The Lady and the Peacock (33 page)

And Suu blossomed like a lotus flower.

She had left Lady Sri Ram College after only one year, while the rest of the Gang of Five stayed a further year to complete their first degrees there. And when Malavika saw Suu again—they were to take the same course at St. Hugh's, Oxford, but one year apart—her friend's transformation was remarkable.

“This sophisticated Suu emerged,” she remembered. “Before she had worn her hair in a ponytail, but now she cut it in a fringe, she wore these tight white trousers and had a Moulton bike . . .”

Back in Rangoon, Suu's old classmate Tin Tin helped out a painter friend who was looking for a model: He wanted a pair of hands to paint. But when the smart new Suu returned for a visit, the friend took one look at her and pleaded with her to sit for a portrait. “I was really annoyed!” said Tin Tin. “Suu looked so beautiful with jasmine in her hair and the
fringe—she painted Suu's portrait and it was very, very nice . . . The ugly duckling had turned into a swan.”
¹

On her arrival in London, Suu stayed for a few weeks at the Chelsea home of her guardians, the Gore-Booths, then went up to Oxford as a fresher at St. Hugh's to start her course in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

She made an immediate splash. Large-scale immigration from the Indian subcontinent had yet to get under way: England was still predominantly a white, Anglo-Saxon country, and Suu, who may have been the first student in the history of the college to turn up for classes in longyi and
aingyi
, was petite, beautiful and exotic.

She had changed from a stiff, over-protected adolescent into an elegant and fashionable young woman. Shankar Acharya, an Indian student who was also studying PPE, a friend of Malavika and her gang, got to know Suu well during her first year, though they were never more than friends. But he conceded, “Every male who met Suu had a little bit of a crush on her. So let's not pretend that that dimension was totally absent.”
²

Yet although something in the Sixties' air had brought on Suu's transformation—her release from Daw Khin Kyi's strict supervision was doubtless another factor—she found herself strongly out of sympathy with the moral relativism growing rampant all around her, of which Swinging London was the most famous manifestation. Malavika described the mores in which she and her friends in Delhi's elite were raised as “post-colonial Victorian” and there is something of the prim and puritanical Victorian about the way Suu reacted to her new environment. But if it had only been that, if she had just been a provincial person with a lot of catching up to do, she might have shed those attitudes after a while, as others did. Instead, as her new English friends were to discover, her moral certainties were firmly rooted.

“She had strong views about her country, and about right and wrong,” said Robin Christopher, another Oxford contemporary and friend. “She had a high sense of moral rigor, an almost visible sense of moral purpose. She would not do anything that she considered was wrong: She just wouldn't! That shone through in an almost naïve way, but always touched with humor.” But where did her certainties come from? “She was very widely read in literature—it was she who introduced me to
Jane Austen, and me an Englishman,” he said. And as Christopher saw it, Suu's morality was “a mixture of her own traditional Burmese background and identification with bits of English literature. It was very curious . . .”
³

Over the years, a handful of Suu's women friends have been strongly enough affected by Suu to record their memories of the friendship with a special eloquence and affection. Ma Thanegi in Rangoon many years later was one; and at St. Hugh's she encountered another. She was Suu's close contemporary, a few months older but starting the same course in the same term. Her name was Ann Pasternak Slater, the niece of the great Russian novelist.

“We got to know each other in Oxford, as freshwomen at St. Hugh's College, in 1964,” Ann wrote in a memoir of the friendship.

I have to admit that I first approached her simply because she was so beautiful and exotic. She was everything I was not. I came from an Oxford home and Oxford schooling . . . I had spent the long summer between school and university in statutory fashion—hitching round Greece, picking grapes and maize in Israel, traveling deck-class across the Mediterranean with
Anna Karenina
for a pillow. Suu's tight, trim, longyi and upright carriage, her firm moral convictions and inherited social grace contrasted sharply with the tatty dress and careless manners, vague liberalism and uncertain sexual morality of my English contemporaries.
⁴

How did Suu herself regard Oxford, and herself in it? For most British students, to gain a place at Oxford or Cambridge was and remains the great prize, the foundation of a good career, a priceless opportunity to build a network of useful contacts; it is an achievement in its own right, cause for jubilation. Yet there is nothing in the record to suggest that Suu saw it this way.

