The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (32 page)

At the district court my great-grandmother won hands down, both the original case and the new one for the alleged loan. She was set to receive a sizable amount of money. But Shwe Khin’s widow appealed to the High Court in Rangoon and there, apparently by the bribing of a corrupt judge, everything was lost. My great-grandmother was left with almost nothing and with the expensive legal fees coming on top of the rest. She was forced to sell the land and all but one of the houses, the gardens with the mango trees, and even some personal possessions.

Up until this time Thant had lived a happy and comfortable life. He was an avid swimmer and in the past couple of years had taken a strong interest in English books and magazines, enlivening his classmates after school with tales of Stanley’s search for Livingstone in the remote African jungle. When his father died, he was fourteen, and he made his first journey to Rangoon the following year (to go with his mother to the High Court), the very same time the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII) was visiting as well; Thant saw the royal party making its way down one of the main thoroughfares of the colonial city. Edward was then accompanied by his cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten, later the viceroy of India. Few could have then imagined that Lord Mountbatten and the boy on the street from Pantanaw would meet decades later, both as international statesmen, in a skyscraper along New York’s East River.

Thant’s dream, what he talked to his father about, had been to become a civil servant in the British Burma administration. He wanted nothing more than to graduate from university and sit for the elite Indian Civil Service exams. But now there was no way. He had his little brothers and his mother to think about and four years at university was too long to be away; it was important that he find a job more quickly to support them. He decided to go only for a two-year intermediate course at Rangoon University. It wouldn’t meet the requirements for senior government service, but it would be enough to pursue his new ambition, to become a journalist. He thought it was the right thing to do.

Thant was a serious student at university. His classmates remember him as “studious, quiet, tidy and neat but not expensively dressed.” He had few very close friends but was generally outgoing and well liked; he was elected secretary of the University Philosophical Association and the Literary and Debating Society. He also began to write many articles and letters to local newspapers, including nineteen on the Simon Commission then investigating India’s constitutional future. Influenced by his father, he was critical of colonialism but was equally critical of mindless anticolonial rhetoric, reserving his harshest judgment for those self-styled nationalists who he thought shied away from any real debate and were instead happy simply to blame the British for all of the country’s ills.
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It was at university that Thant first met John Sydenham Furnivall, a onetime colonial officer turned anthropologist, who had left government to teach and write and encourage a generation of young Burmese students. He was to write seminal books on colonial Burma and Indonesia and introduced to the world the concept of a plural society (with Burma as the archetype), a society where different communities with different religions, cultures, and languages live side by side, but separately and in the same political unit.
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He had a modernizing vision of Burma and knew the country intimately, being fluent in Burmese and having served long years touring hundreds of villages as a district officer in the 1890s and 1900s. He was probably considered an oddball by many of the other Europeans in Rangoon, being as interested as he was in the country and its history; in the late 1920s, in addition to lecturing at the university, he had set up his Burma Book Club. Thant was one of the club’s main patrons and contributed often to the bimonthly magazine
The World of Books
, founded by Furnivall with one of Thant’s younger brothers. Another of Furnivall’s students was Thant’s good friend Nu, who was to become the first prime minister of independent Burma.

Furnivall encouraged Thant to continue at university and compete in the civil service exams and said he would help make sure he received a good posting. Thant may have been tempted, but felt too strongly his responsibilities at home. He was also increasingly interested in pursuing writing as a career and thought he could do this from anywhere. And so, at the ripe old age of nineteen, Thant returned home and landed a position as senior master at the local national school.

The next many years were spent back at Pantanaw, in his family’s old teak house under the shade of the big tamarind tree. New books were added to his father’s library—Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski and H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell—and evenings were spent reading by candlelight, usually after a postprandial game of billiards at a house nearby. At age twenty-four, Thant won a nationwide Secondary Teachership Exam, and was made the youngest headmaster in the country. In second place was another denizen of Pantanaw, his own former English teacher K. Battacharya, a Bengali with a strong passion for Russian literature. He had introduced Thant and his other prize students to Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gogol and was delighted to hear of his protégé’s success. By chance, Thant’s best friend, Nu, a few years older, was appointed the school’s superintendent.

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As a young writer in his twenties, my grandfather chose the pen name Thilawa, after a fourteenth-century swashbuckling nobleman best remembered for having laughed only three times in his life,
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perhaps not for Thilawa’s violent successes but for his reputation as a man of few words and calm disposition. Thant was apparently attracted to serious and somber men as opposed to the rowdy and colorful Burmese politicians who were making their names in those days. While some young Burmese looked up to Mussolini or Chiang Kai-shek, Thant’s personal favorite was Sir Stafford Cripps, the severe and humorless Socialist lawyer and safe pair of hands, the man who would one day head last-minute diplomatic efforts leading up to Indian independence. It was an interesting choice of role model for a small-town Burmese headmaster.

He worked diligently to be a good teacher and taught history and English, his two subjects at university. His school was a so-called national school. It was different from the few government schools paid for by the British Burma administration and the private schools run by missionaries. The national schools were an outgrowth of protests in the early 1920s against colonial education policies; they received only minimal official funding and depended heavily on voluntary support. Their aim was to provide boys and girls with well-rounded educations and to instill in them a sense of pride in Burma and being Burmese. The Pantanaw National School was one of the few still surviving in the
early 1930s, with about three hundred students in all, many of whom were too poor to pay any fees. Thant started out with a very modest salary of 175 rupees a month, and from this would routinely donate at least 40 or 50 rupees toward the upkeep of the school.

