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 the way.
A woman who
grew up in a secluded family in Kathmandu, however, has perhaps one in a
million chance to make it to Yangon. How many of my brethen had made it out
here, under the full moon, to appreciate the clamor of Yangon at dusk? I would
hazard a guess that I may be the first traveler of my ilk to stare down at the
Sule Pagoda. I didn’t have to go to the moon. This was already on the scale of
a lunar journey for me.
In the clamor of dusk, near the Sule
Pagoda, buses slide by in endless procession—old, beaten up buses, the kind you
see in India and Nepal. Below me on the wide pavement, young boys sell small chat-like salad snacks that taste like bitter mud mixed with peanuts and
tomatoes. I know how it tastes because I just ordered a plate half an hour ago.
Two spoonfuls are hard to swallow. I’ve never had this much difficulty eating
food. Is this what the people of Yangon eat on a daily basis?
I look around me. The tiny kintergarten
sized tables with baby-sized plastic stools in bright primary colors, four to
five at one table, are filled with middle class people, enjoying their evening
meal. I am not at the bus-stand with weary travelers from villages. I am in the
middle of the city, in the thick of life, tasting the bitter taste of Myanmar.
I see an older woman sitting under a tree
growing in the middle of the pavement now. She appears to be staring at me. She
has white hair and looks like a ghost, sitting underneath a small tuft of
greenery. She gets up and bends down to cross the twelve-inch elevation of the
pavement—stooping, she grabs the kindergarten table, then descends. Before I
know it, she’s in front of me, with that unmistakable gesture of supplication.
The brash young vendor who’s taken my order gives me my change. The notes are
soiled and falling apart, and taped in three or four places with cellophane.
The edges are ragged, like ancient papyrus. I want to get rid of them as fast
as possible. I give 200 kyats back to the vendor and make a “half” motion with
my hand, then gesture to the old woman and another elderly beggar who has
materialized before me. The vendor smiles approvingly. I drop 100 kyats into
the bags of each, wondering if 100 kyat is too much, or too little, to give.
It is getting to be dusk. I walk to the
Sule Pagoda, which is covered with scaffolding and what appears to be straw
while renovations take place. The scaffolding makes it look primitive, like an
archaeological excavation—not the soaring gold spire depicted in postcards and
travel guides. I pause at the entrance and hand over my other ragged 200 kyat
note to the jasmine garland girl. She looks at me and I see she has two strips
of white powder on her cheeks. Then she counts out my jasmine strands—a
veritable bouquet. The couple before me has just handed over 200 kyats, so I
don’t have to ask for the price. Already I know.
Unfortunately, I don’t follow the couple
closely enough. Lost in the fragrance of the jasmine, I am halfway up before I
see everyone is in bare feet. Thinking of lax Thai temples, where Addidas
wearing teen tourists walk up shod to the inner sanctums of sacred shrine Wat
Saket, I continue to walk up the last few remaining steps. I think, in my lassez
faire Nepali way, that there must be a place to
take off shoes at the top. How wrong I am!
A young woman in her twenties catches
sight of me. “Foreigner? Fee!” she says authoritatively. “Fee.” She marches me
towards a table, then somewhat in the same moment, she notices my leather
sandals.
“Shoes! Shoes!”
Alarmed, I back off. “I’ll go down and take it off,” I
suggest, but she has started to say, in a loud commanding voice: “NO! NO!” I
walk down the steps hastily. The girl attending shoes, who I hadn’t noticed
before, materializes from behind a pillar. “Donation?” she asks. From above,
the gatekeeper informs her: “She came up here with her shoes!” or the equivalent,
in Burmese. It is clear I have violated a sacred taboo. A loud hub-bub started
with two women sitting on the stairs joining in the chorus.
The shoe-keeper looks at me accusingly.
“She went up wearing her shoes?” she seemed to say, in confusion and feigned
outrage. She is at fault here for allowing me to walk up unnoticed. The
situation was spiraling out of control. I had committed some unforgivable
crime. Myanmar’s temple beaureaucrats were at the point of deciding on a
suitable punishment.
“Forget it,” I say, taking this
quintessential American expression out of my vocabulary in this moment of great
discord. I swing my jasmine in my hand as I march out to the loud murmur of
opprobation. I can hear the gatekeeper calling to me in a commanding voice, and
perhaps with a note of conciliation, as if she regretted scaring away a genuine
devotee. But I was already too shaken by the combined censure of the temple
guardians to return. So this, then, is the world, the tightly regulated world
of Myanmar, where one deviance quickly becomes an unforgivable error. This is
the world I’d be glad not to know too much about during my visit.
As I crossed the busy road, I felt
jarred. I didn’t like how that little encounter had gone. As I looked down from
my window onto the world below, I felt like I had made the right decision to
walk away. The Buddha’s spirit doesn’t reside in a place that is intolerant.
The Buddha’s statue might be up there, but the spirit that infuses life into
the image—all those Thai people reverently burning incense and offering white
lotus buds at Wat Saket come back to my mind’s eye—was missing in this giant
shrine.
In Thailand, the glitter and the
ostentatious displays had dismayed me. A few years earlier, in one of my first
visits to Thailand, I had walked through Wat Po as it went through its
renovations. The colored lacquer on the temples was hallucinatory. The golden
glitter was unbelievable. The laborers appeared tired as they slept in the
heat. I had been distressed. And as if to echo my distress, an Indian couple I
had met there had said: “Thailand’s temple tourism has become so commercial and
crass. Wait till you get to Burma. Its so unspoilt there.” And perhaps it was
those words that had stayed with me and taken me, finally, to my own
destination to Burma.
But here in Burma I realized how wrong I
had been. I had been blinded by the gold leaf and forgotten how extreme concern
for others, tolerance and compassion permeated every aspect of Thai life. Just
because they liked lavish displays didn’t mean they were not practicing
compassion and equilibrium of mind.
On the way back to my hotel, I stop at
the panwallah and ask for a pan. The very fact that there is an Indian-looking panwallah selling
betel leaf in Burma surprises me. I don’t know what I had expected Burma to be
like—perhaps more South East Asian, perhaps more like Thailand. What I hadn’t
expected it to look like was India from forty years ago. Yangon appeared to be
an older, poorer, more run-down version of Mumbai. It is as if Burma was an
extension of South Asia, a little bit of Nepal and India that had continued
upwards from Assam.
In a Hindi dialect, he asks me if I am
Indian.
“Nepali,” I answer.
“Pakistani?” he queries, as if he doesn’t
understand “Nepal.”
“Nepal,” I repeat. He hasn’t heard of Nepal. He rolls me a
tiny pan and won’t accept any charge.
I ask him, in my fumbling stumbling
Hindi, where he’s from. He says: “We are from right here.”
“But your ancestors were from India?”
“We are from right here.”
“Bangladesh!” I hazard a guess.
“No.” He laughs a little. “From right
here.” His wife, her head covered with black, nods. They are from right here.
And there was more than people who looked
the same as me to remind me that the subcontinent was present in Burma. The
hush in the immigration section of the airport reminded me of Kathmandu in the
80s—the hush of an omniscient state, the hush of officials who appeared
indifferent, detached, with the quietness of the constantly surveilled. Airport
immigration officials everywhere are not the friendliest of people, but there
was something else about these bureaucrats that frightened the passengers as
they clutched their passports and waited in line.
It reminded me again how fraught that
moment is, when you enter the border of a foreign country, and in this case,
the country happened to be Myanmar—with its own rules and regulations, its own
universe. Perhaps the people working in the airport may be nice middle class
bureaucrats who‘d be great fun to meet at a tea-shop, but right here right
now all I wanted to do was avoid eye-contact. It was clear that almost everyone
in the line felt somehow guilty, and we weren’t even sure what that crime was.
Perhaps for the group of Spanish going in to help poor children and who would
leave the country weeping, the crime would be to help the poor. For the
Scandinavian UN official over there holding out his blue passport, and looking
the poster boy of casual, it might be thinking liberal Western thoughts of
democracy. For me, I had a niggling sense that the video camera that I carried,
along with my plans to write a book, was somehow not sanctioned. Were writers persona
non grata in Burma? As I stood there in the airport
line, clutching my video camera, somehow I couldn’t remember if I was within
the bounds of legal behavior or not.
Of course, my double consciousness as a Third World citizen
also made me see from the bureaucrats’ eyes—how ridiculous some of the
Europeans appeared, tight groups of them holding on to their evangelical
contact numbers and with the breathless sense of urgency that somehow they were
saving all of Burma. It must be annoying, if you are a middle class Yangon
resident working a small but important job at the airport, to see all these
people descend upon your country with the express purpose of saving your
countrymen from you. I could imagine that the slight tone of sarcasm I note in
one bureaucrat’s voice originated from the weariness of this moment.
The woman who takes my passport takes a
look, then starts a causal chat with her colleague. It is just enough pressure
to get my paranoid imagination to start imagining freaky scenarios. But then
she writes something on the side of my visa, then stamps me in. In the gratitude
of the moment, I fail to see that she’s given me one month, not the three weeks
I think I have remaining since I got my visa a week ago at the Myanmar Embassy in Bangkok.
Waiting outside that line of men in
longyi, holding placards of various hotels, just like in Kathmandu. Except
these men look slightly less aggressive and desperate. Kathmandu’s madhouse
airport welcoming scene has become more aggressive by the day, as the free
economy welcomes tourists from all over in even more competitive ways. I spot
“Sushma Joshi” within two minutes. This is the first time I’ve seen my name on
a placard at the airport. It gives me a warm feeling. Usually I am the only
haggling with local taxidrivers or waiting for the bus as the Japanese
corporate salarymen and the Korean businessmen get zipped off in their
limousines.
The driver looks like a character out of
“Burmese Days.” He has a Chinese-looking face, with a slightly shy smile. There
is a certain obsequiousness to him that makes me uncomfortable. He tells me to
“wait!”, then vanishes to fetch the taxi. The tree down the road, a banyan,
makes me feel at home. I feel like I’ve just gone down to some provincial
outskirt of India, not a whole new country. Old beat-up taxis pick up foreign
tourists. The tourists, or should I say travelers? ( only a tourist with a
nefarious scheme up his sleeve would take a vacation in Myanmar), all look
shuttered, discreet—as if they didn’t spend the past few weeks reading at great
length about the repression and violence of an authoritarian military state.
Perhaps they are here to topple the military regime. On the other hand, they
could just as well be traveling to buy opium or steal some gems from the gem
market. One can hardly tell.
The sadness I felt as I zipped up the long
highway towards the center of the city was a complicated mixture of emotion.
The people looked reedy thin, ill-dressed and tired—a shocking contrast to the
buzzing cosmopolitan heart of Bangkok where food was laid out in every cart and
where cheap clothing lay piled up on sidewalks by the sackloads. At the same
time, a sense of nostalgia arose in me as I saw the smaller city of Yangon, and
saw in it the shadow of what my hometown Kathmandu used to be before two
decades of unregulated urban growth demolished it, turning it into a cancerous
modern city imploding from the inside out.
As we drove past a large, ornate and
glittering pagoda, the driver turned back, smiled, and said: “Shwedagon.” This
was the famous Shwedagon Pagoda that I had already heard about from many
sources. Oddly, the story that came back to me was the story from our program
advisor, a jolly Filipina lady in her sixties who had run our fellowship
program for many years. Her
bubbling laughter came back to my mind as we passed the pagoda. “We were at the
hotel near the Swedagon Pagoda! Oh my god! I can’t tell you how terrified I was
there during the nights we stayed there. I don’t know what it was, but I felt
like someone was watching me during the night. I woke up during the night and I
swear somebody was standing at the bottom of my bed, watching me. I couldn’t go
to sleep the whole night. People said to me the next morning: what happened to
you? You look white as a sheet!” I swear there was a ghost in that room that
night.”
“Maybe somebody from the state was watching you?” I suggest.
But she shakes her head adamantly. “It
was something otherworldy. A ghost. Something must have happened there in that
room.”
My Nepali colleague, whose academic
credentials included an impressive Ph.D in political science, had rolled her
eyes at me, as if she couldn’t believe the kind of conversation being initiated
by the director of our fellowship program. As for me, I was intrigued.
Definitely intrigued. “Tell me more about the ghost,” I said. The ghost story
was repeated once, then twice, with lots of jolly laughter. The story came back
to me as I passed the Pagoda. What was the ghostly presences stalking this
particular edifice? Tomorrow I would come to find out.
After about thirty minutes, we were by
the Sule Pagoda. Ko Mya Aye of the Grand Sule Hotel, a young man in his late
twenties, was very kind. “Oh, there is only one of you?” he asks, surprised.
“But you booked a double room.” “Yes, its only me,” I say. “I read on the
Internet that I should get the double room,” I hasten to justify my
extravagance and my lack of a partner.
A part of me, however, is secretly glad
to be alone. All the dramas of relationships are best left at home when you are
traveling light, with one bag and a computer, trying to write a book. On some
level, a boyfriend is extra luggage. Most times men are heavier than a
computer, and you have to drag them around with the same annoyance you feel at
the extra 20 kgs that you added onto your luggage at the last minute, and which
you wish you hadn’t. My experience of traveling with a man told me that the
best way to end a relationship is to travel together in tough situations in new
countries. If you last beyond the train ride on Mumbai, and the rickshaw ride in
Dhaka in July, then you are probably good to go. That’s where people should go
for honeymoons, for a quick reality check. If you fail those obstacle tests,
then your relationship will probably not last the test of time.
