Golden Earth (30 page)

Night, which lay like a stifling cloak upon Pyinmana, brought no relief from the heat. In the station precincts, there was a curious gathering of passengers, and of those who used the station-yard for their social promenadings, in a long line on each side of the train which would leave next morning for Rangoon. The JSM came teetering up to explain. He was sucking an American Cream Soda through a straw in the belief that it was country spirit, and his expression, as the beads of perspiration formed and followed regular channels down his face, was of a man bravely enduring torture. The people, the JSM explained, were waiting for the water-truck. At any moment an engine would draw it along the rails past our train, stopping at each carriage to fill up the small cistern carried in the roof. Usually there was an overflow from each cistern, and those who were waiting would catch the surplus, or as much as they could of it, in their cups, or just wet their clothes with it.

Shortly afterwards the water-tanker came along, with an entourage of well-dressed citizens, who, as the water streamed down the coaches, pressed themselves tightly against the woodwork, or even got down on the track and crouched by the wheels to allow the water to trickle on their upturned faces, their chests, their backs. Some of the men stripped off their shirts, soaked them and put them on again.

Finding that while the passengers luxuriated in momentary
dampness
our compartment had been left empty, I went in to begin the stealthy massacre of the mosquitoes and cockroaches, a task which I had carried out in several furtive instalments on the journey from Mandalay to Yamethin. This time I was less successful. All the cockroaches, which were as tame and trusting, and as fat in their way as monastery catfish, were disposed of in a few seconds, and I was quite absorbed with the mosquitoes, which could be caught in the air, sometimes two at a time, and squashed by closing the fist, when I heard a sound like a slight groan. Mr Pereira had hoisted himself silently into the carriage, and was
standing
behind me, his eye fixed on the corpse of a cockroach, lying feet uppermost in the middle of the floor. Did I realise, he asked me, as soon as he could get command of his voice, that this poor, assassinated creature might quite well be my grandfather in another incarnation? The obvious answer to this was that had my grandfather indeed been
reincarnated
as a Burmese cockroach, I should have regarded it as an act of kindness to release him from what seemed to me – and would probably, from what I remembered of him, have seemed to him – an unsatisfactory existence. This only produced a sermon on Kan and Karma, on cause and effect, into which the matter of merit-acquisition, and thence,
pagoda-building
inevitably entered. Rebellious at last, I asked him if he didn’t think that in his own case, it would have been equally, or even more, meritorious to have given his money to the Mandalay leper asylum. The classic answer would have been, not at all, because the lepers were working off in their present unfortunate condition the adverse balance of their karma, created through misdeeds in previous existences, and there was therefore nothing much to be done about it. But by this time Mr Pereira had recovered himself completely and, remembering the need for
Absolute Tolerance, however mistaken a point of view, mildly agreed that it might have been a good thing – the soft answer that turneth away wrath, which, in his case, meant one more mark on the credit side of the balance.

Thus the dreadful night wore on. Since the departure platform of the Rangoon train had become also the town’s social centre, there was an enduring babel, in which the keynote was sounded by a mad woman who stood in a clear place for many hours, haranguing the crowd. She was well dressed and cared for, and whenever her hair, which was crowned with cornflowers, escaped its bounds, someone would rearrange it for her. Because of the dry quality of the heat, the temptations and pleasures of life had been simplified, and reduced to the alleviation of thirst. The devil presiding over the delights involved was a dreaming, white-bearded Hindu, who kept a stall with bottles of Vimto and American Cream Soda. His stock, besides these, consisted of a block of ice, and an ordinary carpenter’s plane. When a drink was ordered, he would get the cap off the bottle after a long struggle, take a glass out of a slop-pail full of dirty water, and pour in the contents of the bottle. Then he would unwrap the block of ice from its grimy sacking, plane off a sliver, crumple it and put it in the glass, when it would instantly vanish, as if plunged into boiling water. He was agonisingly slow, and as these bottles of branded mineral waters are supposed in any case to contain a quantity nicely calculated not quite to quench the thirst, the only thing to do was to keep a standing order. Once the ice ran out, and there was a long delay while another block was dragged by means of a pair of clamps and a chain along the platform.

About midnight, I carried away what remained of the old man’s bottles, went back to the carriage and climbed into my bunk. Mr Pereira, although not asleep, seemed pleasantly relaxed. ‘This evening, Mr Nair, I was able to obtain my customary Wincarnis. I believe that I shall pass a good night.’

The JSM by ransacking the town had found a supply of country spirit and was occupied by delusions of grandeur. A rumbling Johnsonian undertone had entered his speech.

‘Yesterday was it? – No, of course, it could not have been yesterday –
but no matter – I encountered at the residence of a friend of mine, where I was taking food, the ADPW (Assistant Director of Permanent Ways). After saluting him, I broached the matter of promotion.’

