On religious days, they prepare a banquet of meatless dishes and host the abbot and monks at their home. The merchant leaves much of the cooking to his wife and her helpers; at his advanced age he is not so interested in the flavor of his meals, and he has become accustomed to the bland vegetarian fare served in his home. The abbot and the young monks, however, normally consume a broad variety of dishes—they eat whatever is placed in their alms bowls each morning and are used to the spicy, pungent meals offered to them by most Burmese housewives. Though none of the monks say anything when they visit the merchant’s house, they all acknowledge that the meals produced in his kitchen are disappointingly tasteless.
On one particular religious day, the monks arrive at the merchant’s house as usual, but this time the abbot is not present. The merchant immediately asks the monks where he is. The monks glance at one another and say nothing, but the merchant keeps pestering them; he believes his merit making and perhaps even his future lives are compromised by the venerable monk’s absence, and he wants to remedy the situation. With great reluctance, one of the monks eventually ventures the information that the abbot is unwell.
Concerned that the abbot might be seriously ill, the merchant leaves his home and hurries to the monastery. When he finds the abbot’s quarters empty, he runs through the convocation hall and the meditation chambers, only to find them similarly devoid of any presence. He dashes though the hanging orchid gardens and around the pond, but there is no sign of the abbot. Finally, he happens to pass the kitchen, where his eyes catch a flash of maroon. He halts momentarily and spies the abbot alone in the kitchen. To the merchant’s astonishment, the venerable one is standing in front of the cooker frying eggs. He seems quite happy as he listens to the pop and sizzle of the eggs cooking, and the merchant watches him for a moment just to ascertain he is not mistaking what he sees.
But there is no mistaking the fact of the matter, and it only gets worse; the abbot picks up a fork and begins, brazenly, to eat the eggs straight out of the frying pan. As eggs are an animal product, it becomes devastatingly clear to the merchant that the abbot—the leader of the monastery he funded as a spiritual investment for his retirement and future lives—is not, in fact, a vegetarian.
Dismayed, the merchant hurries home to tell his wife: “The abbot is frying eggs!” His wife refuses to believe him. She tells him it cannot be true as the abbot is a holy man, a religious leader, and a follower of the Buddhist precepts.
“But I saw it with my own eyes!” insists the merchant. “The abbot is frying eggs!”
His wife becomes convinced that some evil spirit has taken hold of her husband. How could he imagine that an abbot, a respected and robed man of the religious order, is frying eggs? She calls her neighbors and asks for help. The neighbors understand the urgency of the situation and recommend a traditional remedy used to temper delirium and febrile delusions. Desperate to cure her husband, the wife agrees. A mixture of tobacco leaf and salt is pounded together and rubbed into the sick man’s eyes. The merchant screams, but the neighbors do not relent, and, after some time, his wife is greatly relieved to see that his demeanor becomes calm and placid.
That night, as he lies next to his wife in bed, the merchant is again consumed by an urge to tell the truth. With his eyes red and stinging, he turns to his wife and describes what he saw in the monastery. In the privacy of their bedroom he hopes that she will listen to him, but her reaction is unexpected. She becomes perturbed and frightened by his speech and threatens to call the neighbors again. Unable to bear the painful administrations of tobacco and salt, the merchant acquiesces.
With a heavy sigh, he relinquishes his hold on the truth: “All right,” he says. “All right. It’s true. The abbot is
not
frying eggs.”
I SPENT SEVERAL MONTHS
traveling back and forth between Rangoon and the delta. After a week or so in one of the townships, I would return to the city to apply for permission to visit the next township, and gradually was able to work my way across the cyclone zone. I enjoyed the days in Rangoon as they gave me a chance to regroup. I could write up my notes, catch up on e-mail, do my laundry, and make the most of having an air-conditioned hotel room after so many hot and sleepless nights in the delta.