Of course there’s also the question of
whether any writing gets done while you are traveling with romantic luggage. My
prior experience told me that sex and romance are distractions which don’t work
very well with the writing schedule. Liz Gilbert of “Eat, Love, Pray” fame
abandons Felip alone in the Atlanta Hotel, drinking his beer by the poolside,
while she goes off to Vietnam to interview grandmothers. Writing takes time—it
is slow, careful, meticulous, laborious work done for hours and hours in the
dead of night. The first night, under the light of the one fluorescent bulb, I
wrote in my little notebook from 7pm to 10pm, with a 30 minute break for
dinner. I deducted thirty more minutes for Lonely Planet reading, tooth-brushing, moon-gazing, checking out of the bathroom
window to see there’s no people staring at me from the other building, turning
the TV on and off, et cetera. But that’s still two hours of continuous writing
that would surely have not been possible with another jet-lagged person
talking, arguing, TV channel flipping and initiating sex in the same room. Not
to mention all the paranoid theories we would no doubt have come up with about
the Burmese state and surveillance if there had been two people to inflate the
danger of the new surroundings.
But of course, no matter how
self-sufficient and how daring any traveler is, at the heart of it we all long
for a companion to share the beauty of the moon. Which is what I wished for, as I looked outside and saw
the stark circle of a large moon outside my window.
***
Money is strange in Burma. I hand over $60 and I get 51,000
Kyats in exchange.
This is still less than what I would get
in Indonesia, which goes into digits that is not in my usual counting range. A
million becomes a mundane unit. At certain moments in Bali, I became
disoriented and handed over 100,000 rupiah notes when I was supposed to hand
over 10,000. In Indonesia, there had been a feeling of reckless disorientation
as my dollars melted into million rupiah pools. I felt rich as Caesar. But in
Burma, the wads and wads of cash gave me another feeling altogether—a sense
that I was carrying around play money which I was handing out as if I was
playing Monopoly. The sense of unreality persisted throughout my trip. Perhaps
it was the wads and wads, all new, bound with the recycled paper band in the
middle, straight from the state printing press, which made me wonder if there
was some scam going on to insert new notes into the economy. It seems
foreigners all got crisp, fresh-off-the-press currency, while the regular
people had to make do with notes disintegrating into shreds of grime.
“It is 860 Kyats to the dollar,” Ko Mya
Aye says to me. “Shall I exchange it for you?” I have read it is better to
exchange at the hotel than outside with the moneychangers, so I say: “All
right.” The fat wad of notes he holds, smelling of new ink, looks unreal. He
carefully extracts half of the notes from an even bigger wad by just looking at
the beginning and end of the serial numbers, and hands it over to me. I look at
him, suspicious, uncertain. Are these real notes? Why does he have stacks and
stacks of them? Am I supposed to count the notes to make sure there are 51 of
them? He smiles at my discomfiture. Later I will realize the Burmese are
probably the most trustworthy people on the planet. Ko Mya Aye would never do
something so undignified as shortchange me during currency exchange.
The $30 I am paying for my room is
another matter. The hotel feels claustrophobic and small, and so does my room.
I feel overcharged. I’ve slept in far better deals in Bali, for instance, where
I had a giant room with a giant garden and an exquisite Balinese family tending
the gods every day. But Yangon is not Bali or Bangkok. Everything including
food, I realized, costs thrice as much as Bangkok, but the quality is thrice as
low. Anyways, I was not here to be a tourist.
Having said that, I took back my words
because my very next trip, the day after, happened to be to the Gems Museum.
Why was I obsessing about gems, you may ask. Well, to answer that question I’d
have to take you back to my trip to Bangkok and how I got scammed at the gems
market, a full year before.
So lets backtrack a bit, to 2009.
I had applied, and been accepted to, the
Ubud Readers’ and Writers Festival in Ubud, Bali. Unlike most people on the
planet who hold a passport that allows them to waltz through borders without
bothering with visas, I hold a passport for which each move has to be
calculated months in advance. In order for me to travel, I need a visa to
Indonesia stamped on my passport, unlike tourists from Western countries who
just show up and pay $25 for visa-on-arrival at the border. For this, I had to
travel to Bangkok, adding three extra days of accommodation, plus a $45 visa
fee, to my budget.
Having wept, stonewalled, thrown hysteria
fits, and once attempted to stamp my own passport (a story I will recount
later) on my way through border points at various points in my life, I know
that the Nepali passport is trouble. Nepalis are, to use a biological term, the
lowest scum on the food hierarchy of border crossers. Perhaps Somali and
Sudanese may have more trouble, maybe Syrians and Iraqis. But the green Nepali
passport definitely does not make life easy for its holder. Indonesia wouldn’t
let me in easily, I had a suspicion. I was prepared for battle.
I was right. I got to the Indonesian
embassy around twelve, which was lunchtime. The man behind the glass window
stares at me blankly when I say: Visa? His stare seems to imply I am in the
wrong place. Perhaps he almost shakes his head in the negative. I ask again, to
re-confirm: “This is the Indonesian Embassy, isn’t it?” Clearly it is, and I am
inside the compound. But these men aren’t co-operating. “Yes,” he says, after a
long pause. “I’d like to apply for a visa,” I say. “Which country you from?”
“Nepal,” I respond. Nepalis surely are not moving en masse to Indonesia for migrant
labor. Please god, say it ain’t so.
I’m used to unfriendliness from embassy
staff—I would have been surprised if I’d been welcomed with open arms. I smile
at the hostile man, and push the festival schedule through the window. “I am
going to the literature festival in Bali,” I say, extra chattily. “I’m a
writer. Here’s my book.” I pull out my book and flash the cover through the
glass opening. He reads the schedule. “Writers’ meeting? Like journalist?
Political?” “Nothing political,” I assure him fervently. “Only fiction.”
Fiction. The word lies between us, with
its own special weight. He considers whether to believe my words about fiction.
He picks up my passport and leafs through
it. “Writers from all over the world are coming. Wole Soyinka, he won the Nobel
Prize!” I babble. I don’t know if Wole Soyinka would have liked me using his
name to cross a border, or at least cross from the glass window of the
unwelcoming security guards to the actual visa section, but I figured this was
as good a use of a Nobel Prize as any. Later, having met Mr Soyinka, I figured
he would probably wouldn’t have minded. The man frowned. He was probably
wondering if the Nobel Prize was political. In desperation, I said: “The man
who wrote Slumdog Millionaire—he’s coming!”
This seems to cinch it. “Okay, you need
ticket to apply,” he announces. “Come back with ticket, then it’s a perfect
application. Come back today. Otherwise, you lose your visa fee.”
As I walk in, I reflect on this tiny moment of profiling.
Because I don’t have a white face, he thinks I am not the right profile for a
visitor to Indonesia. What he doesn’t know is that I am a Nepali traveler with
erratic income but reckless spending habits who will soon drop $2000 in Bali’s
economy in the next month. I will buy a large amount of junk, everything from
batik to fake pearls. I will take art classes and Balinese dance classes. I
will do all sorts of weird things that sustain the tourist industry. Racial
profiling is so bad for the economy. That’s why the Thais don’t do it. And
that’s why their economy is rocking.
I spent the afternoon rushing around
booking my ticket online, and went back huffing and puffing to the embassy to
drop off a ticket by the time the consulate closed. The visa officer, upon
seeing me, was fussy. He said I may not be able to get my visa. They would have
to see. It would take time. But anyways, I should come back in two days’ time.
In two days’ time, I had my visa. “How
much does yours cost?” I asked the Australians lining up for their
visa-on-arrival in Bali’s small airport. “Twenty five US dollars,” said the
sun-tanned man in shorts on his way to a good time in the beaches. I was
miffed. “Mine was $45,” I said, huffily. I felt I’d been charged an unfair
Third World tax.
He took a look at my passport. “But you
got 30 days!” He said, impressed. “We only get two weeks. How did you do that?”
Doing the math, I realized he would have to pay $50 for a month. So I guess I
had nothing to complain about, in the end.
With the visa safely inside my passport,
I decided to do a little pilgrimage of Wat Po. Wat Po is one of the oldest and
largest Buddha shrines in Bangkok. It is located right by the Chao Phraya
river. People usually arrive by boat, which you get at Saphan Taksin station.
So this is what I did. After a pleasant ride from Ratchathewi to Saphan Taksin
on Bangkok’s famous sky-train, I
walked down, bought my obligatory share of fresh papayas and mangoes for 20
baht, then wandered down the piers. The air was fresh and cool, and the water
slightly choppy. I felt happy as the boat zipped past the many landmarks of
Bangkok, from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to the wooden floating homes on the
river’s edge.
At Wat Po, I bought a bouquet of white
lotus buds as an offering for the Buddha. The buds were smooth and white,
soothing to the eye. Wat Po has the image of the Sleeping Buddha as he lies on
his deathbed, on his final parinirvana stage. The statue is gigantic. I
circumbulated the image, marveling again at the good fortune that makes a
pilgrim from Nepal find herself at Wat Po. Then I walked around the different
courtyards. Wat Po has multiple courtyards and some of them lead into complexes
with hundreds of golden Buddhas. It is all a little overwhelming.
Of course I got lost. I found myself in a
part of the wat complex where the renovations were taking place. The roofs were
being painted bright red. Mirrors and colorful enamel pieces were being inlaid
in mosaics on the temple walls. Some of the workers were lost in work. Others
were napping in the heat.
After a while, all the glitter started to
weary me. Was it just me, I wondered, or did the other people wandering around
also sense that the dazzling array of images were destroying their own
spiritual power through the sheer volume and intensity of the image-making
enterprise? And this is precisely the moment when the Indian couple walked down
the two steps from one courtyard to the next, as if they wanted to address the
question in my mind. Something in my gaze must have struck them, because they
smiled. We stopped to talk. I don’t remember any of our small talk, except for
this. “Thailand has lost its charm,” they said. “Its too commercial.” “ Too
much gold,” the woman said, frowning. “Wait till you get to Burma,” the man
said, and the woman agreed. “It is still so wonderful there.” As I looked at them, I had an image of
old wooden, moss-covered Buddhas, entirely hidden inside trees. A sort of
mystical Angkor Wat hidden in the forests rose in my mind.
There is always the seed of a moment, an
event, an encounter, which has taken me to far-away places. My Burma visit, I
feel, stems from this precise encounter. I don’t remember the couple very well,
except that they were middle-aged, well spoken, possibly a professional couple
with time and money to spare. What, I wondered, lay in Burma? I read Amitav
Ghosh’s “The Glass Palace” from front to the last, but I couldn’t get any
answers. How did the Indian history intersect with Burma? Why did so many
Nepalis come from there? The son of my father’s friend had married a Nepali
woman from Burma. To the entire marriage procession from the groom’s side, the
Burmese contingent had handed out a little purple Thai orchid as well as a gold
coin as a gift. Kathmandu talked about that purple orchid and that gold coin
for months afterwards. What was the strange dichotomy which would make a people
spend extravagantly on marriages on one side, then eschew gold on Buddhas on
the other? Where did all that gold come from, anyways? The whole thing was
baffling. I would have to go there myself to find out.
All that walking made me thirsty. I went
into the little cafeteria to get a bottle of water. That’s when I saw the
fortune-tellers. There was a whole line of them, telling people’s fortunes,
right by the little counter with bottled water, the cans of Red Bull and the
sachet of sunflower seeds. I sat down and observed them. An old man around
eighty got my attention. He had bright blue eyes, a strange thing to see on a
Thai man. He was bright and alert as a bird. He was telling a young Western
woman’s fortune with great sweetness and charm. His English was broken but his
energy was impeccable. I wanted him to tell me my fortune. So I waited. The
young man by his side caught sight of me, made small talk with the old man,
shifted his little papers and apparatus around. I refused to catch his eye. My
fortune would be told by this old man, and this old man only.
Finally, he was free. “Ahhh," he
said, smiling. He took my date of birth, time of birth, and place of birth. He
calculated for a good long while, filling up a little sheet with data. Then he
started to speak. “This year of the cow. You 36 years old. Your brain,” he
said, putting his thumbs up. “Very good.” Anybody could tell from a glance at
me that I was a nerd. No points for that one.
“You good heart,” he said, tapping his
heart. “You good communications.” Then he paused. “Mars, Mercury, Venus,
Jupiter,” he said. “Good ideas, good adaptation. Sometimes one job, two
job—good planning.” This wasn’t very encouraging. My unsteady and erratic
employment history, which frequently included two jobs at the same time, was
causing me some stress. “You like freedom and independence. Sometimes hot
temper.” I grin at this one. The Joshis were famous for their short
tempers. I seem to have inherited
that family legacy.
Then he said: “Past two years, up and down.” I nodded. Yes,
the past two years had been very rocky indeed. The jumbled nature of which
involved love, broken hearts, a $50,000 dollar grant to start an organization,
and a coup in which I was ousted from said organization, the publication of
three books, and the piracy and unsatisfactory distribution of all three of
them.
The old man smiled happily, as if he knew
all this. “From 37 to 39, good.” I breathed a sigh of relief. Well, at least I
got a couple of years of reprieve.
“After November, new love, new marriage.
Man from another country. You happy.” At this point I tried to slow him down
and ask him which November he was talking about, but he continued: “From 40-41,
so-so, sometimes better job. But 42-54, very happy.”
“From 29 to 41, you work very hard. Very
hard work.” I had often wondered myself why I worked so hard for so little
gain. My book of short stories had been rejected in 2002 by publishers, and
here I was, still plugging away at trying to get it published a full ten years
later. I had written another five books of short stories, and two novels. I had
written four film scripts. I had written three plays. All of them unpublished.
“From 55 to 56, take care of health,
family. Maybe operation,” he said. “But no drink, no problem.” He cackled in a
jolly way.
“From 57 to 74, happy old.” I like the
way the Thais say “happy.” They lengthen out the “p” until it sounds trippy. Happpppy.
“On 75, go on holiday around the world.
You long life. No accident. Buddha take care of you. You live old, like me.”
Then he leant forward, and suggested: “You buy land, buy property, buy house.
Sell in old age. You have three houses, like me.” This property advice wasn’t
what I had come to find out about. Forget about three homes, I barely had one.
My parents, traditional Brahmins, who never discussed property, planned to
leave every square inch of their land to my brother and his son—just as they
had given every single rupee for his education.