‘And what response did he vouchsafe?’

‘My dear colleague –’ (the voice faltered, with a sudden alcoholic change in the wind’s direction) ‘he invited me to get to hell.’

‘The dickens he did! These buggers are all the same.’

The next day was passed among the parched greys and yellows of harvested paddy-fields, which now awaited the rains. From this dun wilderness arose nothing but a skyline serration of pagodas, and the low formless silhouettes of towns which had once been dynastic capitals, the greatest and most glorious of South-East Asia in their day. ‘… The streetes thereof are the fayrest that I have seene … the lodgings within are made of wood all over gilded, with fine pinacles, and very costly worke, covered with plates of golde.’ Thus wrote Caesar Fredericke of the capital of the kingdom of Pegu, now dissolved in anarchy. The names of these towns were now, as we passed through them, the motive of a melancholy commentary. Ela. ‘That was a nice place. It was a coaling station, but it has been burned several times, also recently. Steel Brothers’ sawmill, also burned down.’ Toungoo. ‘These are territories dominated by the Karens. Much damage has been done. I do not think they can rebuild. It is stated that the leaders have offered ceremonial food to the monks who will present a petition for amnesty. Also these men’s leader Saw Tapu Lay is observing daily Sabbath. I do not know. But still shooting continues with all modern weapons, and the dropping of bombs.’ Pegu. ‘Mostly there are Communists who will not agree that food shall come into this town. Therefore all the paddy remains in the villages, and the farmers cannot eat so much rice. They would like to sell this paddy to the Government who will pay rupees 285 per hundred bags. But this rice they may not sell and they cannot eat it. In this town the people do not eat. It is very ruined.’

I
N RANGOON
the great annual pagoda festival was being held, that of the full moon of Tabaung, which coincides with Easter in the West. The Shwedagon Pagoda is the heart and soul of Rangoon, the chief place of pilgrimage in the Buddhist world, the Buddhist equivalent of the Kaaba at Mecca, and, in sum, a great and glorious monument. ‘The fairest place, as I suppose,’ thought Ralph Fitch, ‘that is in the world.’ Fitch had seen the splendours of the Mogul Empire, and it is a
consolation
to think that as the Shwedagon has been, if anything, improved since Elizabethan days, there still exists one tiny oasis, in a desert of pinchbeck modernity, where the prodigious glamour of the ancient Orient endures.

The special sanctity of the Shwedagon arises from the fact that it is the only pagoda recognised as enshrining relics not only of Gautama, but of the three Buddhas preceding him. Those of the Master consist of eight hairs, four of them original, given in his lifetime, and four others,
miraculous
reproductions generated from them in the course of their journey from India. These, according to the account in the official guidebook, flew up, when the casket containing them was opened, to a height of seven palm trees. They emitted rays of variegated hues, which caused the dumb to speak, the deaf to hear, and the lame to walk. Later, a rain of jewels fell, covering the earth to knee’s depth. The treasure buried with these relics was of such value that, centuries later, the report of it reached the ears of the King of China, who made a magic figure in human form, and sent it to rob the shrine. This creature, says the chronicle, was so dazzled by the pagoda’s appearance, that it hesitated, and while in this bemused state was attacked and cut to pieces by the Shwedagon’s spirit-guardians. It was the habit of the Burmese kings to make extravagant gifts for the
embellishment of the Shwedagon, diamond vanes, jewel-encrusted finial umbrellas, or at least their weight in gold, to be used in re-gilding the spire. The wealth that other Oriental princes kept in vaults and coffers was here spread out under the sun to astound humanity. Two of the three greatest bells in the world were cast and hung here. Both were seized by foreigners – one by the Portuguese, and one by the British – and both, causing the capsizal of the ships that carried them away, were sunk in the river. Shinsawbu, Queen of the Talaungs, won so much respect by building the great terrace and the walls, that the most flattering thing the Burmese could think of to say about Queen Victoria was that she was a reincarnation of this queen.

Early on the morning of Good Friday, when the festival was at its height, I took a car out to the pagoda to gather a few last-minute impressions of the Burmese
en fête.
The Shwedagon lies three or four miles to the north of the town. The last quarter of a mile I covered on foot, while ahead a volcano of gold rose slowly up from among the trees, into the dusty blue of the sky. Pilgrims, when afar off, prostrate themselves in the direction of this cone as it comes first into sight. The road was lined with shrines and monsters. Streams of jeeps went past, taking early-morning worshippers. A few of them were disguised with a carnival decoration of cardboard peacocks, and were carrying boys, about to enter the novitiate, to pray at the pagoda before the ceremony began. The boys wore expensive imitations of the old Burmese court dress, with gilt helmets and epaulets like sprouting wings, and their attendants struggled to hold golden umbrellas over their heads.

