The Lady and the Peacock (36 page)

Michael Aris (left) with his identical twin brother, Anthony.

After leaving school, Michael went to Durham University to study Modern History. His choice of subject is puzzling because by this time he had become intrigued by a subject well off the track of the curriculum: the culture, language, religion and history of Tibet.

This arcane interest had been accidentally implanted by his father when he brought a Tibetan prayer-wheel back from a trip to India. Michael became fascinated, less by the function of the device—one of the many ways invented by Tibetans to express their devotions—than by the mysterious letters inscribed on a piece of paper he found inside it. As it happened, one of their teachers at Worth School, Andrew Bertie, knew some Tibetan, and helped Michael to decipher it. A lifelong fascination was born.

When Suu came down from Oxford, we know that her unhappy love affair with her fellow student Tariq Hyder was still on her mind, and continued to weigh on it for another year. There was to be at least one other candidate for her love, and Pat Gore-Booth recalled how she got to learn of it. “Paul and I were on a tour of South America,” she said, “when we got a message from Suu saying I would like to marry so-and-so, a Burmese man. As a very dutiful honorary daughter, she was not asking permission, just running it past us.” But like the Hyder affair this one, too, came to nothing—and just as well, it would seem: Though notionally, like Suu, from the faction opposed to Ne Win, “he proved to be a turncoat,” Pat Gore-Booth remembered, “and later became a minister in the regime.”

Yet somewhere between these failed liaisons, an interest in the lanky, tousle-haired Aris boy took root and began to grow. And for Michael, it seems, there was never any doubt: This delicate young Burmese lady with an Oxford degree and a flower in her hair was the most enchanting thing he had ever seen. “He was smitten from the word go,” said his brother Anthony.
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Like many East and Southeast Asians, the Burmese are hostile to foreign liaisons, particularly if they involve the recently departed imperial
oppressor. Suu's mother Daw Khin Kyi, however sophisticated and experienced in the ways of the world, was no different from the rest of her race in feeling this way. But for Suu it was all rather different. She had come of age in the sixties, where in the West prejudices of every sort were being discarded. For years she had been moving in cosmopolitan circles, where interracial relationships were common. Her Indian friends were in this respect more hidebound: The pressures and expectations of caste still tended very largely to dictate their choice of partner. In Burma, where caste in the Indian sense does not exist, the chief obstacle to overcome was xenophobia pure and simple—plus the view that, as Norman Lewis put it, “through failure to spend a token period as a novice in a Buddhist monastery, the foreigner has never quite qualified as a human being.”
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By falling in love with Tariq Hyder, she had already shown her willingness to consider a mate who would have caused all sorts of difficulties back home in Rangoon. There is, after all, no arguing with the human heart. The candidates who were on the face of it more promising had problems of their own: The Burmese youth, dismissed by Suu's friend Tin Tin as an “idiot”; the other Burmese fellow who became a turncoat.

And then there was this Aris boy she was getting to know, and who was already in love with her. The qualities he was to bring to their marriage must have been already apparent: He was considerate, thoughtful, patient. If he was not an alpha male like Tariq Hyder or David Gore-Booth, not exactly ambassadorial material, if he was a touch on the dreamy side, then perhaps that was no bad thing: When she herself was so uncertain about the way ahead, another seeker was perhaps what she needed for her partner, rather than someone like her brother who knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it. With someone like Michael, a woman would stand a chance of building a life on equal terms, rather than merely tagging along.

There was her mother to be brought round: She was firm in her view that Suu should marry someone Burmese. But Suu had lived apart from her mother for three years now, and had learned to stand on her own feet. She had discovered the strength of mind to turn down flat the invitation of the most powerful man in Burma; she would find a way to win her mother over. And in this respect Michael Aris's fascination with Tibet, which would have seemed eccentric to many, was an important asset.
Most people Suu knew at Oxford had only the vaguest notion about the religion in which she had been raised. Michael Aris already knew more about it than any Englishman she had ever met.

*

They began their romance, in fine modern style, by flying off in opposite directions. They were to be united only very briefly over the next three years. The Internet did not exist, international phone calls were prohibitively expensive and reserved for emergencies, so Suu and Michael Aris carried on their love affair by airmail. That they were still together at the end of this period testifies to the strength of their feelings for one another.

