The Lady and the Peacock (70 page)

26
. The last occasion when Burmese affairs had been strongly featured in the British press: Norman Lewis,
Golden Earth
, p.22.

27
. His delusions did not last long. They were “stripped away: ibid., p.22.

PART THREE, CHAPTER 2: THE GANG OF FIVE

1
. I soon hated my new school and till well into adulthood would avoid going anywhere near it: from
Bungalows,
bageechas
and the
babalog, in
Remembered Childhood—Essays in Honor of Andre Beteille
, eds. Malavika Karlekar and Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Oxford University Press New Delhi, 2009.

2
. Delhi, characterized by much heat and disorder: Harriet O'Brien,
Forgotten Land
, p.57.

3
. Her mother was shrewd, funny and generous: quoted in Edward Klein, “The Lady Triumphs” in
Vanity Fair
, October 1995.

4
. She also met his daughter Indira, shortly to become prime minister herself, and her sons Sanjay and Rajiv: when Suu was visited in Rangoon by India's Foreign Secretary, Nirupama Rao, in June 2011, Suu recalled her friendship with Rajiv Gandhi and asked Ms. Rao to pass on her greetings to his widow, Sonia Gandhi.

5
. always full of good gossip about the latest political intrigues which she dispatched with much wit and humor: ibid., pp.58–9.

6
. In Delhi Suu learned, at an impressionable age, the ways of “the argumentative Indian”: the title of a book (pub. 2005) by Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning Bengali economist.

7
. Both in their different ways had a world outlook: quoted in Aung San Suu Kyi,
Freedom from Fear
, p.116.

8
. In Delhi Suu was discovering the great cry of freedom, written in English, of Rabindranath Tagore: these lines from the poem “Walk Alone” by Tagore were quoted by Suu in her address to the University of Natal on April 23, 1997, on being given the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. The address was read in her place by Michael Aris. “Many of [his] verses,” she wrote, “even in unsatisfactory translation, reach out to that innermost, elusive land of the spirit that we are not always capable of exploring by ourselves.”

PART THREE, CHAPTER 3: AN EXOTIC AT ST. HUGH'S

1
. I was really annoyed!: interview with author.

2
. Every male who met Suu had a little bit of a crush on her: interview with author.

3
. She had strong views about her country, and about right and wrong: interview with author, London, 2010.

4
. We got to know each other in Oxford, as freshwomen at St. Hugh's College, in 1964: Ann Pasternak Slater, “Suu Burmese,” published in Aung San Suu Kyi,
Freedom from Fear
, pp.292–300.

5
. When I first got to know her as a student I can remember her talking very proudly about her father: interview with author, Oxford, 2010.

6
. my mother, who was another foreign oddity: Lydia Pasternak Slater, chemist, translator and poet and the youngest sister of Boris Pasternak.

7
. four years after the Lady Chatterley trial and two years after the Beatles' first LP: “Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me)—/ Between the end
of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles' first LP” from “Annus Mirabilis” by Philip Larkin.
Lady Chatterley's Lover
by D. H. Lawrence was first published by Penguin Books in 1960, more than thirty years after its original publication in Italy: its exculpation under Britain's new Obscene Publications Act on grounds of literary merit was a major cultural event.

8
. “When we first arrived,” Pasternak Slater's memoir continued: in
Freedom from Fear
, p.293.

9
. he carried around one of the works of John Ruskin, and his social philosophy was based as much on primitive English socialism as on anything suggested by the Vedas:
Unto This Last
by Ruskin had a dramatic impact on Gandhi's social philosophy; he carried a copy of the book with him at all times, and in 1908 he translated it into his mother tongue, Gujarati.

10
. Aung San Suu Kyi was, briefly, a pupil of mine when she was reading for the honors school of PPE: Mary Warnock in a review of
The Voice of Hope
, in the
Observer Review
, May 25, 1997.

11
. She was curious to experience the European and the alien: Pasternak Slater in
Freedom from Fear
, p.294.

12
. Suu set out, a determined solitary figure in the early morning haze: ibid., p.295.

