The Lady and the Peacock (38 page)

But few romantic stories are quite as enchanted as they appear, and there is none without its shadow. The ceremony was a gracious nod to Suu's roots and Michael's fascination with Buddhism, but there were absences that were ominous given Suu's stature as the Bogyoke's only daughter. The Burmese ambassador did not show up: The froideur between Suu and the Ne Win regime was now official. More upsettingly, nor did Suu's brother or mother. Despite the evocative ceremony and the reception at the Hyde Park Hotel afterwards laid on by her generous guardians, it was more like the wedding of an orphan than Burma's most honored child.

There is no doubting the strength of the love that Suu and Michael Aris felt for each other: There is a gleam in Suu's eyes in the photographs taken in the early years of their marriage that we have not seen before. Gone is the blank correctness of her expression when she was an Oxford student visiting her mother in Delhi, the air of gloomy abstraction she wore in New York, “serious, sad, uncertain” in the words of Ann Pasternak Slater.
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In a photograph taken in 1973 during their first visit to Burma together, Suu glows in a way that is quite new. She and Michael are pressed together on the floor in a room washed with sunshine, both dressed in white, gazing at the camera. Michael appears dazed with happiness, Suu looks
practically beatific. In a photograph taken the same year in Nepal, she cradles her baby boy Alexander and beams open-mouthed at the camera from under her fringe, showing her sparkling teeth, and looking more like a Burmese Audrey Hepburn than one would think possible.

Suu and baby Alexander.

They look like the perfect modern couple: Buddhist to a degree—both steeped in its ideas and ceremonies and art works—but never in thrall to superstition, unmistakably secular, late-twentieth century young people, their differences of race and upbringing dissolved in the hot sun of their love for one another; the conventional expectations of an older generation—settling down, finding a career—rendered irrelevant by the wonderful prospect of setting off together on a great adventure. And the adventures really happened: A year in Thimphu, where hardly any foreigners had spent even a fortnight; the best part of another year in Nepal, tiny baby in tow, with side-trips to Burma; later long trips to Japan, to the Indian Himalayas.

That's the bright side of the picture. What of the shady side?

It is the story of many a modern woman who finds herself in what turns out to be, almost by default, a rather traditional marriage—often despite the best and most enlightened intentions of both partners.

Since they had first met in Chelsea, Michael had got his lucky break and run with it: He had spent nearly five years immersed in the language, culture and history of Bhutan and Tibet. Those years were to be as fundamental to his future career as the voyage on the
Beagle
was for Charles Darwin. From now on, no one in Tibet studies would get away with calling him a dabbler.

And Suu? She had taken a mediocre degree, done a little part-time tutoring and a little temporary research work, obtained a postgraduate position in New York which she abandoned weeks later; and then had used her name and connections to get a semi-menial job in the United Nations, from which she resigned after three years to get married. She was the proud daughter of a great man but had achieved next to nothing on her own account—and, more disturbingly, did not seem to have a compass of her own. Unable to forget who she was, she had attached ferocious conditions to her marriage “. . . should my people need me . . .”—but in the meantime she was that unfortunate creature: a trailing spouse.

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They flew off to Bhutan, where Michael, now thoroughly at home, continued as tutor to the royal family while deepening his knowledge of all things Bhutanese. During his free time they trekked through the kingdom's vertiginous valleys, sometimes on foot, sometimes on ponyback; at least once they were obliged to ride on the roof of a lorry, and snacked on the fruit of the Asian gooseberry trees they passed under.

For Michael it was the coda to his years of primary research: By the end of it he had enough material, he believed, to write the doctoral thesis that would be the next vital step in his career. For Suu, by contrast, it was an exotic interlude but not much more. The scenery was magnificent, though repetitive; the local cuisine, in which pork fat and chilies played a dominant role, was largely inedible, she confided to a friend in Rangoon—“we were hungry all the time,” she said.
⁴
In response to her appeals, her mother sent that eye-watering staple of Burmese cuisine, fried
balachaung
—pounded dried shrimp and fish paste deep-fried with sugar, chili and tamarind paste—packed in empty Horlicks bottles. On one occasion the package arrived but the bottle was cracked at the bottom; they debated whether they should throw it out because of glass shards but ended up eating it at a single sitting.