It is sometimes an advantage to be fascinated by something that fascinates only a very few other people. Though his degree was in Modern History, Michael employed his spare time at Durham learning as much as he could about Tibet's history, culture, religion and language. “While he was still at Durham he formed a friendship with Hugh Richardson, a great authority on Tibet who had been the last British Resident”—or official representative—“in Lhasa before the Second World War,” recalled Michael's brother Anthony, and Hugh “became his mentor.”
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He also came in contact with another outstanding figure in Tibetan studies, Marco Pallis. Now that he had graduated, Michael wanted more than anything to get to the country he knew so much about and become a real expert. But Tibet, never easy to enter, had been totally barred to foreigners since the Chinese communist takeover in 1951.

There were however several “little Tibets” on the fringes of the Tibetan plateau, high in the Himalayas, which preserved the ancient culture and language of the country and which were more readily accessible: Ladakh, for example, now a part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir; Sikkim, at the time a protectorate of India; and Bhutan, an independent Buddhist monarchy, closed to tourists and very little known to the outside world.

With one of those strokes of luck by which careers are made, Marco Pallis learned that the royal house of Thimphu, the Bhutanese capital, was looking for a tutor for the royal children. In Michael Aris he had a young man he regarded as the ideal candidate: already with a considerable
knowledge of Tibetan, but with a high level of general education as well. Aris seized his opportunity and set off. He was to remain in Bhutan for six years.

Suu meanwhile flew off the other way, to New York. There was never a more exciting time to be in the Big Apple than the late 1960s, with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, Robert Rauschenberg and the Abstract Expressionists, the Buddhist Beats and the Last Poets and the Black Panthers all competing for attention. But none of this held any appeal for Suu: What induced her to cross the Atlantic was her dear Burmese friend Ma Than É, the famous former singer, who had returned from Algiers and was now working at the headquarters of the United Nations. She invited Suu to share her tiny flat in midtown Manhattan.

There was good reason for the move from the point of view of Suu's career: Despite her poor degree, Ma Than É had persuaded Frank Trager, professor of International Affairs at New York University and an expert on Southeast Asia, to take on Suu as a postgraduate student. She could live down that third, get a postgraduate degree, enjoy a taste of the New World, prove beyond doubt her independence and self-sufficiency—and at the same time relax in the company of her cosmopolitan, worldly wise Burmese friend.

Yet there was a flaw in the strategy, and it is the same flaw that dogged Suu throughout her on-again, off-again academic career. What did she want to study and why? What was the end in view? Her mother had browbeaten her into taking a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, which failed to engage her fully. The university had prevented her from changing to a more congenial subject. And now she had found what appeared to be the perfect way to recoup; but instead she hit the buffers.

Suu began commuting from Ma Than É's apartment uptown in Beckman Place, round the corner from the UN at First Avenue and East 49th Street, to NYU, which was centered around Washington Square in Greenwich Village. But after a few weeks it seemed that it was not working out.

“Getting to and from New York University meant a long bus ride,” Ma Than É wrote in an essay about her friend, “. . . and it was a trial for Suu, who was given to giddiness on bus rides. There were also the hazards
from toughs who frequented her route from the bus stop across the park to Washington Square and the classes she had to attend.”
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So she simply gave up.

But knowing what we do of Suu's story since 1988, the explanation fails to convince. “I see myself as a trier,” Suu told Alan Clements.
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“I don't give up.” And for a trier there would have been ways of sticking to that commitment. Never mind the giddiness-inducing bus: From Ma Than É's flat on Beckman Place it was a five-minute walk to the Lexington and 53rd Street subway stop, then eight stops downtown on the E train to West 4th Street, and a couple of minutes' walk to class from there. New York was rougher in 1968 than it is now, to be sure, and there were many parts where it was unwise for a young female to go alone—but Beckman Place and the NYU campus were not among them. Professor Trager's offer of a postgraduate place would have been like gold dust for an ambitious student. If the commute (it takes less than twenty-five minutes each way) was such a problem, a really motivated student would have found a room of her own close to the campus, and paid the rent by waiting on tables. Ma Than É's account is a kind attempt to save her friend's face, but the true explanation must be that, once again, Suu's heart was not in it.

