The Lady and the Peacock (49 page)

After visiting Manerplaw in the spring of 1991 I traveled through mainland Burma in the only way permitted at the time, on a guided tour. In the cities people were too terrified to say anything to a foreigner. I brought a letter from the lawyer I had met in Manerplaw, Khaing Saw Thun, to deliver to Daw Myint Myint Khin, the female head of the Bar Association who was also a member of the NLD's Central Executive Committee. I hoped she would give me a good interview and introduce me to some other important people. But it was not to be.

Her office was on the first floor of an old building in the congested and chaotic commercial heart of Rangoon. She received me with frigid courtesy: Standing behind her desk she read Khaing Saw Thun's letter, then handed it back and asked me to leave at once. “As soon as you have gone,” she said, “Military Intelligence will come up those stairs. They will want to know what you were doing here and if you gave me anything. So please take the letter away.” The following month she was arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. I have no way of knowing whether my intrusion was partly responsible.

That was what rule by fear was like—but it was fear alone; there was no element of grudging respect, no concession that the army was perhaps within its rights to act like this. Once we were in our tour bus, safely away from possible spies, our guides were uninhibited in their expressions of loathing and disgust for SLORC. They pointed out roads that had been constructed by forced labor, and miserable new shanty towns built for those bulldozed out of the city center. In the ancient city of Pagan—once I had quietly revealed to the guide that I was a journalist—I was loaned a bicycle and given a special one-man tour of the sad new township where the lacquerware-makers of the city had been decanted by the regime in their efforts to tart up the city for foreign tourists. The ordinary people of Burma, in the aftermath of the election, were the subjects of a regime that they regarded as both brutal and illegitimate.

Gustaaf Houtman draws an important distinction between two Burmese terms that both translate roughly as “power”:
ana
, which he renders as “the naked power of the state,” and
awza
, the primary meaning of which is “nutrition” and which conveys the idea of giving strength, as in “rich soil.” Houtman translates
awza
as “influence.”

“Ana and awza, just like authority and influence, blend into one another,” he writes. “One who is greatly influential is often given authority, and one who is in a position of authority is also able to influence.”
¹³
A great leader like Aung San, and like a very few Burmese kings (including Kyansittha), possessed both ana and awza—which explains their magnetic hold on the emotions of the people. But in the aftermath of the 1990 election, SLORC found its last residue of awza used up. “The army,” he writes, “used to holding the reins of power since 1962, knows that their authoritarian (ana) instruments have failed to create enduring structures of state, and they now fear the invisible, fluid, and unbounded trickling throughout the country of influential (awza) and popular personalities . . . They fear these individuals might just succeed in snatching away their privileges.”

The generals could console themselves that the one personality above all others who embodied awza, Aung San Suu Kyi, was locked away from the people and completely incommunicado, her ample resources of awza unable to be expressed. But if they had known how she was spending her time while bottled up in University Avenue, even that comfort would have been denied them.

*

Although Aung San Suu Kyi has spent more than fifteen years in detention, the first years were the hardest to bear. She has said as much on numerous occasions. Soon after she was released in November 2010 she told BBC reporter John Simpson, “the first years were the worst . . . they threw me in at the deep end.”

Every human consolation had been taken from her, one by one: Her party colleagues, her friends, her children, her husband. She had no telephone to compensate. She still had her family's letters and parcels with
books and tasty items of food that would remind her of home. But in the run-up to the election, Khin Nyunt tried to obtain a little of the
awza
that Suu possessed in such ample quantities by telling the press that the junta was doing her the favor of passing on all these luxury goods that would turn the average Burmese pale with envy. One of the parcels addressed to her was opened and the contents photographed for the
New Light of Myanmar
: a Jane Fonda work-out video, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, novels, food in tins and jars, laid out for the cameras.