She did not appear to be in awe either of Oxford or of England: She was doing what her mother wanted her to do, and what a girl of her age and class and intellect was capable of. And far from being a social climber, she seemed to pick her friends merely on the basis of liking them.

“When I first got to know her as a student I can remember her talking very proudly about her father, and teaching me how to pronounce her name,” Pasternak Slater said in an interview at her home in Park Town, opposite Suu and Michael's last family home in Oxford.
⁵
She continued:

All of that was a very important part of her total personality. But she was not a social climber in the least. She was extremely sort of democratic in her friendships. They were multiracial and included a Ghanaian girl who I didn't find very interesting, outside the Indian social and intellectual elite who were the other people she knew.

Then there was the matron of St. Hugh's who she was very kind to and who was very kind to her, and an elderly lady, a friend of our family, who was a terrible bore, a single Jewish spinster artist who Suu was extremely kind to, always hospitable and always polite—just as she was, with less effort I hope, to my mother, who was another foreign oddity.
⁶
In this way she made friends with people who were of no possible use to her, and she was not looking over their shoulders at a party or something, on the contrary.

Suu was an anomaly from the outset: an exotic belle who showed no interest in testing the value of her looks and breeding—who on the contrary was fiercely hostile to the prevailing morality of the university.

Suu had arrived at the most sheltered and peripheral of Oxford's five single-sex women colleges, founded by Elizabeth Wordsworth, great-niece of the poet, in 1886. It lacked the classic medieval cloisters of the city's more venerable colleges, and its buildings were unremarkable and generally undistinguished. In compensation it was endowed with spacious grounds and plenty of trees and greenery.

Its north Oxford location “was popularly dismissed as ‘too far out,'” wrote Pasternak Slater in her memoir of Suu, “a full three minutes” bike ride from Balliol or St. John's,” and the college had “a demeaningly high reputation for hockey. As freshers we were housed in the heavy main building. Dark brown doors; long, dim corridors; bleak sculleries where the homelier students simmered hankies and bedtime cocoa.”

Talk of sexual liberation was all around—this was, after all, four years after the Lady Chatterley trial and two years after the Beatles' first LP—but at St. Hugh's at any rate it was rarely more than talk: For most of the freshers it was more a torment than a promise.
⁷
“When we first arrived,” Pasternak Slater's memoir continued,

there was an active myth that news of the rare male visitor used to be tapped out on the central heating pipes running from room to room. Only a decade or two previously, another rumor ran, when men came visiting, the women's beds had to be moved out into the corridor until their guests
had left. We certainly had to be in by 10 pm, or sign a late pass releasing us until midnight at the latest. A warren of nervous adolescent virgins and a few sexually liberated sophisticates made for an atmosphere airless and prickly as a hot railway compartment.

In this setting Suu was delightfully antithetical, an original who was at once laughably naïve, and genuinely innocent. All my memories of her at that time have certain recurring elements: cleanliness, determination, curiosity, a fierce purity. How do I see her? Eyebrows furrowed under a heavy fringe, shocked incredulity and disapproval: “But
Ann
! . . .” We are in the basement laundry room, starching piles of longyis and little sleeveless blouses. She is teaching me to iron. She is teaching me to eat rice neatly by hand . . . She is showing me how to carry off long dresses plausibly . . . She taught me to twist and tie a longyi round my inappropriately broad, unoriental waist; to sit on the floor, legs tucked away so that not even an ankle showed; to walk upstairs with only a slight furl of skirt twitched aside, not a great heaved armful in the English manner. Even with familiarity, much remained exotic—her proud parentage, above all. But no less evocative now is the tiny tuft of silky hair under her chin, the block of sandalwood she ground for face powder, the abundant scraps of sample silk she collected for dress trimmings, the fresh flower worn daily in her high pony-tail . . .

There were tea parties of interminable oriental decorum, whose wit and finesse were imperceptible to my coarse western ear. And then the long night gossip in other students' rooms, where Suu's assumptions seemed merely absurd.

