The Lady and the Peacock (31 page)

Norman Lewis experienced all this at first hand. “The last occasion when Burmese affairs had been strongly featured in the British press,” he wrote, “had been in 1948, when the Karen insurgents had taken Mandalay and seemed to be about to overthrow the Burmese government. Since then, interest had died down . . . In July 1949, the Prime Minister had announced that peace was attainable within one year. Having heard no more I assumed that it had been attained.”
²⁶

Lewis envisaged a leisurely tour of the whole country, preferably arriving in the northwest from Manipur in India and working his way down. His delusions did not last long. They “were stripped away . . . within thirty-six hours of my arrival. On the first morning I bought a newspaper and noted with slight surprise that a ferryboat crossing the river to a suburb of Rangoon had been held up by pirates and three members of the
crew killed.”
²⁷
In a village twenty miles away, “the whole population had been carried off by insurgents. Serious fighting seemed to be going on, too, in various parts of the country . . . there were a few extremely vague reports about the government troops capturing towns . . .” The most perilous part of his severely foreshortened journey was when he insisted, against all advice, on traveling from Mandalay to Rangoon, Burma's two principal cities, by train.

The Burmese government's problems in combating communists and other insurgents were aggravated by the absence of Aung San. His successor, U Nu, was enormously popular with ordinary Burmese on account of his sweet face, his charming temperament and his Buddhist piety. But he had none of Aung San's steel, and only a fraction of his political savvy. The party he had inherited from Aung San, the AFPFL, was less a coherent party, more a ragbag of rivals from different parts of the political spectrum, each with his entourage. And as the communist and ethnic insurgencies continued to rage and the country struggled to recoup the prosperity it had enjoyed before the war, the AFPFL began to come apart.

Confronted by a bitterly divided party after the general election of 1958, U Nu found himself obliged to invite the army to take over temporarily to restore order in the country. General Ne Win duly became temporary prime minister and the army went to work cleaning up the squalor Lewis had observed in the streets of Rangoon, which had got much worse over the years, and enforcing a degree of tranquility in the rest of the country. In 1960, true to his remit, Ne Win politely handed power back to U Nu, who, popular as ever despite his failings, won another large mandate in that year's election.

General Ne Win, known as “the Old Man” or “Number One.”

But U Nu's new government was never to complete its term. Ne Win had enjoyed his taste of power, and now he wanted some more. Heavily influenced by the chauvinistic, anti-Western Japanese during his years of training there with Aung San, bitterly prejudiced against Burma's prosperous Indian community after an early business failure, and with a strong puritanical streak which sat oddly with his taste for the pleasures of the flesh, he saw much that he wanted to do with his country. And after returning to his barracks in 1960, he began plotting to take power, not at U Nu's invitation but on his own initiative, and permanently.

It was a move that required careful preparation: He wanted the takeover to be peaceful, so potential rivals and enemies of army rule needed to be dealt with well in advance. One of these was Aung San's widow. Aung San had always opposed the idea of army rule, which is why he resigned his commission before entering politics. His widow was close to the prime minister, who had not only found her a new home and turned the previous one into a museum but had also set her on a high-profile career in public service.

The appointment of Daw Khin Kyi as ambassador to Delhi in 1960, the first time a woman had been made a Burmese ambassador, would normally have been described as a great honor for the woman who was now chairman of the Social Planning Commission. So it was—but it was also an excellent way of removing a person of enormous symbolic importance from the scene; a figure who, even if she remained politically taciturn, could easily become a focus for enemies of army rule. In the old days, the first and crucial step for a newly crowned Burmese king was to dispose of potential pretenders. These days they did not roll them up in scarlet carpets and have them trampled by elephants; instead they sent them far away, on honorable state business.

Thus, in 1960 Aung San Suu Kyi and her mother boarded a plane for Delhi. Suu's years of exile were about to begin.

T
HERE
is a certain irony in the fact that the house where Daw Khin Kyi and her daughter set up home in Delhi is today the headquarters of the Indian National Congress party—and as such is plastered with smiling images of the woman who, thanks to her close family connection to the man who negotiated the nation's independence, has for years been the most powerful person in India: Sonia Gandhi.

Even in 1960 that elegant bungalow at 24 Akbar Road, in the gracious, leafy heart of Lutyens's Delhi, was in the Nehru family's gift. Jawaharlal Nehru had seen in Suu's father Aung San a comrade and a fellow spirit; when they met in Delhi as Aung San was on his way for crucial negotiations on independence in London, he gave him sound advice and a new set of clothes. When his widow arrived nearly fifteen years later with her daughter to take up her appointment as Burma's ambassador—her son, Suu's surviving brother, Aung San Oo, was by now at boarding school in England and only visited in the holidays—he made sure she was set up in style. The bungalow was temporarily renamed Burma House.

India and Burma were about to move in different directions, the army taking Burma down its lonely path to a peculiar form of single-party socialism while India remained committed to multiparty democracy and was still firmly in the grip of the party that had struggled for and won independence. But in 1960 the similarities between Rangoon and Delhi would have been far more noticeable than the differences.

Flying in from Rangoon, Suu would have noted the same fiery weather, and similar brilliant flowering trees lining the streets; the same broad boulevards, built by the former colonial power and ideal for military maneuvers if required, and a huge military cantonment within easy reach of the city center, just like Rangoon's.