His wish to be a good teacher was more than matched by his desire to follow a career as a journalist. He wrote for his father’s old paper
The Sun
and an English-language journal titled
New Burma
as well as a number of Burmese-language magazines. In Furnivall’s
The World of Books
, he wrote a monthly editorial as well as an occasional column entitled “From My School Window.” From the verandah of his wooden house, with wild orchids all around, set a few yards back from a wide dirt road and surrounded by the smells and sounds of the Irrawaddy Delta, he tried to connect to the wider world. He became the first Burmese member of the British Left Book Club and was proud of owning all the published works of Cripps as well as John Strachey, the Webbs, and George Orwell. He also wrote several books, the first being a translation of
The Story of the League of Nations—Told for Young People.

It was a happy time, and in November 1934 he married my grandmother, Thein Tin, whom he had met two years before. The only daughter of a small-town lawyer, she was originally from Tada-U, near Mandalay. When her father died, she and her mother moved to Pantanaw, where they had relatives, and her mother became quite the successful businesswoman, owning and managing a very profitable cigarmaking firm. It had been a long and formal courtship, with my grandfather spending countless evenings with his future mother-in-law in a sort of yearlong interview. It was then that he picked up his cigarsmoking habit, becoming a chain-smoker until he was diagnosed with cancer at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital in 1973. His first son died in infancy (child mortality rates were and still are shockingly high), but he and his wife had two more children in the 1930s, a son (who also died, but much later in a traffic accident) and a daughter, my mother.

The year my grandfather was appointed headmaster was the same year that the Reichstag made Adolf Hitler dictator of Germany and the year that Japan withdrew from the League of Nations and launched its ferocious campaigns on the mainland of China. In America, Franklin D. Roosevelt had just succeeded Herbert Hoover and was launching his New Deal to end the Great Depression. There were many signs of
the instability to come, but few would have guessed that the violence and upheaval would soon devastate Burma as well. The Depression was already wreaking havoc on the lives of farmers across the Irrawaddy Delta. Within a few years the little town of Pantanaw itself would be burned to the ground and its people forced out as refugees, many never to return. Burma was ill prepared for what lay ahead.

NO MORE ROADS TO MANDALAY

The house was not difficult to find. It was a very large, rambling brick house in the pukka English style of the 1920s and 1930s, and the lawn was overgrown, the small side entrance to the compound almost entirely covered by long grass and weeds. A woman was bathing near a well in the back, a darkly colored sarong wrapped around her shoulders. A few big geese were feeding nearby. Just on the pavement outside, an old vendor sold bananas, and across the street a brand-new Chinese temple in bright yellow was being built, bamboo scaffolding propped up against the newly painted walls. It was the house of His Royal Highness Hteiktin Taw Hpaya, the eldest grandson of King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat and heir to the Konbaung throne, and I had come up from Mandalay to visit on Boxing Day 1997. Dressed comfortably for home in a pair of gray trousers and a red and black lumberjack flannel shirt, the prince warmly ushered me to a reception area just inside. A young, neatly dressed woman silently appeared with a tray of tea and biscuits.

We spoke for much of the afternoon. The prince was very charming and friendly, with a ready smile and a cheerfulness that made him seem much younger than his seventy-two years. He spoke with an old-fashioned British India accent and had been living here in Maymyo for much of his life at this house on Forest Road. Maymyo is a former British hill station, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive up a winding road from Mandalay, the place where European officials and their wives retreated during the hot months of March and April and tried to re-create what they could of home. It’s named after a Colonel May of the Fifth Bengal Infantry (
myo
means “town” in Burmese). It was always cool, even cold at night, and in this pretend facsimile of English summer weather (without the clouds or the rain) the British had built mock Tudor
homes and a beautifully landscaped botanical garden, in large part the handiwork of Turkish prisoners during the First World War. There were (and are) fields of strawberries and gardens of larkspur, hollyhock, and petunia and houses with names like Fairview and Primrose Cottage. The old chummery, or bachelor residence, of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation is today a hotel, still with a huge fireplace and hot baths and less than tempting roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. The main street is like something out of a Wild West film except for all the people in sarongs, with horse-drawn carriages and wooden shopfronts and the big Purcell Clock Tower at the very center. Though the British have all left, many others who came in their wake remain, including a strong Gurkha community, descendants of old Indian Army soldiers who decided to make this their new home.

The prince was familiar with people calling on him to discuss his grandparents, the events of the 1880s, and the fate of the royal family. He didn’t seem at all displeased to talk about these things and instead energetically waded into different topics. He said that his family had wanted to repatriate Thibaw’s remains from India to Burma after independence, but the British embassy had intervened and made sure it did not happen. They were afraid, he said, that it would inflame anti-British feeling.

The prince was keen in his relaxed way to explain how important the royal family still was in the hearts of the Burmese people. He recounted a story from the 1960s or 1970s when he had been asked by the army to appear at an anti-Communist rally in Shwebo, the capital of his ancestor Alaungpaya, only never to be asked again to appear in public after the strength of popular feeling that had been shown that day. He was a man strangely dislocated, in his own country yet from an entirely different Burma, both the Burma of royal times and the British Burma of his boarding school years. When he saw how interested I was to talk about the old dynasty and court, he gained an energy, a brightness.