It was during one of those Rangoon trips that I heard about Myat Su Mon, the university student who died after being bitten by a snake in August that year. Burma has some of the deadliest snakes in the world and produces antivenom against bites by the most lethal: viper and cobra. The denuded health-care system, however, is unable to provide sufficient supplies of antivenom vaccine, and village clinics have only a couple of vials in stock at any given time. As a result, Burma has one of the highest incidences of death by snakebite in the world, with nearly eight hundred deaths each year and speculation that many more go unreported. Myat Su Mon’s death would not have been unusual but for the circumstances that followed it.
After she was bitten, Myat Su Mon was taken to a nearby hospital, but the hospital had run out of antivenom serum and was not able to treat her. The doctor in charge transferred her to a larger hospital in the Insein district in northern Rangoon, but that hospital was also out of serum, and she was transferred again, this time to the country’s main hospital, Rangoon General, where she reportedly died shortly after arrival. Even by Burma’s abysmal health-care standards, people were shocked that the bigger hospitals like Insein and Rangoon General were not equipped to treat a snakebite victim.
What was even more surprising, though, was the government’s reaction. The minister of health himself became involved and oversaw an investigation into Myat Su Mon’s death. It was unprecedented for a minister to handle an individual case like this or, indeed, for the Ministry of Health to demonstrate any public interest in casualties of the health-care system. Most people I spoke with in Rangoon at the time were convinced that there must be something more to the story; something that wasn’t being reported in the state media.
What
was
being reported in the media had the dual effect of erasing the incident from public record and portraying the Ministry of Health in a beneficial rather than negative light. Intended to meet these ends, the results of the health minister’s investigation were predictable. He reported that all the hospitals Myat Su Mon had been taken to were actually fully stocked with the necessary serum. It was, he stated, the fault of the doctors; they had been careless and negligent in their haste to transfer the patient. The minister announced that one doctor had been fired and a medical superintendent was retired. Other medical personnel involved received strong warnings. The Ministry of Health went on to provide assurances that health-care workers were chosen only from those who loved, and were willing to serve, their country.
As always, the subtext of Myat Su Mon’s story was to be found in the rumors rustling behind the newsprint. There were stories that students at Rangoon’s Technological University, where she had been a second-year student, organized a demonstration to protest against a health-care system that was unable to deal with snakebites in a country filled with poisonous snakes. Supposedly, the demonstration was quelled by local security forces. But when I asked a young friend to question any friends she had at the university, she was told that there hadn’t been any demonstrations. According to her source, many students had attended Myat Su Mon’s funeral, and it may have been the large gathering that started the rumors and spooked the regime.
Whatever had happened at Myat Su Mon’s university, the minister’s reaction and public statements seemed to illustrate that the event had rattled the rulers in Naypyidaw. The nationwide uprising of 1988 was triggered by a seemingly inconsequential incident—a brawl in a tea shop—and the authorities were now always alert for possible catalysts that might unleash the widespread dissatisfaction that lay concealed beneath the surface of Burmese society.
Though it was one of those frustrating half stories I could never quite get to the bottom of, the incident opened my eyes to the fact that there were potentially incendiary sparks flying off all the time—sparks that were constantly being contained by the dogged force of the regime and its security apparatus. To maintain its control, the regime had to be ever watchful, as it was not always the overtly political elements or events that could trigger a mass outburst. It was more likely to come from one of the many day-to-day injustices: a farmer’s order to contribute labor to the construction of a new road; the late arrival of a military VIP at the opening of a school; or an empty vial of antivenom serum.
NINE
I
t was quiet in the center of Laputta during the morning rush hour. There was only the gentle percussion of bicycle bells, sandals scraping the dirt road, and the hushed babble of the tea shop. Laputta had the atmosphere of a frontier town: It was dusty, worn down, and storm battered. Aside from the patched-together tractors used for hauling heavy loads, there were few motorized vehicles on the streets.