Even the ethnic composition of the capital would not have been unfamiliar, for a majority of Rangoon's population was of Indian descent until Ne Win began compulsory repatriation. A dozen years after
both countries had gained independence, traveling from Rangoon to Delhi was like moving from the provinces to the center. English was the lingua franca of the elite, a language Suu was already quite at home with, thanks to the English Methodist High School; the privileges of the political and diplomatic caste she belonged to were quite as much taken for granted as the poverty of the masses; and in both cities modern Western culture seeped in, filtered but not entirely blocked by distance and Asian morality.

Yet Delhi was a center as emphatically as Rangoon was a province, and Suu's four years in the city gave her a perspective on the land of her birth; her discovery of Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and the other giants of India's struggle for political and cultural emancipation were to prove a vital stage in her intellectual development, one which bore fruit twenty years after she left India for England.

India and Burma both shook off British rule in the late-1940s, within five months of each other; but India had borne the colonial yoke for the best part of three centuries—with consequences for the nation's development that Suu slowly came to appreciate as Burma grew steadily more oppressive and claustrophobic under army rule.

But for the time being what mattered was that she was abroad, but without the disorientating sense of being an alien. She was fifteen and a half on arrival, and her mother enrolled her in the closest Delhi equivalent to the school she had just left, run not by American Methodists but Irish Catholic nuns: the Convent of Jesus and Mary, with sections for boys and girls, “separated appropriately by the cathedral,” as one of her best friends put it.

That friend was Malavika Karlekar. The daughter of a senior Delhi civil servant, she was to remain close to her for the next seven years, and is still a friend today. She and Suu formed two-fifths of what Malavika called “a gang of five,” their friendship forged in the rigors of “a dreadful school.” “I don't think Suu liked it either,” she added.

“I soon hated my new school and till well into adulthood would avoid going anywhere near it,” Malavika wrote in a memoir of her childhood. “I hated the teachers . . . and though I made friendships that have lasted through the years, felt constantly inadequate.”
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Although the school was packed with students from different religious backgrounds, many of them Hindus, the Irish Jesuits tirelessly thrust
Roman Catholic Christianity down their charges' throats. “There was no proselytization but when the gong rang at midday we were all made to kneel and say the Angelus, we had to say the Lord's Prayer in the morning, and Hail Mary,” Malavika remembered. “Scripture was a compulsory subject for the Senior Cambridge exam, and we studied the Gospel according to St. Mark. Though not an official subject for the final examination, there was also Moral Science, a hodgepodge of dos and don'ts, all with a strong Christian undertone.”

Some teachers were also racially condescending, a reminder that the entrenched racism of colonialism was only a few years in the past. Their English teacher was called Mrs. Ince: “a good teacher,” Malavika concedes, but a racial snob. “One day, Mrs. Ince had the arrogance to punish the entire class for something or other and shout, ‘What kind of families do you girls come from?' at a class of forty-plus girls standing with their heads down. She was greeted by silence from the daughters of senior armed forces personnel, bureaucrats, diplomats and businessmen. Clearly we were not taught to question or answer back—either at home or in school.”

Malavika continued, “The best thing about school was the new set of friends I made”: three Indians and Suu. Previous friendships were thrust into the margins: “Life with my school friends took over.”

Despite having flown in from the other end of the ex-empire, Suu was embraced without any strain. “She was not at all exotic,” Malavika recalled in an interview at Delhi's Habitat Center, “and she was extremely plain! You wouldn't ever think so, but she was extremely plain. She would come to school in the ambassadorial Mercedes driven by Wilson, their driver, her hair in two neat plaits and just a trace of arrowroot on her face.” What looked like arrowroot was actually
thanaka
, a paste produced by grinding a type of tree bark, which has been used by Burmese women for centuries as a face cream.

Soon the five of them—Malavika, Suu, Anjali, Kamala and Ambika—were spending much of their free time together, outside school as well as in. Malavika said:

There was a lot of coming and going between people's homes. We were very close, as kids are. Her mother was a friend of my parents: It was a very small society. The five of us would spend lazy Sunday afternoons gorging
on delicious khao suey, rice with prawns, at Suu's house. Daw Khin Kyi would get this great big meal organized, she'd be there and she'd come and say hello to us. We were scared of her: Suu was under her strict supervision.

We never felt Suu was any different from us [ . . . ] We didn't talk about Burma or the fascination of her father, but her mother would say to her, you must remember who you are. Of course we knew who her father was, my parents all knew about Aung San, it was part of the postcolonial discourse in South Asia. There's no question about that. But to us she was no different from any of the rest of us. It wasn't, “Oh, she's the daughter of an assassinated leader”; rather, “She's the daughter of an ambassador.”

While we were always aware that she was the daughter of the maker of modern Burma, she never spoke of a life in politics. In fact, if I remember right, her interests were highly literary. But what I do remember is her upright posture, never an adolescent slouch, and great pride in lineage. “I will never be allowed to forget whose daughter I am,” she would often say. History proved her right.

Harriet O'Brien, the daughter of a British diplomat then based in Delhi, visited 24 Akbar Road around this time and was powerfully struck by the refined atmosphere.

“Delhi, characterized by much heat and disorder, seemed to evaporate as we walked into the Burmese Residence,” she wrote years later.
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The living room was divided by elegant lacquer screens and was cool and very exotic with finely worked silverware on coffee tables. India outside was dirty and earthy in comparison to the neat and delicate sophistication of Daw Khin Kyi and her house. She wore longyi and
aingyi
and her hair was pulled back into a tight bun on the top of her head where it was ornamented with an ivory comb, a gold pin and a single flower.