Everyone was on the hunt for boyfriends, many wanted affairs, sex being still a half-forbidden, half-won desideratum. Being laid-back about being laid was de rigueur—except that most of us were neither laid back nor laid. There was excitement and anxiety about the unknown, an atmosphere of tense inexperience dominated and dragooned by the few vocal and confident sexual sophisticates. It was extremely difficult to preserve any kind of innocence in such a setting. To most of our English contemporaries, Suu's startled disapproval seemed a comic aberration. One bold girl asked her, “But don't you want to sleep with someone?” Back came the indignant reply—“No! I'll never go to bed with anyone except my husband. Now? I just go to bed hugging my pillow.” It raised a storm of mostly derisive laughter.
⁸

If Suu's reaction to the new moral consensus ushered in by the pill struck her Oxford contemporaries as hilariously anachronistic, her shock at the ethical quagmire in which she had landed was unfeigned.

England might have been the colonial oppressor, but both in Rangoon and Delhi she had learned that it was also the fount of learning and wisdom, the land of Jane Austen and George Eliot, of John Locke and Wordsworth and John Stuart Mill. Gandhi, asked for his opinion about Western civilization, said he thought it would be a good idea, but that was just a quip: He carried around one of the works of John Ruskin, and his social philosophy was based as much on primitive English socialism as on anything suggested by the Vedas.
⁹
But on her first direct encounter with England, not in some benighted slum but at the high altar of scholarship, Suu learned that the moral values with which she identified England were crumbling.

For the first time she found herself in a country where Aung San and the Burmese independence struggle meant very little; and where Buddhism meant less than nothing to the vast majority, while those few who thought they understood it were mostly quite wrong. It was a moment of lonely self-definition. If we can locate the moment when Suu discovered the need to dig in her heels and declare her own moral convictions, however mocking or baffled the reaction, this was it.

At least one of her teachers found her unforgettable for that reason. Yet even Mary Warnock, the distinguished philosopher, could only make a failed, groping attempt to work out what she was all about.

Reviewing a book about Suu many years later, she wrote:

Aung San Suu Kyi was, briefly, a pupil of mine when she was reading for the honors school of PPE.

She was unlike any undergraduate I had taught before or have taught since. She was highly intelligent and articulate, though quiet and enormously polite . . . She was totally untouched by the sexual aspirations of her friends, naive in a way, but sure-footed and direct in all her dealings. She was also extraordinarily easily amused, and found many things hilarious, not least her philosophy tutorials.

She had been brought up severely by her mother in a Buddhist tradition. I never knew how religious, in the ordinary sense, she was. Once in the course of a very standard tutorial on personal identity, starting from the text of John Locke, we . . . were considering the proposition, put forward by Locke, that one is the same person only as that person whose past acts one can remember. Suu said, “But I am my grandmother.” Her [tutorial] partner and I fell upon her with questions about how she knew this. She smiled, with a look of incredible mischief, and refused to be drawn.
¹⁰

Suu was discovering that, despite close encounters with Asia going back some three hundred years, Britain, as represented by the brains she found around her at St. Hugh's, had largely failed to get to grips with Asian religious and philosophical ideas. If a philosopher as distinguished as Warnock could write hazily about “a Buddhist tradition” yet be amazed that a practicing Buddhist should subscribe to a belief in reincarnation, what could she hope for from her peers?

“Morality,” ventured Warnock, seeking to put Suu's beliefs in a nutshell, “consists in aspiring to the traditional Buddhist virtues, especially loving-kindness and honesty. She is a living illustration of the truth that to be moral entails essentially wanting to be good, rather than bad.” It would be hard to imagine a lamer attempt to sum up the truths of Buddhism. Listening to such stuff, the “enormously polite” Suu must have heaved a quiet sigh and bitten her lip. What would be the point, with this Oxford philosopher, of, say, proposing a discussion of the basic principles of Theravada Buddhism—of the three characteristics of conditioned beings, for example, namely suffering, impermanence and non-self? Better to save your breath.