IN SEARCH OF RUBIES
Published in Emanations, November 2018 I stood at the window of the hotel for a long time, staring at the full moon. I was in Yangon! The unreality of the moment was breathtaking. How does a woman from Kathmandu find herself alone in Yangon, traveling across South East Asia, with the express purpose to write a book? The statistical impossibility of such an event made me pause. If I had been an European or American traveler, I may have seen that moment as a little adventurous, perhaps exciting, but nothing too much of the ordinary. After all, people like me would have done it a thousand times before. Almost all documented explorers, travelers and travel writers are white males (and sometimes females), and thousands, perhaps millions, of them travel to Yangon all the time. A man from my well-educated Brahmin community could find himself in Yangon, and perceive it as a little out of the normal course of the path of achievement prescribed for him, but nothing drastically out of