The Lady and the Peacock (28 page)

Into this moment of high drama stumbled Suu's two sons, visiting their mother for the first time since Christmas—without their father, who had had to stay behind in Scotland where his own father had just died. They brought a surreal air of boyish normality with them. “Ma Suu had a lunch meeting with the CEC,” wrote Ma Thanegi, “while I ate with Kim and Alexander. I kept Kim company, playing Monopoly with him.” It was the family's favorite game, and had been the occasion for Suu and Michael's rare clashes of temper (for which reason they had given up playing).

“The army allowed the CEC to leave around 2 pm,” she went on, “and after that we sat around chatting while some of the boys [the student
bodyguards] took naps.” The surreal mood persisted; a perverse, infectious mood of gaiety stole up on them. “We all agreed that Suu would not be put under house arrest,” Ma Thanegi recalled, “as people might march up and rescue her.” Nonetheless, that Suu would be arrested was now taken for granted.

We wondered where she would be taken to. No one seemed at all worried; we chatted amiably and cheerfully, cracking jokes. Suu asked us who would stay with her and everyone said they would. I said I would, I only needed to have my art materials brought in for me.

Around 4
PM
an army officer came to the gate and asked permission to see her. We all walked out to the gate, Ma Suu and I first dabbing on some perfume which I had with me in my holdall. We said to each other that we refused to be arrested without French perfume.

She and her sons were escorted into the house and the rest of us into the large bamboo shed at the end of the garden used for classes and meetings. We sat around, and one MI asked Ko Myint Swe to make a list of who would like to stay in the house. He did so, but we knew that was not going to happen. It grew dark; we could see moving bright lights in the house and knew they were taking videos.

We were then herded out onto two large trucks parked near the front of the house. I went inside to take my bag of clothes that I keep under my desk, and my holdall. Ma Suu ran to fetch lavender soap and a large tube of toothpaste for me plus her expensive leather sandals which she said were very good for trekking. I told her I doubted if I would be walking anywhere but she insisted. We hugged and told each other to take care. Neither of us had a look of sadness, despair, or fear on our faces.

Ma Thanegi and her colleagues were taken to prison. Aung San Suu Kyi was put under house arrest for “endangering the state,” Section 10(b) of the penal code.

Nine months later, despite the fact that all its senior leaders were under lock and key, the NLD won the general election by a crushing majority, gaining 392 of parliament's 485 seats. Overall, parties opposed to SLORC and army rule won more than 94 percent of the seats.

But Suu remained in detention, and the army remained in power.

She was not to emerge for nearly six years.

B
UDDHISM
teaches that nothing is permanent, nothing is fixed, all is in flux. If Aung San Suu Kyi had metamorphosed within a year from an Oxford housewife into her nation's longed-for leader but was now a prisoner in her family home, her earliest days were no less mercurial. Raised the child of the most honored family in the country, she had been born a fugitive.

A photograph in Suu's short biography of Aung San shows her father as Minister for War in Japan's puppet Burma government in 1943. Shaven bullet head, tunic tight on the Adam's apple, lower lip thrust out, what one would have to call a fanatical gleam in his eye: a model servant of the God-Emperor.

Yet the picture is misleading: Like his colleagues in the Burma National Army, which he had founded, Aung San was already discovering that, as one of his followers put it, “If the British sucked our blood, the Japanese ground our bones.”
¹
“He became more and more disillusioned with the Japanese,” wrote William Slim, commander of the Allied Fourteenth Army. “Early in 1943 we got news . . . that Aung San's feelings were changing. On August 1, 1944, [as the Japanese and the British were still fighting it out for control of central Burma] he was bold enough to speak publicly with contempt of the Japanese brand of independence, and it was clear that, if they did not soon liquidate him, he might prove useful to us.”
²

“Liquidation” was a lively danger, even though Japanese resistance to the Allied counterattack was rapidly disintegrating. Then in March 1945 Aung San's Burma National Army (BNA) defected to the Allied side, surprising and killing some Japanese officers, and Slim responded by providing Aung San with arms and supplies and bringing his small but useful force into the Allied scheme.

The collaboration seemed to be working when, on May 16, 1945, with the aplomb he showed all his life, Aung San presented himself to Slim
in person. There followed an interview so extraordinary that Slim felt it worth recording verbatim in his memoirs. He wrote:

The arrival of Aung San, dressed in the near-Japanese uniform of a Major General, complete with sword, startled one or two of my staff. However, he behaved with the utmost courtesy, and so, I hope, did we. He was a short, well-built, active man in early middle age, neat and soldierly in appearance, with regular Burmese features in a face that could be an impassive mask or light up with intelligence and humor. I found he spoke good English . . .

At our first interview, Aung San began to take rather a high hand. He was, he said, the representative of the Provisional Government of Burma, which had been set up by the people of Burma through the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League . . . He was an Allied commander, who was prepared to cooperate with me, and demanded the status of an Allied and not subordinate commander.
³

Slim's eyes were surely widening in amazement. “I told him that I had no idea what the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League was or represented . . . I pointed out that he was in no position to take the line he had. I did not need his forces; I was destroying the Japanese quite nicely without their help, and could continue to do so . . .” He went on to remind Aung San that he was wanted on a civil murder charge, for which there were witnesses, and that Slim was being urged to put him on trial: During Aung San's progress through southern Burma with the Japanese in 1942, it was alleged that he had personally executed a village headman he accused of betrayal. “Don't you think you are taking considerable risks in coming here and taking this attitude?” he demanded with some heat.

“No,” Aung San replied.