I left my shoes with a flower-seller at the entrance to the covered stairway, bought some flowers from her, and began to climb the steps. There were two or three hundreds of them, left purposely rough and uneven – like the
pavé
in a French village – to ensure a slow and respectful approach. All the way up, there were stalls selling flowers, gongs, votive offerings, and ugly toys. Barefooted crowds were climbing and descending the steps with the murmuring of hushed voices, and the
rustle of harsh, new silks. The air was full of the odour of flowers standing in vases. From somewhere above, light was spreading down the dark shaft, and from its source, too, the sound – like a deep, melodious breathing – of gongs.

Coming out of the cavernous approach on to the wide, glistening expanse of terrace, I plunged suddenly into the most brilliant spectacle I had ever seen. Fitch, a merchant adventurer, who had surveyed without comment the splendours of the Venice, the Ormuz, the Goa and the East Indies of his day, had stood here in admiration, although unable to refrain from a sour aside on the vanity of consuming gold in such a way. The terrace is flanked by shrines, with a press of guardian ogres, fabulous beasts, and mild-faced, winged gorgons squeezed in between and behind them; and then, in the immediate background, rises a golden escarpment, a featureless cliff of precious metal, spreading a misty dazzlement, in which the crawling shapes of pilgrims, sticking on their gold-leaf, are black, vaguely seen insects.

The innumerable foreground shrines were banked with flowers, and decked with the votive parasols which usefully protect an image from the sun in a tropical country, and often replace the candles necessary to light its cavern in the north. Round the glittering pyramid went Rangoon’s Easter-parade of the gay and the devout. When they wanted to pray – which they did most poetically, with offerings of flowers held between the clasped palms – there were hundreds of images to choose from, of gold, of silver, of marble or wood. (Like most peoples who incline themselves before images, Buddhists insist with the gravest emphasis that they are not worshipping the material object, but the great principle it represents.) People worshipped individually, or in groups, in the large shrines or out in the hot sunshine of the terrace, prostrating themselves vaguely towards the spire of the pagoda. Year old babies were lowered tenderly into the ritual position, where, often unable to straighten themselves, they sprawled in adoration, until recovered. On this day there were many ways to acquire merit: by buying water (in petrol cans) from the sellers and pouring it over the images that sat in the hot sun; by re-lighting candles that had gone out, and replacing parasols that had fallen down; by taking
up the deer’s antlers provided, and striking a gong, and then the ground beneath it, to call the attention of the nats of the earth and sky to the worshipper’s prayers.

Until the recent troublous times Buddhists from all over the East, journeying as freely as did European pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela and Monte Sant’ Angelo, visited the Shwedagon for this festival. Now, apart from the Burmese, there were only Tibetans, whose tenacious piety nothing could daunt.

A few hundred yards from the foot of the pagoda, the Government had organised a secular festival, a combination of a pwè and industrial samples-fair, that was not quite successfully one thing or the other. At night it came to vociferous life beneath the golden symbol of renunciation shining in the moonlit sky above it.

There was an open-air theatre with an actress and two clowns, but it was not very good. Perhaps the atmosphere was wrong. The formal organisation seemed to have stripped the thing of its spontaneity. Although the loudspeakers poured out a tremendous babel of noise, and the lights hurt the eyes, this could not compare for authentic quality with the pwès got up by the neighbours of the various districts of Kemmendine.

I spent half an hour watching the boxing, noticing that pongyis were allowed in to see this ungodly spectacle without charge. Half the audience were members of the yellow robe. The boxers came out and prostrated themselves, foreheads touching the ground, to their corners; the obeisance was returned by their seconds. The challenger then executed a very slow war-dance to the music of drums and flutes, stopping occasionally to beat himself on the chest in the Tarzan manner. After that the opponents advanced towards each other with ballet steps, like
Ramayana
champions about to hurl fiery javelins. Suddenly they went into action, leaping into the air like fighting-cocks. There was much initial flurry, an exciting spectacle lasting a few seconds, when both men tried to floor each other with flying kicks. But this exuberance
soon died down, as it does in fighting-cocks too. A clinch followed with unrestricted use of knees, fists and elbows. The winner is decided when, as a spectator explained, ‘the first blood oozes out’. With typical regard for foreign susceptibilities this man was kindly doing his best to outline the rules governing the contest, when he was roughly interrupted by a forthright Westernised fellow who said, ‘Nothing is debarred to them. They may even kick each other in the sensitive parts.’  