13
. She was curious to know what it was like: Pasternak Slater in
Freedom from Fear
, p.295.

14
. She was more comfortable with Indians than with Brits to begin with: interview with author.

15
. It wasn't a romance. It was an utterly genuine friendship: interview with author.

16
. Suu “was much more interested in getting to meet Algerians and in what was happening in the country than in the many parties to which she was invited”: Ma Than É, “A Flowering of the Spirit: Memories of Suu and her Family” in Aung San Suu Kyi,
Freedom from Fear
, pp.275–91.

17
. She didn't want to be doing PPE: interview with author.

18
. He was in Queen's College. We knew each other but were not chums: interview with author.

19
. One university friend mentioned that she was still talking about him “at least a year after she left Oxford”: private information.

20
. Some of her Indian friends did not approve of Hyder. “He was a bit of a sleazeball,” said one: university friend of Suu who requested anonymity.

21
. She would discuss these things with me when she came to Burma: interview with author.

22
. Aung Gyi had been a subordinate of Ne Win's in the 4th Burma Rifles during the war: cf. Michael Charney,
History of Modern Burma
, pp.120–1.

23
. The only reliable classes were those who contributed to the material needs of society, such as the peasants and the industrial workers: ibid., p.122.

24
. in a letter written years later: private information.

PART THREE, CHAPTER 4: CHOICES

1
. Her Oxford friend Ann Pasternak Slater worried for her: Ann Pasternak Slater, “Suu Burmese” in Aung San Suu Kyi,
Freedom from Fear
, p.295.

2
. “She called me Di Di,” she remembered—the affectionate Indian equivalent of “aunty”: author interview with Lady Gore-Booth, and quotes from documentary
Aung San Suu Kyi—Lady of No Fear
.

3
. From a diplomatic point of view, we should have said “Go”: interview with author.

4
. He and his identical twin brother, Anthony, were born in Havana, the sons of an English father, John Aris, and a French-Canadian beauty, Josette Vaillancourt, whom he fell in love with and married while working as ADC to the Governor General of Canada, Lord Tweedsmuir (better known as the thriller writer John Buchan): thanks to Lucinda Phillips for details about her family.

5
. He was smitten from the word go: Anthony Aris, interview with the author

6
. as Norman Lewis put it, “through failure to spend a token period as a novice in a Buddhist monastery, the foreigner has never quite qualified as a human being”: Lewis,
Golden Earth
.

7
. While he was still at Durham: interview with author.

8
. “Getting to and from New York University meant a long bus ride,” Ma Than É wrote: Than É, “A Flowering of the Spirit” in Aung San Suu Kyi,
Freedom from Fear
, p.284.

9
. “I see myself as a trier,” Suu told Alan Clements: Alan Clements,
Aung San Suu Kyi, The Voice of Hope
, p.33.

10
. A more believable explanation is that, within those few weeks, Suu discovered that Professor Trager was on friendly terms with high officials in the Ne Win regime: the true reason why Suu dropped out of Frank Trager's course was one of several questions I gave to Suu, in writing, during our meeting at her party's headquarters in March 2011, but she declined to answer them. A future biographer may be more lucky. Trager's friendship with Ne Win cronies is mentioned by Robert Taylor in “Finding the politics in Myanmar” in
Southeast Asian Affairs
, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, June 2008.

11
. U Thant “saw no reason why I should not go wherever I wished”: Norman Lewis,
Golden Earth
, p.33.

12
. U Thant said that the railway service from Rangoon to Mandalay was working: ibid., p.23.

13
. “Thant's dream,” wrote his grandson, Thant Myint-U, “had been to become a civil servant in the British Burma administration.”: Than Myint-U,
The River of Lost Footsteps
, p.271. Much of the detail in this chapter is culled from this work.

14
. “in real life no less dreadful than it sounds” according to Thant Myint-U: ibid., p.333.

15
. a rambling seven-bedroom red-brick house: ibid., p.38.

16
. “U Thant and his family would be warmly welcoming,” Ma Than É remembered: quoted in Aung San Suu Kyi,
Freedom from Fear
, p.285.