He takes out a magnifying glass and peers
at my palm. “You three children, two boys and one girl.” Then he starts to
calculate my lucky numbers and my lucky colors, things I don’t really care
about. I wait impatiently for him to finish, so I can ask him more about this
foreign boyfriend. “Red,” he proclaims. “And orange. Very good. Number four is
bad for you.”
I start to ask him a question, but he is already moving on. “You live another country. You make
money, better than office job. After October, moving another country, very
good. Different nationality, good boyfriend.”
I wondered if Thai astrologers always
told women that they would find a foreign boyfriend, go live in another
country, and have three homes. That could very well be a Thai girl’s dream.
All these
things weren’t satisfactory. As I peeled off 1200 bahts, I thought: “At least I
got some good advice on savings and investment. I don’t know when I’ll get
married, but here’s $30 for property investment advice from a smart Thai man.”
Mr Sawong Kontong handed me his card, clipped to my little chart with all the
dates and figures.
***
Now come the strange story of rubies. I
exited Wat Po, feeling a little heady thinking my two rocky years were behind
me. I sat down at the bus waiting station, and opened my Bangkok map. I was
trying to see if I could get a bus to go downtown. This, I realized later, was
my biggest mistake.
The big dark man who showed up was on top
of me in almost a minute. He probably waited for clueless tourists right at
this spot. “May I help you?” He said. I must have looked up, and I must have
caught his eye. From that moment on,
his voice took on a weird booming quality. I could see his finger
pointing to various points in the map as he showed me how I could get to where
I needed to go.
“What a nice man!” I remember thinking.
“What an extraordinarily nice man. So helpful!”
“Here is the place you need to go,” he
says, pointing to the map. “But do you know today is the birthday of the Black
Buddha? This is where the Black Buddha’s temple is. Don’t forget to stop there.
And here,” he says, pointing at some place in the map, and looking me directly
in the eye: “Is where the jewelry expo is happening. There are many shops and
you should stop by and see all the gems being displayed.”
“Yes, but I don’t really want to go
there,” I say. I’ve been warned by various guide-books about gem scams. “I just
need to get to Wat Saket.” I try to sound firm.
“No bus to Wat Saket, but tuk-tuk will
take you.” He looks again at the map. “Very grand expo,” he says. “Very good
gems. You should see. No buy, just see. Big expo.” He looks at me for a moment,
then he says: “You should get a ruby. Ruby very good for you.”
But I did not want a ruby. I smiled at
him, because I didn’t want to let him know what I thought. “A ruby,” he
repeated, looking at me deeply in the eye, become hailing a tuk-tuk for me.
My new Thai friend now says something to
the driver in Thai. The driver
breaks into a broad grin as he looks at me. “This driver, he very honest. He no
cheating. He take you to Wat Saket for forty baht.” Now, any idiot in their
right mind would have realized that forty baht was too low to get from Wat Po
to Wat Saket. But I was not in my right mind. It occurred to me that forty baht
was indeed a major bargain. I got into the tuk-tuk. In my hand, I had a paper
bag containing a few small essential oil bottles I had picked along the
sidewalk. They said: “Lotus” and “Lavender” and “Ylang-Ylang” on their labels.
I broke these open and smelled them, and then in the sudden euphoria I poured
the oils on myself. The tuk-tuk driver looked at me curiously at the mirror. I
feel like a princess as the wind blew through my hair. All of a sudden, a
restless excitement had seized hold of me, as if I was on a major journey. I
was racing through Bangkok on a tuk-tuk, not with worry and gloom, but a great
excitement that I was being driven towards an unknown but fabled destiny.
The tuk-tuk driver drove into a side
street. “Black Buddha,” he said. I
felt annoyed and angry. I did not want to go to the Black Buddha! I wanted to
go to Wat Saket.
Now let me state here that I was in this
odd mental state where my entire being was telling me something was wrong with
this moment. I was in a heady mixture of excitement and fear. I didn’t trust
the tuk-tuk driver. I didn’t want to enter the wat. What if I was going to be
robbed while inside? What was inside? It was a quiet wat—I didn’t see a single
soul walking around as I entered the premises. Could I call out to the monks if
something happened? I looked around for monks and didn’t see a single one. The
other part of me worried the tuk-tuk driver would take off while I entered this
abandoned looking shrine. Every nerve of my body was shrieking and telling me
not to enter the wat. On the other hand, I didn’t know what else to do. It
would look absurd if I made a fuss. However, despite all this, I still did. “I
don’t want to go in,” I say to the driver, not budging from my seat. “Take me
to Wat Saket.”
“You see, you see!”
“No, Wat Saket!”
“Nice Buddha, Black Buddha.” I feel from
his expression that he can’t believe I am being so paranoid. I have nothing to
fear, his disbelieving stance implies. So reluctantly I get down from the
tuk-tuk.
“You coming in?” I asked. He gave me a
look that almost amounted to fear.
“No, no,” he said. “I wait here. You come
quick.”
Inside, it was quiet. A single man was
kneeling, head bowed, praying in front of the large assortment of different
Buddhas. I rush in rather breathlessly. I want to get this over with fast. The
man turns back and looks at me. His face is dark with some inner tension. He
appears to harbor a deep sadness. I ignore his stare deliberately—I don’t want
to start a conversation at this moment. The man gets up, and starts to go
around the shrine. I kneel, and bow before the rather nodescript looking black
statue of the Buddha. As I am about to get up and leave, the man starts a
conversation from the far corner.
“Where you from?” I stop in my tracks.
“Nepal.” Something makes me answer him
very, very reluctantly. I feel I am being very rude, but I don’t want to talk
to him. The Asian feeling of politeness, however, comes to the fore. I cannot not answer him.
“You traveling alone?”
“I am traveling with friends,” I lie.
Whenever I find myself alone, I lie and create whole contingents of travel
companions—the computer industry husband, the two twin children I invented in
2005, groups of friendly travel companions.
“What do you do?”
“I write books,” I say.
“Book writer?”
“Also I make films.” I can feel myself smiling too exuberantly.
“What kind of books?”
“Short stories, novels, film scripts.”
“I am sure you become very famous one
day,” he says, with great intensity. “Your book very famous, like Harry
Potter.” He looks at me, a little withdrawn, a little awed, a little envious,
as if he’s seen a ghost. A very rich ghost.
“I don’t think so, but thank you,” I say.
I laugh. “Thank you.” I thought of my little book of short stories and to the
major publishing drama in which my Nepali publishers hadn’t given me royalty
despite the books selling well for months. I was burnt out fighting them in the
Copyright Office. Little did he know. I was hardly likely to be J.K Rowlings
anytime soon.
“I am sure. Sure,” he insists. “Your film
very big in Hollywood.”
I laugh. I am still feeling giddy, rushed
and heady. For a moment, I see myself in his eyes—someone with a wildly
successful Hollywood film. It is a dream I have never had before, but from his
gaze, he makes it appear possible. I could one day have a wildly successful
Hollywood film! The thought enters my mind and surprises me. It surprises me
because it had never been my own dream—until now.
That’s when he adds. “You need a ruby,”
he says. “A ruby will help you to make dream come true.”
Now let me tell you reader, that although
I am a young woman with a fair amount of common sense, and although I make
quick connections very fast, the thought that both these men had told me I
needed rubies appeared to be isolated events at that moment. In my head, this
man was telling me a new story—not one that the booming-voiced man had told me
in the bus station.
I walk out. I get into the tuk-tuk.
“Ready?” the driver looks back at me. “Lets go.” The tuk-tuk drives for about two or three minutes before it
swerves into a side lane again. The tuk-tuk driver insists I get out and enter
the door of a quiet store. I protest again, saying I don’t want gems. But he
has stopped the tuk-tuk, and there is no way for me to walk but in. With a
great deal of reluctance, I enter the place.
The store is full of jewelry in glass
cases, but the place is empty. Then a girl rushes up to ask me: How can I
help you? I feel uneasy, stifled and uncomfortable.
I don’t know why I am here. I feel furious. And then, of course, there is a
woman behind the curving display case. She has on a yellow silk outfit and a
tight matronly smile. It seems impossible to escape interacting with her. I
don’t like the pressure of the girl’s ostentious welcome, and I don’t like this
moment. But again, there is no way to walk but towards the woman who sits there
behind the counter with a benign alligator smile.
Before I know it I am seated in a leather
stool in front of the display case, sweating. The woman is showing me ruby
rings. She quoting figures as high as ten thousand dollars.
I laugh. I say I don’t have that much
money.
She stares at me with disdain. “Well, how
much money do you have?” I have a money belt strapped to my waist, with the
exact amount of three hundred dollars. I still thank my lucky stars I wasn’t
carrying more on me. Then she has
a ring in her hand. “Only three hundred dollars,” she says
contemptuously. I can’t afford the fabulously expensive rings, but someone on a
cheap budget like me could buy a
cheap ring, her tone implies. I felt embarrassed and humiliated.
The ring is curved. It has a tiny ruby on
it. I feel myself taking out my money from my moneybag, knowing something is
very wrong. I don’t even like jewelry, and I find all jewelry flashy and
unnecessary. But here I am, taking out all my money to buy one. All of this
appears to happen very quickly, within a few seconds. I ask, as a last and
desperate measure: “Can I get a receipt?” A receipt, I feel, will somehow
protect me from what I know is clearly an illegal transaction. I can report this, I remember thinking.
She glares at me. “We don’t give receipts,”
she says with great disdain, as if I am asking her for her private bank account
number. “But you can take this certificate of authenticity.”
The certificate is in my hand. So is a
little blue velvet box containing my ruby. My three hundred dollars are gone. I walk out a little
desolately. The tuk-tuk driver snickers as I walk out. He drives for a while. I
am sitting there in the tuk-tuk, somber, as I try to process what just happened
to me back there. Then, in a moment of human sympathy, he asks me: “You alone?
You have friends?”
It is as if he knows that he just took
part in a scam to skim a tourist off all their cash, and that I could end up
without any money in the hotel.
“I have friends,” I lie. I don’t want
this tuk-tuk driver to rob me en-route of my three essential oil bottles and my
bag holding my passport. The tuk-tuk stops somewhere close to the river. “It
very far to Wat Saket,” he says. “I have to make big turn. You take the boat
here in the klong.” I feel desolate as the tuk-tuk driver drives away, clearly
on his way back to collect his share of the loot. I feel strangely berefit. I
have been to this klong before, and I have taken a boat here before, I
recognize. As a boat rushes past me on the klong, I feel like I am seeing a
scene from “Don’t Look Back.” I shiver a little, because I am not sure if the
tuk-tuk driver will come back to kill me. The boat arrives. I get in. The dirty
water sprays in my face, and the boat attendent walking up and down on the
gangplank raises the plastic covering. As I look at all the Thai people inside,
I wonder if all of them are part of a giant hypnotic scam, and soon I will find
myself in a place far away from my destination. The middle class people
clutching their bags of groceries look like actors in a giant swindle. I am to
sit in this boat and be abducted to some faraway place, where they will maybe
rip out my kidneys and my eyes. I have never been so relieved when the boat
arrives at a familiar destination.
A year after this episode, when I had
recovered somewhat from the emotional shaking of this episode, I took the ring
to the jewelry shop on Durbar Marg in Kathmandu, and I asked them to value it
for me. The man took out his magnifying glass. He took a look. “This is a
heat-treated ruby set in white metal,” he said. “The price shouldn’t be more
than $10.”
“Ten dollars?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I
had heard right.
“Ten dollars,” he confirmed.
But I am an optimist, in many senses of
the word. I had been scammed of $300, it was clear. I had been taken on one of
Thailand’s famous wild goose chases. Three men and two women had worked in
tandem to hypnotize me, make me open my moneybag and take out $300 for a tiny
piece of heat-treated gemstone. I had never thought I'd become one of those
tourists who'd fall under the spell of a mesmerizering scamster. But then, in
that unexpected way, I'd become one of those victims. But as a writer, I had a
story. Maybe it wasn’t the story I had been looking for. Maybe it was totally
unexpected. Maybe the ruby had shown me how gems had always deceived people,
and how their colors and their iridescence promised more than they gave up. But
yet, at the same time, it gave me a story to pursue. Now, I thought, I wanted
to know about the ruby. Where did it come from? What did it signify? Why did
people think that having a ruby would bring them great creative powers—as
obviously these men were insisting to me? What, in other words, was the lure of
the ruby?
***
April 4, 2012
Rubies, it appears, come from Burma.
I don’t know when I became aware of this
fact. Or when I started to link my curiosity of Nepalis living in Burma with
the fact that they appeared to be mining rubies there.
I encountered rubies on my first day in
Yangon. I am not sure how a traveler makes a decision to orient themselves to a
new city, but mine was to go to the museum. There has to be a starting out
point somewhere, and being a New Yorker for some years, cultural institutions
like museums have always been my favorite places.
The National Museum of Myanmar, however,
was different. It was, first of all, completely empty, except for one or two
foreign tourists wandering through the desolate haunted rooms. After taking a
quick peek at treasures mentioned in the Lonely Planet, I almost rushed out after twenty minutes of traversing each floor
of the five storey building. Each floor got spookier the higher I climbed. The
building itself reminded me of
state-run institutions in Nepal in the Eighties which no longer exist.
The empty rooms echoed with shadows and treasures nobody comes to see. The
owners are long dead, and nobody cares about the objects or identifies with
them as their own heritage. Unlike Europe, or parts of Asia, Burma’s
institutionalized state museum lacked one vital ingredient-life. No crowds
surged or thronged around in devotion, as I had seen people do in Spain, as
they lined up outside the Prado Museum to see masterspieces of Rembrandt. No
young people wearing jeans and earphones crowded around, creating noise and
energy as they do in Bangkok. The security people are indifferent, merely there
to sit through eeiriely quiet days, with no sense of respect or responsibility to the objects on display. They seem
to command people to go away.