At midnight a straight theatrical show started in one of the tents, and I sampled an hour of a performance that would go on all night. The first scene showed a young Burman engaged in the hopeless courtship of a girl who, it was made clear, led him on, only to spurn him cruelly. At first she smiled, but the moment he approached, her smile turned to a grimace of contempt. These tactics were repeated several times. It was most baffling. But then the scene changed and we were whisked back in time a hundred years or so, to be present at a function of the court, with our hero in a previous existence as a prince, and the lady who had first been treating him with such unexplained malice, in the role of a minor lady of the palace. By their gestures it was evident that the prince had trifled with her affections, and was now casting her off in favour of one more suited to his station. The scene changed again … and so did the epoch. What an aid to a flagging plot, to be able to extend the device of the flashback, not only to the characters’ pasts, but to their previous incarnations! But also, alas, how it holds up the action!

Much of the industrial section of the festival could not have been more boring. As most native Burmese industries are still in the planning stage, there was little to see. One booth gave a soap-making demonstration; another tried to extract drama from the workings of an automatic
self-photographing
machine; a third displayed a revolting collection of Kewpie dolls, under a banner which said, ‘Burma makes fine rubber toys’. But there was one exhibit – and it was the main one – which amply compensated for the dullness of the rest. This was the pavilion the Government had taken for its anti-corruption campaign. The Burmese
have no objection at all to the washing of dirty linen in public, and at this time Burmese newspapers were full of stories of the various rackets practised by Government officials. The current scandal was over
import-licences
, in which, it seemed, a great trade was going on. They were usually obtained by persons who had no experience whatever, and no capital, but who happened to have a friend or relative in the Government. Sometimes such shadow-firms, with accommodation addresses, turned out, upon investigation, to be conducted by the wives of the high officials themselves. In any case, the licence when granted was sold to a firm of established reputation, usually at a price equal to the landed value of the goods – ninety per cent of which, however, was paid by the intermediary, or shadow firm, as a bribe to the official granting the licence. As an immediate result of this system, the prices of the imported goods affected were enormously increased, usually to double the normal figure, or more. What was more pernicious in the long run, from the national point of view, was that although in a desperate financial condition, Burma found itself importing all kinds of useless luxuries upon which this toll could be levied. One of the letters published in the press instanced the licences granted to import silk from Japan, which Burma, as a silk producer, does not require. The importers turned out to be a timber-cutting company and a flour mill.

In the Anti-Corruption Pavilion, these manipulators were dealt with, with a hint of defeatism, perhaps, as far as this life went. Seeming to resign themselves to the wicked man’s prosperity in this world, the Burmese Government had set themselves to show what awaited him in the next. For their illustrated fable they had chosen a mild fellow of average virtue and weakness, lifted from a comic-strip or toothpaste advertisement, and his downfall was ascribed to the promptings of an ambitious wife, a fact which drew much protest in the Rangoon press from feminists.

In the first of a series of pictures he is shown relaxing from
departmental
cares in the surroundings of a modest home, listening thoughtfully to the pleadings of his wife, who, seated on the arm of the sofa, bends over him to pour the poison of covetousness into his ear. In Picture Two, he has already sold his soul to the devil. The furniture has
been modernised, and there is a big radio-set on the table. The honest mediocrity of his appearance has been rectified. He wears a made-up turban. His wife – since the dress of Burmese women has reached an apex of taste which no mere access of ill-gotten wealth can assail – is as before; but there is a twinkle of gems at her throat. Picture Three. Having
overeaten
, the husband dies of an acute attack of indigestion. His soul is seen leaving his body. In a vertical position, and respectably clothed, it floats upwards, and is about to pass through a modernistic candelabra. Four. A judge of hell receives him, in appropriately Dantesque surroundings: a rocky area, where huge vultures perch at intervals. The judge is dressed, with the solid conservatism of the last generation, in the Burmese
equivalent
of a morning suit and top-hat. Picture Five. It now comes to light that the young man has only once accepted a bribe and, most fortunately, it is also discovered that the link connecting soul and body is not quite severed. He is to be given another chance. But to make sure the warning has not been lost, the judge first takes him on a brief, conducted tour of hell, which is organised, on Gilbert and Sullivan lines, to make the punishment fit the crime. Thus arms-traffickers are chased by ravening hounds across a landscape set with bayonets. Corrupt Public Works Department officials are run over by ghostly replicas of their
steamrollers
. Excise men who have succumbed stagger blindly through a ravine seething with the fumes of noxious liquors. Co-operative officials who misappropriate rations queue up, ration card in hand, for molten silver to be poured down their throats. Railway executives who sell privilege tickets and take bribes for freight priorities are flogged by demons with lengths of rail. Meanwhile, as the final vision reveals, the unfortunate young man’s wife has already remarried, and is busily engaged in spending his loot with her new husband.