17
. We liked him and his wife and children: ibid.

18
. “Some members of the [Burmese] delegation had said they would like to meet us, she wrote: ibid., p.286.

19
. Suu's calm and composure were for me very reassuring: ibid.

20
. Soon afterwards she was writing to thank her brother-in-law-to-be: private information.

21
. Suu made a choice. She decided that a husband and children would be greatly preferable
to a career in the UN, however brilliant it was promising to be: Aung San Suu Kyi,
Freedom from Fear
, pp.286–7.

22
. With six months' more hard slog in a city she had learned to dislike: private information

23
. Recently I read again the 187 letters she sent to me in Bhutan from New York: Michael Aris, Introduction in
Freedom from Fear
, p.xix.

PART THREE, CHAPTER 5: HEROES AND TRAITORS

1
. It was a lovely ceremony: quoted on
Aung San Suu Kyi—Lady of No Fear
video.

2
. the World's End and Gandalf's Garden: the World's End, a section of Chelsea close to the Gore-Booths' home, named after a local pub called the World's End, became one of the centers of London hippy culture in the 1960s and 1970s and home to an influential boutique called Granny Takes a Trip. Gandalf's Garden, named after the wizard in the Tolkien trilogy,
The Lord of the Rings
, was the home of a mystical community of that name which ran a shop in the World's End and published a magazine of the same name.

3
. serious, sad, uncertain: Pasternak Slater in Aung San Suu Kyi,
Freedom from Fear
, p.295.

4
. the local cuisine, in which pork fat and chilies played a dominant role, was largely inedible, she confided to a friend in Rangoon: recorded in Ma Thanegi's diaries.

5
. she left 54 University Avenue once a year, for an annual medical check-up: Ma Thanegi's diaries.

6
. “Never before,” wrote Thant Myint-U, “had a call for the overthrow of a UN member state government been made from inside the UN”: Thant Myint-U,
The River of Lost Footsteps
, p.311.

7
. The Buddhist funeral service went as planned: ibid., p.313.

8
. We put the coffin on a truck and thousands and thousands of us marched towards Rangoon University campus: interview with author in Rangoon, March 2011.

9
. placed on a dais in the middle of the dilapidated Convention Hall, ceiling fans whirring overhead in the stifling heat: Thant Myint-U,
The River of Lost Footsteps
, p.313.

10
. We took it to the site of the students' union building: former activist interviewed in Rangoon, March 2011, on condition of anonymity.

11
. At about six that morning we were woken up at our hotel by a phone call: Thant Myint-U,
The River of Lost Footsteps,
pp.314–15.

12
. “The abiding image I have of the U Thant riots,” wrote Harriet O'Brien: O'Brien,
Forgotten Land
, p.223.

13
. officials of the government called Suu in and asked her if she planned to get involved in “anti-government activities”: Aung San Suu Kyi, “Belief in Burma's future” in
Independent
, September 12, 1988.

14
. “Uncle, I've heard that these days you are mostly looking after your grandchildren,” she told him chidingly: Kyaw Zaw,
My Memoirs: From Hsai Su to Meng Hai
, Duwun Publishing, 2007. I am grateful to Dr. Maung Zarni for drawing my attention to this anecdote and translating it from Burmese.

15
. a pretty but impractical house: Pasternak Slater in Aung San Suu Kyi,
Freedom from Fear
, p.296.

16
. Memories of that time are still sunlit but with a sense of strain: ibid.

17
. When I called in the afternoons with my own baby daughter: interview with author.

18
. “Michael and Suu complemented each other, it was a marriage made in heaven,” said Peter Carey: quoted in documentary
Aung San Suu Kyi—Lady of No Fear
.

19
. “It was actually her husband Michael who I got to know first,” Noriko said: there are two sources for Ms. Ohtsu's reminiscences in this chapter: a written account of her friendship with Suu, first published in the Japanese monthly magazine
Sansara
in November 1994, translated into English by the author and Junko Nakayama; and an interview with the author in Oxford in 2009.