Perhaps the spookiest moment in Myanmar’s
National Museum comes when you hit the top floor, where there is an entire
floor dedicated to the different races of Myanmar. The long room is shrouded in
gloom, but one can see life-sized models of all the different ethnic tribes of
Buma, standing in spectral silence. They stand there, folorn, with limp arms,
like voodoo dolls who have been frozen by the state for its own purposes. On
the sides are written state slogans about good behavior. I stood there by the door, too scared
to enter the haunted room, then quickly made my way downstairs before the
attendant could wonder why I wasn’t in there, admiring the greatness of the
artwork.
On one of the floors, there is an entire
range of royal jewelry. And everywhere I turn there are rubies and sapphires,
carelessly sprinkled on spittoons and little jeweled boxes. It is magnificent.
I wondered why no Burmese entrepreneur had minted a fortune yet taking these
models and creating new versions of them for the international market. How
interesting it would be to take these beautiful objects and carefully recreate
the years of royal splendor of a bygone age. The only problem, of course, is
that anything newly minted would be manufactured in a factory in China with
imitation paste instead of gems, and the girls who made them would be paid a
pittance and the final product would be sold in Walmarts for $6. Or if they
were mined out of a mine, it would be impossible to ever figure out if the
workers were treated fairly and paid a fair price.
On the first floor are royal garments of
silk and brocade. It makes me think of my friend Prabal Gurung, who has now
become a fabulously famous fashion designer who makes beautiful clothes for
Hollywood actresses. Some of the clothes are startlingly modern, unusual cuts
ready for the runway.
On my way out, as a man politely tried to
push on me a souvenir about the museum, I just as politely refused. I had
already paid $5 to support this institution, and I felt I had done my part.
There were whole chapters in Lonely Planet about
the ethical implications of paying money to state-run institutions in Myanmar,
since the money would go to the junta and therefore continue the repressive
political system. I hoped the $5 would go for soap and toilet paper at the
toilet which I had used in the museum, and which had no soap or toilet paper,
and not to buy a bullet for the military.
I spy a woman who’s also been wandering through the museum
ahead of me. She has white hair, and looks about sixty. I catch up with her and
start a conversation. I am bursting to discuss the haunted-house museum. Her
name is Elsie and she’s from Holland. She’s been to Myanmar in the past, this
is not her first time. “I almost had a panic attack in there,” I say. “It’s a
mausoleum.” She laughs and admits that its not the best kept museum in the
world.
Elsie knows a good restaurant close to
here, she says. Would I like to join her for lunch? The restaurant is indeed
nice and clean, with bamboo furniture and seating in the garden. I order an
aubergine salad and ice tea, both of which are excellent. The prices are
entirely reasonable and I feel cheered up to discover this beautiful restaurant
with excellent food. Elsie and I have one of those interesting conversations
that you can often strike up with intelligent women you meet in strange places,
where both of you realize that you
share the same intellectual heritage but probably will not spend more than an
afternoon together. Both of you enjoy the conversation, without expecting it to
stretch beyond a few hours or perhaps a day or two that you will overlap in the
same city. Elsie pays for lunch, and we have an interesting discussion about
the concept of “going Dutch” which she said was an American misunderstanding of
Dutch mores. As we finish lunch, Elsie says: “I am meeting my friend this
afternoon at the Gems Museum. Would you like to go with us?”
Elsie says: “Three thousand” in a firm
voice to the taxi driver, and he instantly agrees. The taxi-drivers in Yangon
appear to be a lot more pleasant than those in Kathmandu, whose level of
truculence and aggression has increased over the past seven years. With Nepal’s
political change from authoritiatve monarchy to political anarchy has come a
free-for-all economy. Taxi-drivers have taken full advantage of this shift,
often refusing to move at all unless offered a substantial chunk of cash. The
meters which regulated fares in Kathmandu have long been tampered with, with
the government office that calibrates the meters taking Rs.2000 per “call” to
wind it up beyond the legal limit. Some sort of taxi order, however, seems to
prevail in Yangon.
As an Austrian had said so approvingly
this morning at the hotel: “Myanmar people, they have discipline. I never go to
India because Indians, they talk very loud and fast and I think there must be
chaos.” I ask him if he’s ever been to India, and he admits he hasn’t. He’s
just imagining the chaos—but in some senses, he’s right. Even the Indians of
Burma appear calm and phlegmatic, not the hyper-excited citizens of Delhi or
Bihar. People in Burma, in general, exude a hushed silence that could be
interpreted in multiple ways—as a free-thinking democrat from a louder Asian
country, you could say the people were repressed by the military state, or as a
Vipassana practitioner you could say they were calm and balanced, or as an
European tourist you could say they were well-behaved.
The Gems Museum is located at 66 Kaba Aye
Pagoda Road. It takes us a while to get there. Elsie's friend Gretchen
instantly starts to shop at the two floors of small stores, all lined with
precious gems. Rubies and emeralds and sapphires are carelessly strung on
cotton threads in the haphazard stores that line the two floors, like they are
so many colorful beads, strung like Christmas ornaments. Gretchen cannot be
persuaded to move upstairs: her hands are full of cheap pearl necklaces and
rubies earrings.
So eventually I wander up to the third
floor, which houses the Gems Museum. Once there, looking at the giant rocks cut
in half, showing their precious jeweled insides, I begin to wonder about the
unreality of it all. All these giant boulders, with precious sapphires, rubies
and emeralds showing from their neatly sliced interiors, make me wonder about
the nature of precious stones. Why do we consider these crystallized rocks,
pressured by time and the earth's volcanic weight into beautiful colors and
shapes, to be so precious? Why are people willing to kill for these things?
What is it about the hallucinatory colors and shapes of these stones that makes
us believe we are rich? Then I look up from the stones I am staring at, I
realize with a shiver the Gems Museum is empty, and silent, as an abandoned
mine.
***
At the Shwedagon Pagoda, where I went the
next morning, I felt that silence. All around me, people murmured as they ate
lunch, rested or chatted with friends inside the many pavilions. The elderly
looked shrunken, as if they didn’t have enough to eat, but the young looked
like the young everywhere—beautiful in their youth, flirting with boyfriends
and girlfriends, laughing at silly jokes.
The Shwedagon is a strange place, filled
with child-faced Buddhas, neo-mythical
creatures that appear to be modeled on the sphinx, Buddhas with closed
eyes with circular spinning neon lights behind them, farcical caricatures of
Englishmen, and pagodas in various architectural styles. A very large crocodile stretches down
as the steps descend into the outside, adding to the atmosphere a slight sense
of danger.
A man detached himself from the shadows
and started to follow me around. “Where are you from?” He asked. My instinct
was to avoid touts, and I walked ahead, but he didn’t seem to mind, and kept
following me. So finally, I answered:
“Nepal.”
“This pagoda was built by Nepali people,” he said, pointing
to one where there appeared to be a lot of Buddhas.
“I don’t think so,” I said, contradicting
what I thought was his “you stupid, gullible tourist” line.
“Yes,” he says earnestly, seemingly
unperturbed by my disbelief. “They made money trading rubies and jade. Now many
live in Bangkok. This pavilion has 64 Buddhas.”
“Oh,” I say. Perhaps he was telling the truth. Maybe the
Nepalis did build this pagoda—it was plausible. I’d just spied a Nepali
grandmother, wearing her choli, and with the dhungri and bulaki jewelry, only a few
minutes ago, walking around near the shrine before she vanished.
“I’m a driver,” he says. “My car, it is
being repaired. So I have no work now for two weeks. I thought I’d come to
pagoda.” That’s why I am free to show you around, he says, in a friendly way.
Of course, I should have been suspicious, and I was. But it is hard to shake
off touts.
He takes me to a Buddha statue, and asks
me to pour water on the statue nine times. He hands me a silver cup. I’m happy
to do it. All I can think, as I pour the water over the Buddha, is this:
“Please free the people of Burma from suffering.” I feel a tiny bit of
uneasiness with this wish—I do not want to be like the people with the White
Savior Complex (as Teju Cole has wittily coined), and it is not my place to
wish just one people to be free of suffering. On the other hand, the slow pace
of the old people, looking down with hopeless eyes, the young people laughing
around me, exquisitely vulnerable in their naivete, the young children with
troubled eyes who wanted to know what existed beyond these pagodas—all of them
move me. I don’t know if the alternative to what exists now—the rush of global
transnational capitalism that will flood this country—will necessarily bring
more peace. But what is clear is that something is amiss here, and I wish it to be changed.
I think of the cute little boy who’d just
looked at me with that troubled look that seem so familiar to me—the look that
must have been on my own face as a child as I’d seen the tourists and notice
their sense of ease, comfort and mobility. Those qualities had appeared so
foreign, so distance, so inaccessible, to my eyes. I was a little Brahmin girl,
shuttered within high walls with no hopes of leaving. And yet, through that
glimpse of that other world, a new life had finally presented itself to me. I
wonder how much of those high walls that shielded me inside a gated compound
still remains inside me—perhaps it is a lifelong process, chipping away at the
sense of “self” and “other” engrained by a cloistered upbringing. Perhaps that
sense of distance can only be cancelled with Buddhist awareness and compassion
of our common human nature. The lectures of the Tibetan rimpoches which I’d
attended over the years came back to me. The Tibetan Buddhists have a
remarkable ability to see the common nature of our suffering, and through it,
our common humanity.
Does Vipassana meditation, which I’d
learnt from SN Goenka’s tradition, allow for this kind of universal connection? I closed my eyes and am back again in
the green sunlit hilltop of Pokhara, where by the lake we listened once again
to the voice of our teacher teaching us a technique he said went back to
Gautama Buddha. And then I remembered again what the essential core of that
teaching had been for me—the awareness of going back to that molecular level,
in which all ego dissolves into the universal transcendence of understanding
that we are all a manifestation of the same energy. We are all a flow of energy
connected to each other. Goenka-ji had learnt the Vipassana technique from a
Burmese monk.
How on earth did a culture steeped in
this tradition of universal connection become the home of a military junta? In
one way, it makes perfect sense. Vipassana, the core of the Hinayana Buddhist
tradition, emphasizes perfect control of the mind, which is not to be disturbed
by any ripples of greed, hatred, anger, envy, jealousy et cetera. The external
circumstances do not matter. What matters is the equilibrium of the mind. So
human rights abuses, violations against minorities, slave labor—none of this
can bring outrage because outrage disturbs the mind. This sense of Hinayana
Buddhism being a pure tradition, one above and beyond all spiritual pathways,
may then have led to the downfall of Burma.
The Mahayana Buddhists as found in Tibet,
on the other hand, have boddhisatvas with long swords who fight off demons. The
boddhisatvas are enlightened beings who have chosen to return to earth to save
people who need their help. Ingrained in this idea is the notion that all is
not perfect on Planet Earth, that people often do hurt each other, and that a
spiritual tradition must have a way to deal with demons and oppressors (whether
through tough love or compassion), and cannot simply focus only on one’s own
mental impurities. In Tibet, the tradition of ahimsa or non-violence has been
so ingrained the only way for people to protest against the Chinese regime is
self-immolation. And yet even in this violent act is the acknowledgement that
an action is needed—and that one cannot sit there passively waiting for one’s
own mentally equanimous mind to deal with external injustice.
Reading “George Orwell in Burma” by Emma Larkin, you would think the giant repressive military
junta regime gets its entire inspiration from British colonialism. She gives so
many examples it is hard not to be convinced that the repressive military
system is solely the fault of the British. But why it took on this uniquely
Burmese form is of course left unanswered. Why did the Indians, who also
experienced British colonialism, not exhibit the same repressive system later?
Although the confluence of spiritual traditions which constitute Hinduism is
the place where the notion of the perfect, balanced mind started, Hinduism also
has a vocal tradition of fighting against injustice. In fact, two of its most
important religious epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are magnum opuses
of wars fought in the name of justice. And perhaps the very loud Indians who argue
endlessly about all social issues are one reason why a military junta was never
able to take over power in India.
Some may argue and say secular India, not Hindu India, keeps at bay a
military junta. This is entirely possible—except secularism by itself is not
the defining factor to stop a military junta. There are many secular countries
in the world where the military is very powerful at the top-most levels. Of
course, India’s democracy is not perfect either—with army violence against
Kashmiris and ethnic minorities in the north-east paralleling those of the
abuses of Burma’s army. But at least the political system hasn’t been seized by
the military, as it has in Burma.
I open my eyes again. My guide is telling
me about the giant bell in one of the pavilions. He says: “The British try to
steal this bell, but it heavy. It fall into the river. Then the Burma people
bring it back.” I gathered the bell had lain at the bottom of the river. Nobody
could budge it. The British officers told the Burmese they could have it back,
if they could dredge it out of the bottom of the river. Which is what they did,
using simple manpower. He hands me a long wooden pole and shows me how to hit
the bell to make it ring, perhaps to scare away the ghosts of colonialists of the
past. The three adorable children sitting underneath the bell like little
pixies move away, giggling. I try it once, twice. It makes a long hollow boom,
like the booming sound you hear in Tibetan monasteries.
The Tibetan Buddhists chant: Om mani
padme hum. Om is the jewel in the lotus.
Om is the sound of universal connection,
the primordial sound that encompasses the universe. The lotus is the Buddha
dharma. And Om, therefore, is the jewel in the lotus. Perhaps I’d found my ruby
in this simple line.
***
IN SEARCH OF RUBIES
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 the way.
A woman who
grew up in a secluded family in Kathmandu, however, has perhaps one in a
million chance to make it to Yangon. How many of my brethen had made it out
here, under the full moon, to appreciate the clamor of Yangon at dusk? I would
hazard a guess that I may be the first traveler of my ilk to stare down at the
Sule Pagoda. I didn’t have to go to the moon. This was already on the scale of
a lunar journey for me.
In the clamor of dusk, near the Sule
Pagoda, buses slide by in endless procession—old, beaten up buses, the kind you
see in India and Nepal. Below me on the wide pavement, young boys sell small chat-like salad snacks that taste like bitter mud mixed with peanuts and
tomatoes. I know how it tastes because I just ordered a plate half an hour ago.
