Queen Supaya–Lat

The young Queen Supaya-lat and King Thibaw lived within the walled citadel of Mandalay. Their fabled palace with its tinkling fountains and moats of floating water lilies could have with ease belonged to Scheherazade's tales. And within the charmed walls of the palace, life was very pleasant indeed – pink-cheeked handmaidens from the Shan state played hide and seek with the Queen, their pretty feet showing just a little from under the shimmering pink silk skirts. Burmese rubies glowed on their ear lobes and strings of pearls around their necks – against the dark teak of the palace walls they made a very fetching picture indeed.

Sometimes a bird from a foreign sky flew into the Queen's quarters and the Queen – no, no she did not kill the poor creature. Instead she soothed it, gave it some water to drink, placed perhaps a gold leaf on its beak. And her handmaidens laughed in merriment at their Queen's act of clemency, reminiscent of the young Prince Siddhartha's tenderness for the stricken swan:

But ominous clouds were darkening the horizons of this Eden. For it was said that the young Queen Supaya-lat was as ambitious and as strong willed as her mother, the Dowager Queen Hsinbyumya-shin, King Thibaw's stepmother and the Middle Palace Queen of his father, the late King Mindon. Like her mother she plotted and conspired to protect the sovereignty of her husband's throne and what she conceived to be the purity of the royal lineage.

The irrepressible wit

November 1967, Rangoon

Khin Myo Chit was writing an editorial for the Working People's Daily. She hoped it would be her last piece for the government-sponsored paper. She strongly willed it to be so. Outside her window, she noted with some satisfaction, Saladin, her many-horned cactus was in bloom. The King of the Desert looked regal standing atop the rock garden she had had constructed from some ancient grindstones she discovered in a corner of their plot of land.

But it would not do to get distracted. Her fingers flew over the keys of her old trusty Remington, a name so glamorous that it could be paired with ease with an Olivetti or a Marilyn, she thought.

As she wrote she could not suppress a chuckle. Ko Latt (U Khin Maung Latt), her husband of many years and party to many of her hare-brained schemes, cocked an enquiring eyebrow from across the room where he sat reading on a deckchair. She noticed he looked faintly worried and returned to his book with a slight frown creasing his forehead.

Khin Myo Chit was writing an editorial she had titled Writers and Awards. It was a time when authors and poets were called literary workers and encouraged to write extolling the socialist state. Of late the Ne Win government had announced national literary prizes for writing taing-pyu pyei-pyu or “nation-building” literature. As it turned out, it was an ambitious euphemism for propaganda literature, inspiring some worthwhile literature but also a spurt of unctuous if poor quality writing.

Khin Myo Chit, aware that it would not do to blatantly condemn the Ne Win government, instead turned a jaundiced eye on the earlier colonial regime.

I received the picture of Tara which forms the frontispiece of this book from Anna (Allott) when I was a couple of months into my research on Myanmar. The picture had been drawn by Aung San Suu Kyi in the early 1980s and sent to Anna as a printed card on the occasion of the new year of 1993. It was accompanied by a poem extolling the beauty of Tara by the Fifth Dalai Lama and a touching message from Dr Michael Aris on behalf of Aung San Suu Kyi who was then serving a long sentence of house arrest. The picture took me by some surprise, not only at Aung San Suu Kyi's artistic skills of which I had been unaware but because the Tara I met here was nothing like the Hindu goddess I knew since a child. The Tara who adorned our family altar and in front of whom my father had been in the habit of saying a quick prayer for protection before he dashed off for his day's work had looked far more fierce. She wore a garland of severed heads and her unblinking third eye sent shivers down my spine. The Tara Aung San Suu Kyi had drawn formed the heart of Mahayana Buddhism. She was far gentler, her right hand lifted in a gesture of benevolence, her eyes bestowing encouragement and blessings on all sentient beings. She was obviously a part of the crucial process of adaption by which imported ideologies and deities were localised by the Buddhist societies of South and Southeast Asia. Was she also a part of the gender sensitivity to which Andaya refers while writing of Hindu deities who had been subsequently divested of their androgyny and who were central to Southeast Asia's religious history? Perhaps yes.