After that, Suu declined to accept any more letters or parcels until her release in 1995. It was a refusal that has been attacked as obdurate and harsh, particularly for its effect on her children, who had no contact with her at all for about two years. But given her desire to live in full solidarity with her imprisoned party colleagues, it is understandable. Receiving mail should be a detainee's right; instead it was presented as a favor, and she refused all favors that accorded her special status.

Her isolation deepened. She had no visitors, either from elsewhere in Burma or from abroad. To maintain solidarity with her comrades in jail, who would have starved without relatives to provide food for them, she refused to accept food from the regime. Instead, as she had no access to money, she instructed her guards to remove furniture from the house and sell it to buy her food. They went along with the charade—though in fact the furniture was stored in an army warehouse. But the money the fictitious sales yielded was barely enough to keep her alive. She later told an interviewer:

Sometimes I didn't have enough money to eat. I became so weak from malnourishment that my hair fell out, and I couldn't get out of bed. I was afraid that I had damaged my heart. Every time I moved my heart went thump-thump-thump and it was hard to breathe. I fell to nearly 90 pounds from my normal weight of 106. I thought to myself that I'd die of heart failure, not of starvation . . . Then my eyes started to go bad. I developed spondylosis, which is a degeneration of the spinal column.
¹⁴

She paused, then told the interviewer, putting a finger to her head: “But they never got me up here.”

Sometimes she would wake at night in the dilapidated old house, and then her father's spirit would keep her company, she said. “I would come
down at night,” she told another reporter, “and walk around and look up at his photograph, and feel very close to him. I would say to him then, ‘It's you and me, father, against them,' and I felt very comforted by his presence. I felt at times as if he was there with me.”
¹⁵

Suu had already known plenty of sorrow in her life, from the assassination of Aung San to the death of her brother six years later. But she had never been tested like this before. It commanded all her inner resources.

When, years later, she was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Natal—“the equivalent,” she responded appreciatively, “of a cohort of legendary heroes coming to the aid of our cause”—her speech of thanks, delivered by Michael on her behalf, dwelt on the lessons she had learned in those terrible days.
¹⁶

“Those who have to tread the long and weary path of a life that sometimes seems to promise little beyond suffering and yet more suffering need to develop the capacity to draw strength from the very hardships that trouble their existence,” she wrote. “It is from hardship rather than from ease that we gather wisdom. During my years under house arrest I learned my most precious lesson from a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, many of whose verses, even in unsatisfactory translation, reach out to that innermost, elusive land of the spirit that we are not always capable of exploring by ourselves. The title of the poem, ‘Walk Alone,' is bleak and its message is equally bleak.”

If they answer not your call, walk alone.

If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,

O thou of evil luck,

Open thy mind and speak out alone.

If they turn away and desert you when crossing the wilderness,

O thou of evil luck,

Trample the thorns under thy tread,

And along the blood-lined track travel alone.

If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled by storm,

O thou of evil luck,

With the thunder-flame of pain ignite thine own heart,

And let it burn alone.

Suu went on, “It is not a poem that offers heart's ease, but it teaches that you can draw strength from your harshest experience, that a citadel of endurance can be built on a foundation of anguish. How can anyone who has learnt to ignite his heart with the thunder-flame of his own pain ever know defeat? Victory is ensured to those who are capable of learning the hardest lessons that life has to offer.”

But what is the nature of the “victory” that these hard lessons ensure? It cannot mean that the generals are going to cave in, simply because a woman has suffered. So what
does
it mean?

*

Once in detention, the habits of discipline instilled by her mother came to Suu's help. “I started off on the basis that I would have to be very disciplined and keep to a strict timetable,” she said later. “I thought that I must not waste time and let myself go to seed . . . I would get up at 4:30 and meditate for an hour . . .”
¹⁷

This was new. It was a practice that began with her detention, more or less: In the time when she suddenly went from being the busiest, most in-demand person in Burma to having all the time in the world, and no one to share it with.