Two spoonfuls are hard to swallow. I’ve never had this much difficulty eating
food. Is this what the people of Yangon eat on a daily basis?
I look around me. The tiny kintergarten
sized tables with baby-sized plastic stools in bright primary colors, four to
five at one table, are filled with middle class people, enjoying their evening
meal. I am not at the bus-stand with weary travelers from villages. I am in the
middle of the city, in the thick of life, tasting the bitter taste of Myanmar.
I see an older woman sitting under a tree
growing in the middle of the pavement now. She appears to be staring at me. She
has white hair and looks like a ghost, sitting underneath a small tuft of
greenery. She gets up and bends down to cross the twelve-inch elevation of the
pavement—stooping, she grabs the kindergarten table, then descends. Before I
know it, she’s in front of me, with that unmistakable gesture of supplication.
The brash young vendor who’s taken my order gives me my change. The notes are
soiled and falling apart, and taped in three or four places with cellophane.
The edges are ragged, like ancient papyrus. I want to get rid of them as fast
as possible. I give 200 kyats back to the vendor and make a “half” motion with
my hand, then gesture to the old woman and another elderly beggar who has
materialized before me. The vendor smiles approvingly. I drop 100 kyats into
the bags of each, wondering if 100 kyat is too much, or too little, to give.
It is getting to be dusk. I walk to the
Sule Pagoda, which is covered with scaffolding and what appears to be straw while
renovations take place. The scaffolding makes it look primitive, like an
archaeological excavation—not the soaring gold spire depicted in postcards and
travel guides. I pause at the entrance and hand over my other ragged 200 kyat
note to the jasmine garland girl. She looks at me and I see she has two strips
of white powder on her cheeks. Then she counts out my jasmine strands—a
veritable bouquet. The couple before me has just handed over 200 kyats, so I
don’t have to ask for the price. Already I know.
Unfortunately, I don’t follow the couple
closely enough. Lost in the fragrance of the jasmine, I am halfway up before I
see everyone is in bare feet. Thinking of lax Thai temples, where Addidas
wearing teen tourists walk up shod to the inner sanctums of sacred shrine Wat
Saket, I continue to walk up the last few remaining steps. I think, in my lassez
faire Nepali way, that there must be a place to
take off shoes at the top. How wrong I am.
A young woman in her twenties catches
sight of me. “Foreigner? Fee!” she says authoritatively. “Fee.” She marches me
towards a table, then somewhat in the same moment, she notices my leather
sandals.
“Shoes! Shoes!”
Alarmed, I back off. “I’ll go down and take it off,” I
suggest, but she has started to say, in a loud commanding voice: “NO! NO!” I
walk down the steps hastily. The girl attending shoes, who I hadn’t noticed
before, materializes from behind a pillar. “Donation?” she asks. From above,
the gatekeeper informs her: “She came up here with her shoes!” or the equivalent,
in Burmese. It is clear I have violated a sacred taboo. A loud hub-bub started
with two women sitting on the stairs joining in the chorus.
The shoe-keeper looks at me accusingly.
“She went up wearing her shoes?” she seemed to say, in confusion and feigned
outrage. She is at fault here for allowing me to walk up unnoticed. The
situation was spiraling out of control. I had committed some unforgivable
crime. Myanmar’s temple bureaucrats were at the point of deciding on a suitable
punishment.
“Forget it,” I say, taking this
quintessential American expression out of my vocabulary in this moment of great
discord. I swing my jasmine in my hand as I march out to the loud murmur of
opprobation. I can hear the gatekeeper calling to me in a commanding voice, and
perhaps with a note of conciliation, as if she regretted scaring away a genuine
devotee. But I was already too shaken by the combined censure of the temple
guardians to return. So this, then, is the world, the tightly regulated world
of Myanmar, where one deviance quickly becomes an unforgivable error. This is
the world I’d be glad not to know too much about during my visit.
As I crossed the busy road, I felt
jarred. I didn’t like how that little encounter had gone. As I looked down from
my window onto the world below, I felt like I had made the right decision to
walk away. The Buddha’s spirit doesn’t reside in a place that is intolerant.
The Buddha’s statue might be up there, but the spirit that infuses life into
the image—all those Thai people reverently burning incense and offering white
lotus buds at Wat Saket come back to my mind’s eye—was missing in this giant
shrine.
In Thailand, the glitter and the
ostentatious displays had dismayed me. A few years earlier, in one of my first
visits to Thailand, I had walked through Wat Po as it went through its
renovations. The colored lacquer on the temples was hallucinatory. The golden
glitter was unbelievable. The laborers appeared tired as they slept in the
heat. I had been distressed. And as if to echo my distress, an Indian couple I
had met there had said: “Thailand’s temple tourism has become so commercial and
crass. Wait till you get to Burma. Its so unspoilt there.” And perhaps it was
those words that had stayed with me and taken me, finally, to my own
destination to Burma.
But here in Burma I realized how wrong I
had been. I had been blinded by the gold leaf and forgotten how concern for
others, tolerance and compassion permeated every aspect of Thai life. Just
because they liked lavish displays didn’t mean they were not practicing
compassion and equilibrium of mind.
On the way back to my hotel, I stop at
the panwallah and ask for a pan. The very fact that there is an Indian-looking panwallah selling
betel leaf in Burma surprises me. I don’t know what I had expected Burma to be
like—perhaps more South East Asian, perhaps more like Thailand. What I hadn’t
expected it to look like was India from forty years ago. Yangon appeared to be
an older, poorer, more run-down version of Mumbai. It is as if Burma was an
extension of South Asia, a little bit of Nepal and India that had continued
upwards from Assam.
In a Hindi dialect, he asks me if I am
Indian.
“Nepali,” I answer.
“Pakistani?” he queries, as if he doesn’t
understand “Nepal.”
“Nepal,” I repeat. He hasn’t heard of Nepal. He rolls me a
tiny pan and won’t accept any charge.
I ask him, in my fumbling stumbling
Hindi, where he’s from. He says: “We are from right here.”
“But your ancestors were from India?”
“We are from right here.”
“Bangladesh!” I hazard a guess.
“No.” He laughs a little. “From right
here.” His wife, her head covered with black, nods. They are from right here.
And there was more than people who looked
the same as me to remind me that the subcontinent was present in Burma. The
hush in the immigration section of the airport reminded me of Kathmandu in the
80s—the hush of an omniscient state, the hush of officials who appeared
indifferent, detached, with the quietness of the constantly surveilled. Airport
immigration officials everywhere are not the friendliest of people, but there
was something else about these bureaucrats that frightened the passengers as
they clutched their passports and waited in line.
It reminded me again how fraught that
moment is, when you enter the border of a foreign country, and in this case,
the country happened to be Myanmar—with its own rules and regulations, its own
universe. Perhaps the people working in the airport may be nice middle class
bureaucrats who‘d be great fun to meet at a tea-shop, but right here right
now all I wanted to do was avoid eye-contact. It was clear that almost everyone
in the line felt somehow guilty, and we weren’t even sure what that crime was.
Perhaps for the group of Spanish going in to help poor children and who would
leave the country weeping, the crime would be to help the poor. For the
Scandinavian UN official over there holding out his blue passport, and looking
the poster boy of casual, it might be thinking liberal Western thoughts of
democracy. For me, I had a niggling sense that the video camera that I carried,
along with my plans to write a book, was somehow not sanctioned. Were writers persona
non grata in Burma? As I stood there in the airport
line, clutching my video camera, somehow I couldn’t remember if I was within
the bounds of legal behavior or not.
Of course, my double consciousness as a Third World citizen
also made me see from the bureaucrats’ eyes—how ridiculous some of the
Europeans appeared, tight groups of them holding on to their evangelical
contact numbers and with the breathless sense of urgency that somehow they were
saving all of Burma. It must be annoying, if you are a middle class Yangon
resident working a small but important job at the airport, to see all these
people descend upon your country with the express purpose of saving your
countrymen from you. I could imagine that the slight tone of sarcasm I note in
one beaureaucrat’s voice originated from the weariness of this moment.
The woman who takes my passport takes a
look, then starts a causal chat with her colleague. It is just enough pressure
to get my paranoid imagination to start imagining out-of-control scenarios. But
then she writes something on the side of my visa, then stamps me in. In the
gratitude of the moment, I fail to see that she’s given me one month, not the
three weeks I think I have remaining since I got my visa a week ago at the Myanmar Embassy in Bangkok.
Waiting outside that line of men in
longyi, holding placards of various hotels, just like in Kathmandu. Except
these men look slightly less aggressive and desperate. Kathmandu’s madhouse
airport welcoming scene has become more aggressive by the day, as the free
economy welcomes tourists from all over in even more competitive ways. I spot
“Sushma Joshi” within two minutes. This is the first time I’ve seen my name on
a placard at the airport. It gives me a warm feeling. Usually I am the only
haggling with local taxi-drivers or waiting for the bus as the Japanese
corporate salarymen and the Korean businessmen get zipped off in their
limousines.
The driver looks like a character out of
Burmese Days. He has a Chinese-looking face, with a slightly shy smile. There
is a certain obsequiousness to him that makes me uncomfortable. He tells me to
“wait!”, then vanishes to fetch the taxi. The tree down the road, a banyan,
makes me feel at home. I feel like I’ve just gone down to some provincial
outskirt of India, not a whole new country. Old beat-up taxis pick up foreign
tourists. The tourists, or perhaps I should say travelers, all look shuttered,
discreet—as if they didn’t spend the past few weeks reading at great length
about the repression and violence of an authoritarian military state. Perhaps
they are here to topple the military regime. On the other hand, they could just
as well be traveling to buy opium or steal some gems from the gem market. One
can hardly tell.
The sadness I felt as I zipped up the
long highway towards the center of the city was a complicated mixture of
emotion. The people looked reedy thin, ill-dressed and tired—a shocking
contrast to the buzzing cosmopolitan heart of Bangkok where food was laid out
in every cart and where cheap clothing lay piled up on sidewalks by the
sackloads. At the same time, a sense of nostalgia arose in me as I saw the
smaller city of Yangon, and saw in it the shadow of what my hometown Kathmandu
used to be before two decades of unregulated urban growth demolished it,
turning it into a cancerous modern city imploding from the inside out.
As we drove past a large, ornate and
glittering pagoda, the driver turned back, smiled, and said: “Shwedagon.” This
was the famous Shwedagon Pagoda that I had already heard about from many
sources. Oddly, the story that came back to me was the story from our program
advisor, a jolly Filipina lady in her sixties who had run our fellowship
program for many years. Her
bubbling laughter came back to my mind as we passed the pagoda. “We were at the
hotel near the Swedagon Pagoda! Oh my god! I can’t tell you how terrified I was
there during the nights we stayed there. I don’t know what it was, but I felt
like someone was watching me during the night. I woke up during the night and I
swear somebody was standing at the bottom of my bed, watching me. I couldn’t go
to sleep the whole night. People said to me the next morning: what happened to
you? You look white as a sheet!” I swear there was a ghost in that room that
night.”
“Maybe somebody from the state was watching you?” I suggest.
But she shakes her head adamantly. “It
was something otherworldy. A ghost. Something must have happened there in that
room.”
My Nepali colleague, whose academic
credentials included an impressive Ph.D in political science, had rolled her
eyes at me, as if she couldn’t believe the kind of conversation being initiated
by the director of our fellowship program. As for me, I was intrigued.
Definitely intrigued. “Tell me more about the ghost,” I said. The ghost story
was repeated once, then twice, with lots of jolly Filipina laughter. Her Thai
program assistants had chimed in with their own stories of how they felt
Shwedagon was haunted. The story came back to me as I passed the Pagoda. What
was the ghostly presences stalking this particular edifice? Tomorrow I would
come to find out.
After about thirty minutes, we were by
the Sule Pagoda. Ko Mya Aye of the Grand Sule Hotel, a young man in his late
twenties, was very kind. “Oh, there is only one of you?” he asks, surprised.
“But you booked a double room.” “Yes, its only me,” I say. “I read on the
Internet that I should get the double room,” I hasten to justify my
extravagance and my lack of a partner.
A part of me, however, is secretly glad
to be alone. All the dramas of relationships are best left at home when you are
traveling light, with one bag and a computer, trying to write a book. On some
level, a boyfriend is extra luggage. Most times men are heavier than a
computer, and you have to drag them around with the same annoyance you feel at
the extra 20 kgs that you added onto your luggage at the last minute, and which
you wish you hadn’t. My experience of traveling with a man told me that the
best way to end a relationship is to travel together in tough situations in new
countries. If you last beyond the train ride on Mumbai, and the rickshaw ride in
Dhaka in July, then you are probably good to go. That’s where people should go
for honeymoons, for a quick reality check. If you fail those obstacle tests,
then your relationship will not last the test of time.
There’s also the question of whether any
writing gets done while you are traveling with romantic luggage. My prior
experience told me that sex and romance are distractions which don’t work very
well with the writing schedule. Liz Gilbert of “Eat, Love, Pray” fame abandons
Felip alone in the Atlanta Hotel, drinking his beer by the poolside, while she
goes off to Vietnam to interview grandmothers. Writing takes time—it is slow,
careful, meticulous, laborious work done for hours and hours in the dead of
night. The first night, under the light of the one fluorescent bulb, I wrote in
my little notebook from 7pm to 10pm, with a 30 minute break for dinner. I
deducted thirty more minutes for Lonely Planet
reading, tooth-brushing, moon-gazing, checking out of the bathroom window to
see there’s no people staring at me from the other building, turning the TV on
and off, peeking under the bed to see there were no Burmese spies lurking, et
cetera. But that’s still two hours of continuous writing that would surely have
not been possible with another jet-lagged person talking, arguing, TV channel
flipping and initiating sex in the same room. Not to mention all the paranoid
theories we would no doubt have come up with about the Burmese state and
surveillance if there had been two people to inflate the danger of the new surroundings.