A more compelling explanation is that, within those few weeks, Suu discovered that Professor Trager was on friendly terms with high officials in the Ne Win regime.
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She was learning that attentions from the other side of the political fence, such as apparently innocuous invitations to Wimbledon, were to be handled with great care.

But meanwhile the man who was without doubt the greatest Burmese statesman on the international stage since the death of her father was at large and in control just a couple of blocks from her New York home: U Thant, who had been Secretary General of the United Nations since 1961. If the university didn't work out, for reasons of giddiness or something else, perhaps there was a far more promising prospect on the doorstep. “The UN was about six minutes' walk from where we lived,” Ma Than É recalled. “Why shouldn't she try for a job there and do her studies later? After applications, recommendations, interviews and the usual delays and difficulties, Suu was in.”

*

U Thant is little remembered today, but for anyone growing up in the 1960s he was a figure of enormous fame and stature, his curious name and smooth, sensitive, rather worried-looking features as familiar as those of any national statesman. These were the days, with the cataclysm of world war less than two decades away and the Cold War raging, when earnest intellectuals still dreamed that the United Nations could usher in a new era of World Government, when all conflicts would be resolved without resort to arms. U Thant, who held the closest job ever invented to President of the World, seemed the ideal person to bring it about.

He held the post from 1961 to 1971, thrown in at the deep end when the first holder of the office, Dag Hammerskjöld of Sweden, died in an air crash in the middle of the Cuban nuclear missile crisis—the closest the world has ever come to all-out nuclear war. U Thant's sharp wits and cool, low-profile negotiating skills helped pull Kennedy and Khrushchev back from the brink. He went on to play a key role in ending the war in the Congo, and had a crucial part in resolving many other international conflicts. U Thant was also centrally involved in launching the UN's humanitarian, environmental and development missions. In 1965 he was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for international understanding. While in office he successfully spiked the Soviet Union's proposal that there should be three Secretary Generals, one representing each of the major power blocs, a recipe for permanent impasse. Perhaps the greatest testimony to his charm and suppleness is the fact that at the end of his term, already gravely ill, he was still on speaking terms with the leaders of both Russia and the United States.

The UN's gain was Burma's loss: If democracy had survived in Burma it is hard to imagine that U Thant would not have been at the center of it. Norman Lewis, who met him in Rangoon a decade before his dramatic elevation, was impressed: As Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Information in 1949, he advised the English writer on his prospective journey around the country. U Thant “saw no reason why I should not go wherever I wished,” Lewis wrote. “Later I found that . . . this was his first experience of a request to travel about the country . . . any doubts were veiled beneath more than even the normal measure of Burmese charm.”
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Even at this early stage of his career, U Thant had mastered the art of spinning awkward news: “U Thant said that the railway service from
Rangoon to Mandalay was working. It was perhaps a little inconvenient because of a break in the line. Proper arrangements were made to carry passengers across the gap . . . either in lorries or bullock carts, and if they were sometimes held up it was only to extract a kind of toll. That was to say, no violence was ever done . . .”
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As his record at the UN—and his rapidly deteriorating relations with the United States, as the Vietnam War span out of control—proved, U Thant was profoundly hostile to colonialism and neo-colonialism, and as Secretary General he did everything he could to make the newly independent ex-colonies feel at home in the UN. But he was not an embittered nationalist fanatic like Ne Win, not bent on tearing down the good that the colonialists had done along with the bad, and Ne Win's hostility to him is further proof of his small-mindedness. U Thant represented that cadre of civil servants, so important in the creation of independent India and so badly missed, because so few in number, in Burma, who were able to carry on, administratively speaking, where the British left off. “Thant's dream,” wrote his grandson, Thant Myint-U, “had been to become a civil servant in the British Burma administration.”
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Instead he became right hand man to prime minister U Nu, his friend since university, secretary of the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, and a founding father of the Non-Aligned Movement which the conference inspired.