Before this her Buddhist practice had been conventional. In 1987 she had put her sons through the
shinbyu
ceremony, like every Burman mother in the country. The year before that in the Japanese countryside she had shown sudden devotion before a Burmese shrine. And once a week she told her Buddhist rosary. On the campaign trail, Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary about the mantra Suu recited every week on Tuesday, the day of the week when she was born—when she remembered to do so:

Lights out and I said to Suu thank God it's not Tuesday. Suu asked why and laughed when I said because on Tuesday she must tell her beads for 45 rounds. I think at the time she was 44 and every Tuesday which is her birthday she would recite a prayer and tell the 108 beads for 45 rounds. She said she only managed 15 at Nyamdu on April 4th—sacrilegious but I deliberately forgot to remind her on subsequent Tuesdays. I don't believe that charms and sutras and beads can change one's fate, only
metta
[loving-kindness] can, and she has the love and prayers of millions.

That was in April 1989. But the terrifying dramas of the subsequent months culminated in Suu's total isolation. And now she needed something deeper than merely repeating some old words.

Buddhists would say that the teaching you need appears when you need it. “Not long before my house arrest in 1989,” Suu wrote later, “I was granted an audience with the venerable U Pandita, an exceptional teacher in the best tradition of great spiritual mentors whose words act constantly as an aid to a better existence.”
¹⁸

U Pandita, who is based at a meditation center in Rangoon's Golden Valley, not far from Suu's house, is a world-famous teacher of insight meditation. Face to face and in his writings he teaches practical Buddhism with the simplicity and directness of someone teaching cabinet-making or gardening.

“We do not practice meditation to gain admiration from anyone,” he wrote in his book,
In This Very Life
, which Michael gave Suu at Christmas. “Rather, we practice to contribute to peace in the world. We try to follow the teachings of the Buddha and to take the instructions of trustworthy teachers, in hopes that we too can reach the Buddha's state of purity. Having realized this purity within ourselves, we can inspire others and share this Dhamma, this truth.”

Before Burma began selling off its oil and gas, meditation was the nation's most important export. But although the teachings of U Pandita and his late master, Mahasi Sayadaw, closely reflect the dharma of the Buddha, they are revolutionary.

Until about sixty years ago, meditation was something the monks did. Everyone was born, it was believed, with their karmic account book in a better or worse state, depending on their previous incarnations. Those impelled to become monks for life were by definition those closer to the goal of
nibbana
or liberation; men and women who spent their lives as farmers or shopkeepers were by definition further away from the goal.
¹⁹

Monks meditated to purify themselves, and to inspire others with Buddha's truth. Laypeople did not need to bother with such strenuous non-activity. Instead, in order to acquire merit, they gave monks food and clothing. If they were wealthy they could acquire even more merit by building pagodas. Thus emerged the stereotype satirized in Orwell's
Burmese Days
of the venal Burmese businessman who, after a life of greed and corruption, hopes to redeem himself by splashing out his ill-gotten money on pagodas.
²⁰

Yet even as Orwell was writing, this stereotype was becoming outdated.

When the British abolished the Burmese monarchy in 1885, they did away with a spiritual hierarchy that had survived every other upheaval for a thousand years. The monks lost their royal patrons, which is why monks were at the forefront of every revolt against British rule. Who was to keep them in robes and bowls now? Who was to become their partner in a symbiosis of patronage and sanctification like that which they had enjoyed with the kings?

This vacuum produced a revolutionary idea, which one could define as spiritual republicanism: The people could be the new patrons, the new kings. Individually they might be poor, but en masse they were rich. The revolutionary idea at the heart of this new movement is found in the title of U Pandita's book:
In This Very Life
. Laymen did not have to look forward to hundreds more reincarnations before coming to realization. If they behaved like monks—above all, devoting hours every day to meditation—they too could “realize this purity” in a single lifetime. At the same time they would also gain the other benefits of meditation. In particular they could improve morally. “Morality can be looked on as a manifestation of our sense of oneness with other beings,” U Pandita wrote.