But of course, no matter how
self-sufficient and how daring any traveler is, at the heart of it we all long
for a companion to share the beauty of the moon. Which is what I wished for, as I looked outside and saw
the stark circle of a large moon outside my window.
***
Money is strange in Burma. I hand over $60 and I get 51,000
Kyats in exchange.
This is still less than what I would get
in Indonesia, which goes into digits that is not in my usual counting range. A
million becomes a mundane unit. At certain moments in Bali, I became
disoriented and handed over 100,000 rupiah notes when I was supposed to hand
over 10,000. In Indonesia, there had been a feeling of reckless disorientation
as my dollars melted into million rupiah pools. I felt as rich as George Soros.
In Burma, the wads and wads of cash gave me another feeling altogether—a sense
that I was carrying around play money which I was handing out as if I was
playing Monopoly. The sense of unreality persisted throughout my trip. Perhaps it
was the wads and wads, all new, bound with the recycled paper band in the
middle, straight from the state printing press, which made me wonder if there
was some scam going on to insert new notes into the economy. It seems
foreigners all got crisp, fresh-off-the-press currency, while the regular
people had to make do with notes disintegrating into shreds of grime.
“It is 860 Kyats to the dollar,” Ko Mya
Aye says to me. “Shall I exchange it for you?” I have read it is better to
exchange at the hotel than outside with the moneychangers, so I say: “All
right.” The fat wad of notes he holds, smelling of new ink, looks unreal. He
carefully extracts half of the notes from an even bigger wad by just looking at
the beginning and end of the serial numbers, and hands it over to me. I look at
him, suspicious, uncertain. Are these real notes? Why does he have stacks and
stacks of them? Am I supposed to count the notes to make sure there are 51 of
them? He smiles at my discomfiture. Later I will realize the Burmese are the
most trustworthy people on the planet. Ko Mya Aye would never do something so
undignified as shortchange me during currency exchange.
The $30 I am paying for my room is
another matter. The hotel feels claustrophobic and small, and so does my room.
I feel overcharged. I’ve slept in far better deals in Bali, for instance, where
I had a giant room with a giant garden and an exquisite Balinese family tending
the gods every day. But Yangon is not Bali or Bangkok. Everything including
food, I realized, costs thrice as much as Bangkok, but the quality is thrice as
low. Anyways, I was not here to be a tourist.
Having said that, I took back my words
because my very next trip, the day after, happened to be to the Gems Museum.
Why was I obsessing about gems, you may ask. Well, to answer that question I’d
have to take you back to my trip to Bangkok and how I got scammed at the gems
market, a full year before.
So lets backtrack a bit, to 2009.
I had applied, and been accepted to, the
Ubud Readers’ and Writers Festival in Ubud, Bali. Unlike most people on the
planet who hold a passport that allows them to waltz through borders without
bothering with visas, I hold a passport for which each move has to be
calculated months in advance. In order for me to travel, I need a visa to
Indonesia stamped on my passport, unlike tourists from Western countries who
just show up and pay $25 for visa-on-arrival at the border. For this, I had to
travel to Bangkok, adding three extra days of accommodation, plus a $45 visa
fee, to my budget.
Having wept, stonewalled, thrown hysteria
fits, and once attempted to stamp my own passport (a story I will recount
later) on my way through border points at various points in my life, I know
that the Nepali passport is trouble. Nepalis are the lowest scum on the
hierarchy of border crossers. Perhaps Somali and Sudanese may have more
trouble, maybe Syrians and Iraqis. But the green Nepali passport definitely
does not make life easy for its holder. Indonesia wouldn’t let me in easily, I
had a suspicion. I was prepared for battle.
I was right. I got to the Indonesian
embassy around twelve, which was lunchtime. The man behind the glass window
stares at me blankly when I say: Visa? His stare seems to imply I am in the
wrong place. Perhaps he almost shakes his head in the negative. I ask again, to
re-confirm: “This is the Indonesian Embassy, isn’t it?” Clearly it is, and I am
inside the compound. But these men aren’t co-operating. “Yes,” he says, after a
long pause. “I’d like to apply for a visa,” I say. “Which country you from?”
“Nepal,” I respond. Nepalis surely are not moving en masse to Indonesia for
migrant labor. Please god, say it ain’t so.
I’m used to unfriendliness from embassy
staff—I would have been surprised if I’d been welcomed with open arms. I smile
at the hostile man, and push the festival schedule through the window. “I am
going to the literature festival in Bali,” I say, extra chattily. “I’m a
writer. Here’s my book.” I pull out my book and flash the cover through the
glass opening. He reads the schedule. “Writers’ meeting? Like journalist?
Political?” “Nothing political,” I assure him fervently. “Only fiction.”
Fiction. The word lies between us, with
its own special weight. He considers whether to believe my words about fiction.
He picks up my passport and leafs through
it. “Writers from all over the world are coming. Wole Soyinka, he won the Nobel
Prize!” I babble. I don’t know if Wole Soyinka would have liked me using his
name to cross a border, or at least cross from the glass window of the
unwelcoming security guards to the actual visa section, but I figured this was
as good a use of a Nobel Prize as any. Later, having met Mr Soyinka, I figured
he would probably wouldn’t have minded. The man frowned. He was probably
wondering if the Nobel Prize was political. In desperation, I said: “The man
who wrote Slumdog Millionaire—he’s coming!”
This seems to cinch it. “Okay, you need
ticket to apply,” he announces. “Come back with ticket, then it’s a perfect
application. Come back today. Otherwise, you lose your visa fee.”
As I walk in, I reflect on this tiny moment of profiling.
Because I don’t have a white face, he thinks I am not the right profile for a
visitor to Indonesia. What he doesn’t know is that I am a Nepali traveler with
erratic income but reckless spending habits who will soon drop $2000 in Bali’s
economy in the next month. I will buy a large amount of junk, everything from
batik to fake pearls. I will take art classes and Balinese dance classes. I
will do all sorts of weird things that sustain the tourist industry. Racial
profiling is so bad for the economy. That’s why the Thais don’t do it. And
that’s why their economy is rocking.
I spent the afternoon rushing around
booking my ticket online, and went back huffing and puffing to the embassy to
drop off a ticket by the time the consulate closed. The visa officer, upon
seeing me, was fussy. He said I may not be able to get my visa. They would have
to see. It would take time. But anyways, I should come back in two days’ time.
In two days’ time, I had my visa. “How
much does yours cost?” I asked the Australians lining up for their
visa-on-arrival in Bali’s small airport. “Twenty five US dollars,” said the
sun-tanned man in shorts on his way to a good time in the beaches. I was
miffed. “Mine was $45,” I said, huffily. I felt I’d been charged an unfair
Third World tax.
He took a look at my passport. “But you
got 30 days!” He said, impressed. “We only get two weeks. How did you do that?”
Doing the math, I realized he would have to pay $50 for a month. So I guess I
had nothing to complain about, in the end.
With the visa safely inside my passport,
I decided to do a little pilgrimage of Wat Po. Wat Po is one of the oldest and
largest Buddha shrines in Bangkok. It is located right by the Chao Phraya
river. People arrive by boat, which you get at Saphan Taksin station. So this
is what I did. After a pleasant ride from Ratchathewi to Saphan Taksin on
Bangkok’s famous sky-train, I
walked down, bought my obligatory share of fresh papayas and mangoes for 20
baht, then wandered down the piers. The air was fresh and cool, and the water
slightly choppy. I felt happy as the boat zipped past the many landmarks of
Bangkok, from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to the wooden floating homes on the
river’s edge.
At Wat Po, I bought a bouquet of white
lotus buds as an offering for the Buddha. The buds were smooth and white,
soothing to the eye. Wat Po has the image of the Sleeping Buddha as he lies on
his deathbed, on his final parinirvana stage. The statue is gigantic. I
circumbulated the image, marveling again at the good fortune that makes a
pilgrim from Nepal find herself at Wat Po. Then I walked around the different
courtyards. Wat Po has multiple courtyards and some of them lead into complexes
with hundreds of golden Buddhas. It is all a little overwhelming.
Of course I got lost. I found myself in a
part of the wat complex where the renovations were taking place. The roofs were
being painted bright red. Mirrors and colorful enamel pieces were being inlaid
in mosaics on the temple walls. Some of the workers were lost in work. Others
were napping in the heat.
After a while, all the glitter started to
weary me. Was it just me, I wondered, or did the other people wandering around
also sense that the dazzling array of images were destroying their own
spiritual power through the sheer volume and intensity of the image-making
enterprise? And this is precisely the moment when the Indian couple walked down
the two steps from one courtyard to the next, as if they wanted to address the
question in my mind. Something in my gaze must have struck them, because they
smiled. We stopped to talk. I don’t remember any of our small talk, except for
this. “Thailand has lost its charm,” they said. “Its too commercial.” “ Too
much gold,” the woman said, frowning. “Wait till you get to Burma,” the man
said, and the woman agreed. “It is still so wonderful there.” As I looked at them, I had an image of
old wooden, moss-covered Buddhas, entirely hidden inside trees. A sort of
mystical Angkor Wat hidden in the forests rose in my mind.
There is always the seed of a moment, an
event, an encounter, which has taken me to far-away places. My Burma visit, I
feel, stems from this precise encounter. I don’t remember the couple very well,
except that they were middle-aged, well spoken, possibly a professional couple
with time and money to spare. What, I wondered, lay in Burma? I read Amitav
Ghosh’s “The Glass Palace” from front to the last, but I couldn’t get any
answers. How did the Indian history intersect with Burma? Why did so many
Nepalis come from there? The son of my father’s friend had married a Nepali
woman from Burma. To the entire marriage procession from the groom’s side, the
Burmese contingent had handed out a little purple Thai orchid as well as a gold
coin as a gift. Kathmandu talked about that purple orchid and that gold coin
for months afterwards. What was the strange dichotomy which would make a people
spend extravagantly on marriages on one side, then eschew gold on Buddhas on
the other? Where did all that gold come from, anyways? The whole thing was
baffling. I would have to go there myself to find out.
All that walking made me thirsty. I went
into the little cafeteria to get a bottle of water. That’s when I saw the
fortune-tellers. There was a whole line of them, telling people’s fortunes,
right by the little counter with bottled water, the cans of Red Bull and the
sachet of sunflower seeds. I sat down and observed them. An old man around
eighty got my attention. He had bright blue eyes, a strange thing to see on a
Thai man. He was bright and alert as a bird. He was telling a young Western
woman’s fortune with great sweetness and charm. His English was broken but his
energy was impeccable. I wanted him to tell me my fortune. So I waited. The
young man by his side caught sight of me, made small talk with the old man,
shifted his little papers and apparatus around. I refused to catch his eye. My
fortune would be told by this old man, and this old man only.
Finally, he was free. “Ahhh," he
said, smiling. He took my date of birth, time of birth, and place of birth. He
calculated for a good long while, filling up a little sheet with data. Then he
started to speak. “This year of the cow. You 36 years old. Your brain,” he
said, putting his thumbs up. “Very good.” Anybody could tell from a glance at
me that I was a nerd. No points for that one.
“You good heart,” he said, tapping his
heart. “You good communications.” Then he paused. “Mars, Mercury, Venus,
Jupiter,” he said. “Good ideas, good adaptation. Sometimes one job, two
job—good planning.” This wasn’t very encouraging. My unsteady and erratic
employment history, which frequently included two jobs at the same time, was
causing me some stress. “You like freedom and independence. Sometimes hot
temper.” I grin at this one. The Joshis were famous for their short
tempers. I seem to have inherited
that family legacy.
Then he said: “Past two years, up and down.” I nodded. Yes,
the past two years had been very rocky indeed. The jumbled nature of which
involved love, broken hearts, a $50,000 dollar grant to start an organization,
and a coup in which I was ousted from said organization, the publication of
three books, and the piracy and unsatisfactory distribution of all three of
them.
The old man smiled happily, as if he knew
all this. “From 37 to 39, good.” I breathed a sigh of relief. Well, at least I
got a couple of years of reprieve.
“After November, new love, new marriage.
Man from another country. You happy.” At this point I tried to slow him down
and ask him which November he was talking about, but he continued: “From 40-41,
so-so, sometimes better job. But 42-54, very happy.”
“From 29 to 41, you work very hard. Very
hard work.” I had often wondered myself why I worked so hard for so little
gain. My book of short stories had been rejected in 2002 by publishers, and
here I was, still plugging away at trying to get it published a full ten years
later. I had written another five books of short stories, and two novels. I had
written four film scripts. I had written three plays. All of them unpublished.
“From 55 to 56, take care of health,
family. Maybe operation,” he said. “But no drink, no problem.” He cackled in a
jolly way.
“From 57 to 74, happy old.” I like the way
the Thais say “happy.” They lengthen out the “p” until it sounds trippy. Happpppy.
“On 75, go on holiday around the world.
You long life. No accident. Buddha take care of you. You live old, like me.”
Then he leant forward, and suggested: “You buy land, buy property, buy house.
Sell in old age. You have three houses, like me.” This property advice wasn’t
what I had come to find out about. Forget about three homes, I barely had one.
My parents, traditional Brahmins, who never discussed property, planned to
leave every square inch of their land to my brother and his son—just as they
had given every single rupee for his education.
He takes out a magnifying glass and peers
at my palm. “You three children, two boys and one girl.” Then he starts to
calculate my lucky numbers and my lucky colors, things I don’t really care
about. I wait impatiently for him to finish, so I can ask him more about this
foreign boyfriend. “Red,” he proclaims. “And orange. Very good. Number four is
bad for you.”
I start to ask him about this foreign
boyfriend, but he is already moving on. “You live another country. You make
money, better than office job. After October, moving another country, very
good. Different nationality, good boyfriend.”
I wondered if Thai astrologers always
told women that they would find a foreign boyfriend, go live in another
country, and have three homes. That could very well be a Thai girl’s dream.
All these
things weren’t satisfactory. As I peeled off 1200 bahts, I thought: “At least I
got some good advice on savings and investment. I don’t know when I’ll get
married, but here’s $30 for property investment advice from a smart Thai man.”