For me the new Tara I encountered was an embodiment of the centuries of cultural exchange between India and Southeast Asia on which was founded the early civilizations of the region. In equal measure she personified human virtues of compassion and courage which remained extremely relevant to the subject matter of this book. I had read of Sujata or Maddi but these images of virtue and kindness from Buddhist literature were more than countered by other jataka narratives which portrayed women as seductresses, hindering men's spiritual progress with their feminine wiles.

Amay, give us back our mountain…

Letpadaung copper mine, 14 March 2013

Word had travelled fast in the small hamlets around the Letpadaung Mountain. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was visiting the Sar Lingyi Township days after the government-appointed investigation commission chaired by her passed its final verdict on the Letpadaung copper mine. The commission had decided not to close the controversial mining project. Normally a visit by Daw Suu (Aung San Suu Kyi) would be an occasion of jubilation but today the assembled crowd of villagers and monks were grim faced. The dirt tracks which ran through the villages around the Letpadaung Mountain were abuzz with farmers accompanied by their wives and daughters, dressed in their dusty farmhand longyi, brandishing handwritten posters. They sought justice, some protection from being evicted from their homes and the land they had tended for generations. More than angry, they felt a deep sense of betrayal. Amay (mother) Suu (Aung San Suu Kyi) had let them down.

She came later in the day. The sun was bright, yet could not dispel the faint haze of dust rising from the mine debris. Straggly fields of sesame and pigeon pea lay submerged under the rubble spewed out daily by the dump trucks. Against the balding craters of the Letpadaung Mountain the emerald green of her eingyi (buttoned blouse) and sarong, the yellow flowers tucked low in her hair looked beautiful.

Hey! Is that it? Twenty years!

2 September 1994, Insein

It is my twenty-eight birthday today, the second that I have spent in prison. From where I lie, flat on my back with my arms under my head, I can see a pocket-sized sky. The window is set high in the wall and through its iron grills and the roll of barbed wire I watch the clouds shift and the sky darken as day turns to night. It is the time when the Shwedagon shimmers like burnished gold and the smell of freshly fried fritters fills the air. I think that is what I miss the most – the colours and smells of my town outside.

I think of my other birthdays when we would start the day with a visit to the monastery and my siblings, friends and relatives would crowd in into our already crowded apartment at Sanchaung. But now the nest is empty – a brother is in Taiwan, trying to keep the family afloat with his meagre pay and the youngest – Win Aung – the last of the brood, everybody's favourite, is imprisoned here with me at Insein, accused of substance abuse. And my ageing parents…

Suddenly the walls of my cell seem to close in on me. I feel angry; beads of sweat dotting my forehead. I pace the cell in closed circles, my breath catching in my throat.

…I suppose I am yet to learn to think like a prisoner. And yet I have spent most of last year in this cell, in this 12×8 bit of space where life is measured out in tiny tin cups while the ocean roars outside! Imperceptibly one day of my solitary confinement slides into the next as I watch the rats scuttle from one hole to another and ants share my scanty rations.

Revolution! Revolution! Revolution!

18 September 1988, Mandalay

Ludu Daw Amar reached for her inkwell and pen. Outside her window, dawn was breaking – the first streaks of orange in the east and a waning moon in a still dark sky.

The night had ended but the day was yet to begin.

It was the mercilessly hot month of Tawthalin when fretful inhabitants of Mandalay call the sun a prawn-killer and pray for the weather to break. A monk stood at the corner of 33rd Street, his head bent, holding an alms bowl in the crook of his arm, strangely detached from reality. Daw Amar wondered if later he would be joining the monastic boycott against military donors.

Her mind was not at rest, she could not sleep. Ever since last month when with the torrential showers of August a new revolution had broken in Burma her blood had been singing. At 73 she felt alive once again, as if she was still a student at the Rangoon University, eagerly awaiting life. She felt a sense of urgency, she needed to write another editorial and hand it over for publication. Initially they had to do it stealthily, often distributing handwritten sheets. Of late Nyi Pu Lay had been bolder. Nyi Pu Lay, she thought with a sigh…the only one of her three sons…

But there was no trusting Saw Maung and his army. She had to caution the boys, Min Ko Naing and Htay Kywe and the many others leading the movement. At this point they needed to remain united and calm for the military awaited another spark. She thought of Thakin Aung San's daughter with her father's forehead and eyes.

Daw Amar picked up a paper with a vivid blue peacock printed at the top – a bird taut with bottled up rage – and wrote, “Revolution! Revolution! Revolution!”