*

While Aung San in newly liberated Rangoon was giving a textbook demonstration of chutzpah, dozens of miles to the west, taking refuge in the simple, huddled villages of the Irrawaddy Delta, his wife Ma Khin Kyi was heavily pregnant. Protected by five soldiers in Aung San's Burma National Army, she, her sister and her two toddlers had fled Rangoon in March, all disguised as poor civilians, as her husband prepared to defect
to the Allies: If any Japanese forces remaining in the city had identified her and her children, their revenge could have been terrible. There, on June 19, 1945, in the tiny village of Hmway Saung, Aung San Suu Kyi—her name, she explains, means “strange collection of bright victories”—was born.

Aung San's improbable gambit with Slim succeeded: He won his trust, and even his affection. He had had the temerity to claim equality with the Allied army commander despite being a Japanese collaborator who was wanted for murder “because you are a
British
officer” as he put it, a reply that made Slim laugh. Aung San had a shrewd idea that the Allies would want to make use of his force; he also showed remarkable insight into British psychology. Slim wrote:

He went on to say that, at first, he had hoped the Japanese would give real independence to Burma. When he found they would not, but were tightening the bonds on his people, he had, relying on our promises, turned to us as a better hope. “Go on, Aung San,” I said. “You only come to us because you see we are winning!'

“It wouldn't be much good coming to you if you weren't, would it?” he replied, simply.

. . . I felt he had scored again, and I liked his honesty. In fact I was beginning to like Aung San.
⁴

With the shattered and scattered remnant of the Japanese Army trying to flee east into Thailand, the Allied forces aided by the BIA had retaken Rangoon without a fight, entering the city in the first days of May. And now with charm, daring and exquisite timing, Aung San had established himself in the good books of Burma's newly returned masters—after nearly four years fighting for the other side. Soon after Suu's birth he had a note hand-delivered to his wife: All the Japanese were gone and the city was again at peace. The family was reunited in Rangoon.

The home in which Aung San Suu Kyi started life was 25 Tower Lane, a large but plainly decorated villa in its own grounds, built some fifteen or twenty years before for a Chinese or Indian merchant, located in the salubrious suburbs of the capital north of the commercial center and a mile from the Shwedagon pagoda. Here Suu learned to crawl, then to walk, then to read; she discovered the meaning of friendship and of
physical courage and also—twice before the age of nine—the meaning of grief.

For many years it was possible to explore Suu's first home, because after the family moved out, in 1953, it became the Bogyoke Aung San Museum. But the slow and surreptitious unhitching of the regime from the person of Aung San, described in the previous chapter and which began with the scandal of the “Aung San Suu Kyi” One Kyat Note, has now reached its apogee: The house is still standing, just, but when I visited in 2010 I was waved away by a man in the grounds; the family in residence took shelter indoors to avoid being filmed. The garden is overgrown and the house is in the last stages of disrepair. A man in the tea shop nearby told me it opens only once a year, on July 19th, Martyrs' Day—the last remaining vestige of the national cult.

Suu came to consciousness in what must have been a warm, bustling, loving, stimulating home. Her brothers Aung San Oo, the eldest, and Aung San Lin, were aged two and one respectively when she was born. A second daughter, Aung San Chit, was born subsequently but died after only a few days.

Tower Lane was the first, proper, permanent home the family had enjoyed, following a series of temporary lodgings. Peace had come; independence was surely on the way, and Aung San, the undisputed leader of the nation, who soon resigned his commission in the army to concentrate on politics, would be a shoo-in for prime minister. Important visitors thronged in and out, debating the issues of the moment with Aung San in the big reception room downstairs. But Suu's mother was no purdah wife, lurking deep indoors polishing the silver: Ma Khin Kyi was articulate, well-educated and strong-willed, heir to the Burmese tradition of robust, emancipated women. The domestic tasks were taken care of by Indian Christians, who continued to work for the family for decades.

Aung San must have been a fleeting presence in the family during these feverish days, the broadly smiling but distracted man who flew out to his chauffeured car in the mornings, laden with files and burst back into the house in the middle of the day for a high-speed family lunch; till late at night the children in their beds upstairs—the eldest, Aung San Oo, was only four when Aung San died—would have sniffed the cheroot smoke of his important guests and heard the urgent, impassioned murmuring of
adult voices as the nation's future was discussed and dissected downstairs by the Burmese men in whose hands it would shortly repose.

But none of that lodged in the memory of the small girl with the protruding ears and staring eyes, the baby of the family, who was just two years and one month old when her father went away one hot morning in the wet season and never came home again.

“My father died when I was too young to remember him,” she wrote in the Preface to her book on his life.
⁵
That was honest of her, and honesty was the principle most fiercely inculcated by Ma Khin Kyi. Because the memories she did retain she no longer trusted. “I have a memory of him picking me up every time he came home from work,” she told Alan Clements. “I do seem to remember that whenever he would come back from work, my two brothers and I would come running down the stairs to meet him and he would pick me up.”
⁶
But that memory, she decided, was unreliable. “I think this may be a memory that was reinforced by people repeating it to me all the time. In other words, I was not allowed to forget. So it may be a genuine memory or it may be something I imagined from what people kept telling me.”

Yet flashes of true memory emerged from time to time, perhaps at moments of exhaustion or great stress. In her diary of their journeys, Ma Thanegi records Suu telling her that one time she had refused to kiss her father, “because she had a cold,” she said—which was a fib. And once when he failed in his daily attentions, she remembered ordering him, “Please pick up the child!” and when he said, “Which child?” replying petulantly, “
This
child,
this
child!”