Mr Sawong Kontong handed me his card, clipped to my little chart with all the
dates and figures.
***
Now come the strange story of rubies. I
exited Wat Po, feeling a little heady thinking my two rocky years were behind
me. I sat down at the bus waiting station, and opened my Bangkok map. I was
trying to see if I could get a bus to go downtown. This, I realized later, was
my biggest mistake.
The big dark man who showed up was on top
of me in almost a minute. He probably waited for clueless tourists right at
this spot. “May I help you?” He said. I must have looked up, and I must have
caught his eye. From that moment on,
his voice took on a weird booming quality. I could see his finger
pointing to various points in the map as he showed me how I could get to where
I needed to go.
“What a nice man!” I remember thinking.
“What an extraordinarily nice man. So helpful!”
“Here is the place you need to go,” he
says, pointing to the map. “But do you know today is the birthday of the Black
Buddha? This is where the Black Buddha’s temple is. Don’t forget to stop there.
And here,” he says, pointing at some place in the map, and looking me directly
in the eye: “Is where the jewelry expo is happening. There are many shops and
you should stop by and see all the gems being displayed.”
“Yes, but I don’t really want to go
there,” I say. I’ve been warned by various guide-books about gem scams. “I just
need to get to Wat Saket.” I try to sound firm.
“No bus to Wat Saket, but tuk-tuk will
take you.” He looks again at the map. “Very grand expo,” he says. “Very good
gems. You should see. No buy, just see. Big expo.” He looks at me for a moment,
then he says: “You should get a ruby. Ruby very good for you.”
But I did not want a ruby. I smiled at
him, because I didn’t want to let him know what I thought. “A ruby,” he
repeated, looking at me deeply in the eye, become hailing a tuk-tuk for me.
My new Thai friend now says something to
the driver in Thai. The driver
breaks into a broad grin as he looks at me. “This driver, he very honest. He no
cheating. He take you to Wat Saket for forty baht.” Now, any idiot in their
right mind would have realized that forty baht was too low to get from Wat Po
to Wat Saket. But I was not in my right mind. It occurred to me that forty baht
was indeed a major bargain. I got into the tuk-tuk. In my hand, I had a paper
bag containing a few small essential oil bottles I had picked along the
sidewalk. They said: “Lotus” and “Lavender” and “Ylang-Ylang” on their labels.
I broke these open and smelled them, and then in the sudden euphoria I poured
the oils on myself. The tuk-tuk driver looked at me curiously at the mirror. I
feel fabulous as the wind blew through my hair. All of a sudden, a restless
excitement had seized hold of me, as if I was on a major journey. I was racing
through Bangkok on a tuk-tuk, not with worry and gloom, but a great excitement
that I was being driven towards an unknown but fabled destiny.
The tuk-tuk driver drove into a side
street. “Black Buddha,” he said. I
felt annoyed and angry. I did not want to go to the Black Buddha! I wanted to
go to Wat Saket.
Now let me state here that I was in this
odd mental state where my entire being was telling me something was wrong with
this moment. I was in a heady mixture of excitement and fear. I didn’t trust
the tuk-tuk driver. I didn’t want to enter the wat. What if I was going to be
robbed while inside? What was inside? It was a quiet wat—I didn’t see a single
soul walking around as I entered the premises. Could I call out to the monks if
something happened? I looked around for monks and didn’t see a single one. The
other part of me worried the tuk-tuk driver would take off while I entered this
abandoned looking shrine. Every nerve of my body was shrieking and telling me
not to enter the wat. On the other hand, I didn’t know what else to do. It
would look absurd if I made a fuss. However, despite all this, I still did. “I
don’t want to go in,” I say to the driver, not budging from my seat. “Take me
to Wat Saket.”
“You see, you see!”
“No, Wat Saket!”
“Nice Buddha, Black Buddha.” I feel from
his expression that he can’t believe I am being so paranoid. I have nothing to
fear, his disbelieving stance implies. So reluctantly I get down from the
tuk-tuk.
“You coming in?” I asked. He gave me a
look that almost amounted to fear.
“No, no,” he said. “I wait here. You come
quick.”
Inside, it was quiet. A single man was
kneeling, head bowed, praying in front of the large assortment of different
Buddhas. I rush in rather breathlessly. I want to get this over with fast. The
man turns back and looks at me. His face is dark with some inner tension. He
appears to harbor a deep sadness. I ignore his stare deliberately—I don’t want
to start a conversation at this moment. The man gets up, and starts to go
around the shrine. I kneel, and bow before the rather nodescript looking black
statue of the Buddha. As I am about to get up and leave, the man starts a
conversation from the far corner.
“Where you from?” I stop in my tracks.
“Nepal.” Something makes me answer him
very, very reluctantly. I feel I am being very rude, but I don’t want to talk
to him. The Asian feeling of politeness, however, comes to the fore. I cannot not answer him.
“You traveling alone?”
“I am travelling with friends,” I lie.
Whereever I find myself alone, I lie and create whole contingents of travel
companions—the computer industry husband, the two twin children I invented in
2005, groups of friendly travel companions.
“What do you do?”
“I write books,” I say.
“Book writer?”
“Also I make films.” I smile.
“What kind of books?”
“Short stories, novels, film scripts.”
“I am sure you become very famous one
day,” he says, with great intensity. “Your book very famous, like Harry
Potter.” He looks at me, a little withdrawn, a little awed, a little
envious.
“I don’t think so, but thank you,” I say.
I laugh. “Thank you.” I thought of my little book of short stories and to the
major publishing drama in which my Nepali publishers hadn’t given me royalty
despite the books selling well for months. I was burnt out fighting them in the
Copyright Office. Little did he know. I was hardly likely to be J.K Rowlings
anytime soon.
“I am sure. Sure,” he insists. “Your film
very big in Hollywood.”
I laugh. I am still feeling giddy, rushed
and heady. For a moment, I see myself in his eyes—someone with a wildly
successful Hollywood film. It is a dream I have never had before, but from his
gaze, he makes it appear possible. I could one day have a wildly successful
Hollywood film! The thought enters my mind and surprises me. It surprises me
because it had never been my own dream—until now.
That’s when he adds. “You need a ruby,”
he says. “A ruby will help you to make dream come true.”
Now let me tell you, reader, that
although I am a young woman with a fair amount of common sense, and although I
make quick connections very fast, the thought that both these men had told me I
needed rubies appeared to be isolated events at that moment. In my head, this
man was telling me a new story—not one that the booming-voiced man had told me
in the bus station.
I walk out. I get into the tuk-tuk.
“Ready?” the driver looks back at me. “Lets go.” The tuk-tuk drives for about two or three minutes before it
swerves into a side lane again. The tuk-tuk driver insists I get out and enter
the door of a quiet store. I protest again, saying I don’t want gems. But he
has stopped the tuk-tuk, and there is no way for me to walk but in. With a
great deal of reluctance, I enter the place.
The store is full of jewelry in glass
cases, but the place is empty. Then a girl rushes up to ask me: How can I
help you? I feel uneasy, stifled and uncomfortable.
I don’t know why I am here. I feel furious. And then, of course, there is a
woman behind the curving display case. She has on a yellow silk outfit and a
tight matronly smile. It seems impossible to escape interacting with her. I
don’t like the pressure of the girl’s ostentious welcome, and I don’t like this
moment. But again, there is no way to walk but towards the woman who sits there
behind the counter with a benign alligator smile.
Before I know it I am seated in a leather
stool in front of the display case, sweating. The woman is showing me ruby
rings. She quoting figures as high as ten thousand dollars.
I laugh. I say I don’t have that much
money.
She stares at me with disdain. “Well, how
much money do you have?” I have a money belt strapped to my waist, with the
exact amount of three hundred dollars. I still thank my lucky stars I wasn’t
carrying more on me. Then she has
a ring in her hand. “Only three hundred dollars,” she says contemptuously.
I can’t afford the fabulously expensive rings, but someone on a cheap budget
like me could buy a cheap ring,
her tone implies. I felt embarrassed and humiliated.
The ring is curved. It has a tiny ruby on
it. I feel myself taking out my money from my moneybag, knowing something is
very wrong. I don’t even like jewelry, and I find all jewelry flashy and
unnecessary. But here I am, taking out all my money to buy one. All of this
appears to happen very quickly, within a few seconds. I ask, as a last and
desperate measure: “Can I get a receipt?” A receipt, I feel, will somehow
protect me from what I know is clearly an illegal transaction. I can report this, I remember thinking.
She glares at me. “We don’t give
receipts,” she says with great disdain, as if I am asking her for her private
bank account number. “But you can take this certificate of authenticity.”
The certificate is in my hand. So is a
little blue velvet box containing my ruby. My three hundred dollars are gone. I walk out a little
desolately. The tuk-tuk driver snickers as I walk out. He drives for a while. I
am sitting there in the tuk-tuk, somber, as I try to process what just happened
to me back there. Then, in a moment of human sympathy, he asks me: “You alone?
You have friends?”
It is as if he knows that he just took
part in a scam to skim a tourist off all their cash, and that I could end up
without any money in the hotel.
“I have friends,” I lie. I don’t want
this tuk-tuk driver to rob me en-route of my three essential oil bottles and my
bag holding my passport. The tuk-tuk stops somewhere close to the river. “It
very far to Wat Saket,” he says. “I have to make big turn. You take the boat
here in the klong.” I feel desolate as the tuk-tuk driver drives away, clearly
on his way back to collect his share of the loot. I feel strangely berefit. I
have been to this klong before, and I have taken a boat here before, I
recognize. As a boat rushes past me on the klong, I feel like I am seeing a
scene from “Don’t Look Back.” I shiver a little, because I am not sure if the
tuk-tuk driver will come back to kill me. The boat arrives. I get in. The dirty
water sprays in my face, and the boat attendant walking up and down on the
gangplank raises the plastic covering. As I look at all the Thai people inside,
I wonder if all of them are part of a giant hypnotic scam, and soon I will find
myself in a place far away from my destination. The middle class people
clutching their bags of groceries look like actors in a giant swindle. I am to
sit in this boat and be abducted to some faraway place, where they will maybe
rip out my kidneys and my eyes. I have never been so relieved when the boat
arrives at a familiar destination.
A year after this episode, when I had
recovered somewhat from the emotional shaking of this episode, I took the ring to
the jewelry shop on Durbar Marg in Kathmandu, and I asked them to value it for
me. The man took out his magnifying glass. He took a look. “This is a
heat-treated ruby set in white metal,” he said. “The price shouldn’t be more
than $10.”
“Ten dollars?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I
had heard right.
“Ten dollars,” he confirmed.
I am an optimist, in many senses of the
word. I had been scammed of $300, it was clear. I had been taken on one of
Thailand’s famous wild goose chases. Three men and two women had worked in
tandem to hypnotize me, make me open my moneybag and take out $300 for a tiny
piece of heat-treated gemstone. I had never thought I'd become one of those
tourists who'd fall under the spell of a mesmerizering scamster. But then, in
that unexpected way, I'd become one of those victims. But as a writer, I had a
story. Maybe it wasn’t the story I had been looking for. Maybe it was totally
unexpected. Maybe the ruby had shown me how gems had always deceived people,
and how their colors and their iridescence promised more than they gave up. But
yet, at the same time, it gave me a story to pursue. Now, I thought, I wanted
to know about the ruby. Where did it come from? What did it signify? Why did
people think that having a ruby would bring me great luck—as obviously these
men were insisting to me? What, in other words, was the lure of the ruby?
***
April 4, 2012
Rubies, it appears, come from Burma.
I encountered rubies on my first day in
Yangon. I am not sure how a traveler makes a decision to orient themselves to a
new city, but mine was to go to the museum. There has to be a starting out
point somewhere, and being a New Yorker for some years, cultural institutions
like museums have always been my favorite places.
The National Museum of Myanmar, however,
was different. It was, first of all, completely empty, except for one or two
foreign tourists wandering through the desolate haunted rooms. After taking a
quick peek at treasures mentioned in the Lonely Planet, I almost rushed out after twenty minutes of traversing each floor
of the five storey building. Each floor got spookier the higher I climbed. The
building itself reminded me of
state-run institutions in Nepal in the Eighties which no longer exist.
The empty rooms echoed with shadows and treasures nobody comes to see. The
owners are long dead, and nobody cares about the objects or identifies with
them as their own heritage. Unlike Europe, or parts of Asia, Burma’s
institutionalized state museum lacked one vital ingredient--life. No crowds surged
or thronged around in devotion, as I had seen people do in Spain, as they lined
up outside the Prado Museum to see masterpieces of Rembrandt. No young people
wearing jeans and earphones crowded around, creating noise and energy as they
do in Bangkok. The security people are indifferent, merely there to sit through
eeiriely quiet days, with no sense of
respect or responsibility to the objects on display. They seem to
command people to go away.
Perhaps the spookiest moment in Myanmar’s
National Museum comes when you hit the top floor, where there is an entire
floor dedicated to the different races of Myanmar. The long room is shrouded in
gloom, but one can see life-sized models of all the different ethnic tribes of
Buma, standing in spectral silence. They stand there, folorn, with limp arms,
like voodoo dolls who have been frozen by the state for its own purposes. On
the sides are written state slogans about good behavior. I stood there by the door, too scared
to enter the haunted room, then quickly made my way downstairs before the
attendant could wonder why I wasn’t in there, admiring the greatness of the
artwork.
On one of the dark, quiet floors, there
is an entire range of royal jewelry. And everywhere I turn there are rubies and
sapphires, carelessly sprinkled on spittoons and little jeweled boxes. It is
magnificent. I wondered why no Burmese entrepreneur had minted a fortune yet
taking these models and creating new versions of them for the international
market. How interesting it would be to take these beautiful objects and
carefully recreate the years of royal splendor of a bygone age. The only
problem, of course, is that anything newly minted would be manufactured in a
factory in China with imitation paste instead of gems, and the girls who made them
would be paid a pittance and the final product would be sold in Walmarts for
$3. Or if they were mined out of a mine, it would be impossible to ever figure
out if the workers were treated fairly and paid a fair price.
