I learned the prim Burmese method of bathing with longyi in position and then releasing the knot in the wet
longyi and stepping out of it when the dry one was in position over it. Such douchings were frequent and obligatory. The Burmese bathe as often as possible, and also use water for their most intimate sanitary toilet, relating as a cautionary tale the fate of one of their kings who, because in his immediately previous incarnation he had been an ogre, scorned these matters of hygienic routine and was in consequence deserted by his principal queen.

At high noon we would relax on the balcony before glasses of lemonade, while a sporadic snow of white butterflies drifted across the now sharply defined landscape. This was the time for the collections of snapshots to be produced, and on looking through them I felt that the camera had confirmed, perhaps more convincingly than anything before, the brotherhood of mankind. There were Burmese parties on a social outing to the pagoda, just as Europeans might visit a roadhouse. The halt on the way to be photographed against the blurred background of a waterfall, the girls in the group holding their heads at studied angles, their mouths set in the rictus of the film-star smile. And then there were records of more intimate occasions, such as the canoeing trip with the pretty Shan lady, a shorthand typist, by whom ‘pleasant expectations were aroused, but with vain outcome’. A Sawbwa’s daughter, whose face contained a suggestion of the forceful characteristics of Edda Mussolini, seemed to have been kinder, since Tin Maung’s lips were pursed at the memory – so much so that I almost expected a whistle to issue from them.

In the afternoon I would take up a book, while Tin Maung dismantled the wireless set and prepared it with dexterous tuning for the evening tussle with Radio Toulouse. The evening meal was taken in one of the Chinese restaurants, the opium-smoking and non-serious one being virtuously avoided; on our return, U Thein Zan would be ready with a homily. In a moment of mild exasperation Tin Maung gave away the reason for the present phase of religious fervour. ‘It is time now that the old man should die. If he should continue too much longer in this existence all the monetary resources will be vanished away.’ U Thein Zan’s face cracked into a crestfallen smile. It seemed that he had recently
fallen into his old vice of gambling, and having staked heavy sums as an outcome of a fatal blunder in the calculation of his horoscope, his losses had been tremendous. ‘You should die, old man. You should die,’ said Tin Maung relentlessly; a verdict with which U Thein Zan seemed, humbly enough, to agree.