Keeping Suu company during Michael's frequent absences was a Himalayan terrier puppy called Puppy, a gift of the king's chief minister. Suu became extremely attached to her new pet. It accompanied them back to England, and was with them throughout the family's years together—a talisman of their togetherness, as cherished pets often are. When she learned that Puppy had finally died at an advanced age in her absence—word arrived while she was traveling around Burma in 1989, campaigning for her party—the news broke her heart.

Suu with Michael's siblings and brother-in-law, plus dog. They all struck up a warm relationship with the family's new member.

Suu and Michael in Bhutan with their new puppy, forever to be known as Puppy, to which Suu became very attached.

Bhutan joined the United Nations while Suu and Michael were in residence, and Suu advised the kingdom's minuscule Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the mysterious ways of that body. She also taught English to a class of royal bodyguards, but her fierce efforts to keep order reduced them, by her own admission, to cowering shadows of their normal hulking selves. Michael learned to drive on Thimphu's almost empty roads, but his attempts to pass on his new skills to Suu were not a success. Then in August, eight months after their arrival, Suu discovered she was pregnant, and they decided to go home.

By Christmas they were back in London. Michael wanted to write a doctoral thesis at SOAS on the early history of Bhutan, based on what he had learned during his years of residence there; his supervisor was to be the man who was already his mentor in Tibetan studies, Hugh Richardson. With Michael's family's help they bought a tiny flat in Brompton, not far from the Gore-Booths, and on April 12, 1973, Suu's first son Alexander was born.

Suu with Hugh Richardson, Michael Aris's mentor in Tibetan studies and the last British resident in Lhasa before the Chinese invasion. In 1981, after his death, Suu and Michael co-edited a volume of essays in his memory.

As any parent knows, the first year of a child's life is a unique time when many things are possible that become unthinkable afterwards, and within a few weeks of Alexander's birth Michael and Suu were heading back to Asia with their baby. Word of Michael's special expertise was getting around the world of Tibetologists, and he had been asked to lead an expedition to Kutang and Nubri, two remote areas in northern Nepal having much in common culturally with Bhutan. They were away from Europe for nearly a year.

Probably more significant for Suu were the two visits they paid to Rangoon during that period, the first one to introduce Alexander to his grandmother. If the couple were anxious about what sort of reception to expect from Daw Khin Kyi, they were to be relieved: Despite her earlier misgivings, she decided that she was well satisfied with this genial and learned young man. “She was very pleased with him,” wrote Suu's former personal assistant Ma Thanegi in her diary. One thing she appreciated were his old-fashioned English manners. “When Suu was out somewhere, Michael would not touch his food until she returned,” she went on. “Once when Michael was out, Suu was so hungry she wanted to sit down to eat right away. Her mother reminded her gently that
he
always waited for
her
. So she felt she had to wait, too.”

Suu, Michael and Alexander with Daw Khin Kyi, during their first visit to Burma after the wedding. Despite her initial doubts about Suu marrying an Englishman, Daw Khin Kyi got on well with Michael.

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Daw Khin Kyi must have been glad of their company, because her life since her retirement from Delhi in 1967 had become one of almost total seclusion: She left 54 University Avenue once a year, for an annual medical check-up, but otherwise remained there all the time.
⁵

She did not live like a hermit: She had always been a generous and amusing host, and intellectuals, former politicians, disgraced army
officers and foreign diplomats streamed through her living room, avid for the latest gossip about who was in and who was out, who up and who down. But she gave no ground in the silent war she waged with the tyrant across the lake.

Both Daw Khin Kyi's resistance and her reticence—her refusal to give an inch to the regime, while at the same time declining, hedgehog-like, to expose herself to any sort of attack—indicate a deep understanding of the pitiless nature of the political game as played in her country, and as mastered by Ne Win. In this game, the illustriousness of an opponent was not a reason for holding back, but on the contrary a reason to attack with every weapon that came to hand until victory was total. The most flagrant example of this was the way Ne Win humiliated the corpse of U Thant, a few months after Michael and Suu's second visit.