On the first floor are royal garments of
silk and brocade. It makes me think of my friend Prabal Gurung, who has now
become a fabulously famous fashion designer who makes beautiful clothes for
Hollywood actresses. Some of the clothes are startlingly modern, unusual cuts
ready for the runway.
On my way out, as a man politely tried to
push on me a souvenir about the museum. I just as politely refused. I had
already paid $5 to support this institution, and I felt I had done my part.
There were whole chapters in Lonely Planet about
the ethical implications of paying money to state-run institutions in Myanmar,
since the money would go to the junta and therefore continue the repressive
political system. I hoped the $5 would go for soap and toilet paper at the
toilet which I had used in the museum, and which had no soap or toilet paper,
and not to buy a bullet for the military.
I spy a woman who’s also been wandering through the museum
ahead of me. She has white hair, and looks about sixty. I catch up with her and
start a conversation. I am bursting to discuss the haunted-house museum. Her
name is Elsie and she’s from Holland. She’s been to Myanmar in the past, this
is not her first time. “I almost had a panic attack in there,” I say. “It’s a
masoleum.” She laughs and admits that its not the best kept museum in the
world.
Elsie knows a good restaurant close to
here, she says. Would I like to join her for lunch? The restaurant is indeed
nice and clean, with bamboo furniture and seating in the garden. I order an
aubergine salad and ice tea, both of which are excellent. The prices are
entirely reasonable and I feel cheered up to discover this beautiful restaurant
with excellent food. Elsie and I have one of those interesting conversations
that you can often strike up with intelligent women you meet in strange places,
where both of you realize that you
share the same intellectual heritage but probably will not spend more than an
afternoon together. Both of you enjoy the conversation, without expecting it to
stretch beyond a few hours or perhaps a day or two that you will overlap in the
same city. Elsie pays for lunch, and we have an interesting discussion about
the concept of “going Dutch” which she said was an American misunderstanding of
Dutch mores. As we finish lunch, Elsie says: “I am meeting my friend this
afternoon at the Gems Museum. Would you like to go with us?”
Elsie says: “Three thousand” in a firm
voice to the taxi driver, and he instantly agrees. The taxi-drivers in Yangon
appear to be a lot more pleasant than those in Kathmandu, whose level of
truculence and aggression has increased over the past seven years. With Nepal’s
political change from authoritative monarchy to political anarchy has come a
free-for-all economy. Taxi-drivers have taken full advantage of this shift,
often refusing to move at all unless offered a substantial chunk of cash. The
meters which regulated fares in Kathmandu have long been tampered with, with
the government office that calibrates the meters taking Rs.2000 per “call” to
wind it up beyond the legal limit. Some sort of taxi order, however, seems to
prevail in Yangon.
As an Austrian had said so approvingly
this morning at the hotel: “Myanmar people, they have discipline. I never go to
India because Indians, they talk very loud and fast and I think there must be
chaos.” I ask him if he’s ever been to India, and he admits he hasn’t. He’s
just imagining the chaos—but in some senses, he’s right. Even the Indians of
Burma appear calm and phlegmatic, not the hyper-excited citizens of Delhi or
Bihar. People in Burma, in general, exude a hushed silence that could be
interpreted in multiple ways—as a free-thinking democrat from a louder Asian
country, you could say the people were repressed by the military state, or as a
Vipassana practitioner you could say they were calm and balanced, or as an
European tourist you could say they were well-behaved.
The Gems Museum is located at 66 Kaba Aye
Pagoda Road. It takes us a while to get there. Elsie's friend Gretchen
instantly starts to shop at the two floors of small stores, all lined with
precious gems. Rubies and emeralds and sapphires are carelessly strung on
cotton threads in the haphazard stores that line the two floors, like they are
so many colorful beads, strung like Christmas ornaments. Gretchen cannot be
persuaded to move upstairs: her hands are full of cheap pearl necklaces and
rubies earrings.
Eventually I wander up to the third
floor, which houses the Gems Museum. Once there, looking at the giant rocks cut
in half, showing their precious jewelled insides, I begin to wonder about the
unreality of it all. All these giant boulders, with precious sapphires, rubies
and emeralds showing from their neatly sliced interiors, make me wonder about
the nature of preciousness. Why do we consider these crystallized rocks, pressured
by time and the earth's volcanic weight into beautiful colors and shapes, to be
so valuable? Why are people willing to kill for these things? What is it about
the hallucinatory colors and shapes of these stones that makes us believe we
are rich? Then I look up from the stones I am staring at, I realize with a
shiver the Gems Museum is empty, and silent, as an abandoned mine.
***
At the Shwedagon Pagoda, where I went the
next morning, I felt that silence. All around me, people murmured as they ate
lunch, rested or chatted with friends inside the many pavilions. The hush
permeated the edifices. The elderly looked shrunken, as if they didn’t have
enough to eat, but the young looked like the young everywhere—beautiful in
their youth, flirting with boyfriends and girlfriends, laughing at silly jokes.
The Shwedagon is a strange place, filled
with child-faced Buddhas, neo-mythical
creatures that appear to be modeled on the sphinx, Buddhas with closed
eyes with circular spinning neon lights behind them, farcical caricatures of
Englishmen, and pagodas in various architectural styles. There are statues of
giant owls. A very large crocodile is the balustrade of the steps that descend
to the outside, adding to the atmosphere a sinister sense of danger.
A man detached himself from the shadows
and started to follow me around. “Where are you from?” He asked. My instinct
was to avoid touts, and I walked ahead, but he didn’t seem to mind, and kept
following me. Reluctantly, I answered:
“Nepal.”
“This pagoda was built by Nepali people,” he said, pointing
to one where there appeared to be a lot of Buddhas.
“I don’t think so,” I said, contradicting
what I thought was his “you stupid, gullible tourist” line.
“Yes,” he says earnestly, seemingly
unpeturbed by my disbelief. “They made money trading rubies and jade. Now many
live in Bangkok. This pavilion has 64 Buddhas.”
“Oh,” I say. Perhaps he was telling the truth. Maybe the
Nepalis did build this pagoda—it was plausible. I’d just spied a Nepali
grandmother, wearing her choli, and with the dhungri and bulaki jewelry, only a few
minutes ago, walking around near the shrine before she vanished. In the course
of my travels I would come to find out my intuition in following the ruby had
been right—the Nepalese had a very strong historical connection with rubies
indeed. The primary area in Burma where it was mined, Mogok, was controlled by
a company which only hired Gorkhalis since British colonial days. Nobody else
was allowed in this area. The reason, I was told, is because the British and
then the Burmese junta only trusted the Gorkhalis with this precious commodity.
Each time I asked people about Mogok though, they told me tactfully foreigners
were not allowed into this restricted area. I would not visit Mogok, but I
would come to meet many of those who originated from there, and I would realize
that many people who originated from Nepal had become wealthy trading in rubies
through the last two hundred years of Burmese history. But that, dear reader,
is another story.
“I’m a driver,” he says. “My car, it is
being repaired. So I have no work now for two weeks. I thought I’d come to
pagoda.” That’s why I am free to show you around, he says, in a friendly way.
Of course, I should have been suspicious, and I was. But it is hard to shake
off touts.
He takes me to a Buddha statue, and asks
me to pour water on the statue nine times. He hands me a silver cup. I’m happy
to do it. As I pour the water over the Buddha, this thought comes to me:
“Please free the people of Burma from suffering.” I feel a tiny bit of
uneasiness with this wish—I do not want to be like the people with the White
Savior Complex (as Teju Cole has wittily coined), and it is not my place to
wish just one people to be free of suffering. On the other hand, the slow pace
of the old people, looking down with hopeless eyes, the young people laughing
around me, exquisitely vulnerable in their naivete, the young children with
troubled eyes who wanted to know what existed beyond these pagodas—all of them
move me. I don’t know if the alternative to what exists now—the rush of global
transnational capitalism that will flood this country—will necessarily bring
more peace. But what is clear is that something is amiss here, and I wish it to be changed.
I think of the cute little boy who’d just
looked at me with that troubled look that seem so familiar to me—the look that
must have been on my own face as a child as I’d seen the tourists and notice
their sense of ease, comfort and mobility. Those qualities had appeared so
foreign, so distance, so inaccessible, to my eyes. I was a little Brahmin girl,
shuttered within high walls with no hopes of leaving. And yet, through that
glimpse of that other world, a new life had presented itself to me. I wonder
how much of those high walls that shielded me inside a gated compound still
remains inside me—perhaps it is a lifelong process, chipping away at the sense
of “self” and “other” engrained by a cloistered upbringing. Perhaps that sense
of distance can only be cancelled with Buddhist awareness and compassion of our
common human nature. The lectures of the Tibetan rimpoches which I’d attended
over the years came back to me. The Tibetan Buddhists have a remarkable ability
to see the nature of our suffering, and through it, our common humanity.
Does Vipassana meditation, which I’d
learnt from SN Goenka’s tradition, allow for this kind of universal
connection? I closed my eyes and
am back again in the green sunlit hilltop of Pokhara, where by the lake we
listened once again to the voice of our teacher teaching us a technique he said
went back to Gautama Buddha. I remembered again what the essential core of that
teaching had been for me—the awareness of going back to that molecular level,
in which all ego dissolves into the universal transcendence of understanding
that we are all a manifestation of the same energy. Goenka-ji had learnt the
Vipassana technique from a Burmese monk. Burma, for those of us who got our
first taste of Buddhist meditation via Vipassana, had become known as the land
where Buddha’s original teachings had been preserved intact. Burma, therefore,
was the ultimate pilgrimage place.
How did a culture steeped in this
tradition of universal connection become the home of a military junta? In one
way, it makes sense. Vipassana, the core of the Hinayana Buddhist tradition,
emphasizes perfect control of the mind, not to be disturbed by any ripples of
greed, hatred, anger, envy, jealousy et cetera. The external circumstances do
not matter. What matters is the equilibrium of the mind. So human rights
abuses, violations against minorities, slave labor—none of this can bring
outrage because outrage disturbs the mind. This sense of Hinayana Buddhism
being a pure tradition, one above and beyond all spiritual pathways, may then
have led to the downfall of Burma.
The Mahayana Buddhists as found in Tibet,
on the other hand, have boddhisatvas with long swords who fight off demons. The
boddhisatvas are enlightened beings who have chosen to return to earth to save
people who need their help. Ingrained in this idea is the notion that all is
not perfect on Planet Earth, that people often do hurt each other, and that a
spiritual tradition must have a way to deal with demons and oppressors (whether
through tough love or compassion), and cannot simply focus only on one’s own
mental impurities. In Tibet, the tradition of ahimsa or non-violence has been
so ingrained the only way for people to protest against the Chinese regime is
self-immolation. And yet even in this violent act is the acknowledgement that
an action is needed—and that one cannot sit there passively waiting for one’s
own mentally equanimous mind to deal with external injustice.
Reading “George Orwell in Burma” by Emma Larkin, you would think the giant repressive military
junta regime gets its entire inspiration from British colonialism. She gives so
many examples it is hard not to be convinced that the repressive military
system is solely the fault of the British. But why it took on this uniquely
Burmese form is of course left unanswered. Why did the Indians, who also
experienced British colonialism, not exhibit the same repressive system later?
Although the confluence of spiritual traditions which constitute Hinduism is
the place where the notion of the perfect, balanced mind started, Hinduism also
has a vocal tradition of fighting against injustice. Two of its most important
religious epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are magnum opuses of wars
fought in the name of justice. Perhaps the very loud Indians who argue
endlessly about all social issues are one reason why a military junta was never
able to take over power in India.
Some may argue and say secular India, not Hindu India, keeps at bay a
military junta. This is possible—except secularism by itself is not the
defining factor to stop a military junta. There are many secular countries in
the world where the military is very powerful and juntas have ruled supreme. Of
course, India’s democracy is not perfect either—with army violence against
Kashmiris and ethnic minorities in the north-east paralleling those of the
abuses of Burma’s army. But at least the political system hasn’t been seized by
the military, as it has in Burma.
I open my eyes again. My guide is telling
me about the giant bell in one of the pavilions. He says: “The British try to
steal this bell, but it heavy. It fall into the river. Then the Burma people
bring it back.” I gathered the bell had lain at the bottom of the river. Nobody
could budge it. The British officers told the Burmese they could have it back,
if they could dredge it out of the bottom of the river. Which is what they did,
using simple manpower. He hands me a long wooden pole and shows me how to hit
the bell to make it ring—I wonder if it is to scare away the ghosts of
colonialists of the past. The three adorable children sitting underneath the
bell like little pixies move away, giggling. I try it once, twice. It makes a
long hollow boom, like the booming sound you hear in Tibetan monasteries. The sort of hollow boom that breaks your
body open with its aural power, making you shiver—from the top of your head
to the tip of your toes, I can hear Vipassana guru
Goenka’s voice intoning--like you are falling apart into atoms.
The Tibetan Buddhists chant: Om mani
padme hum. Om is the jewel in the lotus.
Om is the sound of universal connection,
the primordial sound that encompasses the universe. The lotus is the Buddha
dharma. And om, therefore, is the jewel in the lotus.
I looked out at the mis-en-scene in front
of me—the serene Buddhas, the pagodas signaling imperial ambitions, the thin
elderly people taking their evening walks, the laughing women under their
umbrellas, and then the smiling tout in front of me who is surely going to
overcharge me heavily for his volunteer tour services—and wonder if I have not
found my ruby in this simple line.
You can purchase Emanations here:
https://www.amazon.com/Emanations-Chorus-Pleiades-Carter-Kaplan/dp/1729772536
You can purchase Emanations here:
https://www.amazon.com/Emanations-Chorus-Pleiades-Carter-Kaplan/dp/1729772536
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