After spending a few days there, I found a hole-in-the-wall tea shop I liked where I could go for breakfast each morning. It was a simple establishment, with just four low tables surrounded by plastic stools and walls streaked with mildew and the shredded residue of old posters. The kitchen area was fenced-off with a blackened sheet of corrugated iron and had a single charcoal brazier above which an extra-large tin kettle was always steaming. The shop served only one dish: a plate of rice and split peas flavored with fried garlic that was known as the poor man’s breakfast. The tea maker was a surly, wiry man whose arms were branded with tattoos and fading track marks. The tea was always a bit too strong and sloshed messily in the saucer when he slapped it down in front of me, but I liked the no-nonsense atmosphere; it was a tea shop in which people studiously made a point of minding their own business. I could sit undisturbed at a little table by the entrance, drink my tea, and watch the pleasantly quiet rush hour slip past.
The streets of Laputta were filled with the industrious signs of construction. A group of barefoot children pushed a wheelbarrow filled with bricks. Two women strode by in unison with long bamboo poles balanced on flat rolls of cloth on the tops of their heads; with their graceful posture and synchronized strides they looked like they were modeling exotic headdresses. The occasional tractor juddered past, its wooden carriage loaded down with sacks of rice, a cloud of black smoke following behind it. A man had dry fronds of
dani
, the nipa palm that is used for roofing material, strapped like an enormous fan to the back of his bicycle, and he wobbled his way precariously around the potholes.
Like the surrounding countryside, the town was devoid of any color, and everything seemed to have been bathed in a brown rinse. Even the clothes people wore had taken on dull shades of brown, as if the mud of the Irrawaddy River had dyed the fabric after so many riverside washings. Every so often, one of the bright, white Land Cruisers used by the United Nations agencies hurtled past, its shiny newness at odds with the dust-covered, mud-soaked town.
It was at the tea shop that I arranged to meet aid workers or townspeople I had been introduced to, and I spent much of my time there collecting stories. Amid the chronology of inconceivable loss, I had begun to pick out miraculous tales of survival and had acquired a mild obsession for stories that involved animals. The animal tales seemed innocent and fable-like, and they allowed me to write brief moments of redemption into notebooks that were becoming weighted down in misery, scrawled over and over with the same words I kept hearing:
I have nothing left; everything is broken
.
The animal tales included the legend of the boy who had been saved by a crocodile that I had heard in Rangoon in the weeks after the storm. But I was picking up others along the way: There was the girl who survived by holding on to a goose and the women who managed to catch hold of a python as it navigated the storm surge. Snakes were everywhere in the saga of the cyclone; people spoke with awe of how poisonous snakes had become entwined around their necks in the rising water but had not bitten them. Driven out of their holes by the turbulence and flooding, snakes coiled themselves around trees. In the darkness of the storm, one woman grabbed on to a branch, only to find that it was, in fact, a cobra. The venomous snake didn’t strike her; it simply slid along her arm and moved farther up the tree. These stories were biblical in tone, depicting an epic flood in which man and beast battled the elements and longtime enemies chose not to fight each other in the interest of mutual survival.
Over a few cups of tea, I chatted with a local trader who was convinced that some animals had known the storm was coming. We swapped stories we had heard about animals and natural disasters. Indigenous tribes on the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean were said to have known a disaster was imminent when they noticed a day or two before the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 that ants had begun to leave their hills and were marching, en masse, to higher ground. In Thailand some years ago I talked to tsunami survivors who told me that working elephants living along the coast had become agitated well before anyone was even aware of the wave and had, in some instances, broken their chains in their attempts to flee. The trader said he too had noticed something strange. Each evening at dusk bats fill the sky above Laputta, chasing insects through the air. One night he had looked up, expecting to see the usual balletic spectacle of black shadows darting above him, but the sky had been empty. Cyclone Nargis struck the next day. “Now,” he said with an acquired sagacity, “I am always watching for the bats.”
I had come to Laputta toward the end of October 2008 and was planning to visit villages in the area and travel to the coastal town of Pyinzalu, one of the worst-hit parts of the delta, near where the cyclone made landfall. Restrictions were still tight on the movements of international staff, and I had to stick to my established routine of going to villages by day and returning to town each evening. By then the processing of foreigners in the delta had become more formalized. When I arrived in Laputta I had to submit my travel-permission letter in person to a committee of military officers. The three men on the committee were all dressed in crisp olive-green uniforms that had an unpleasant sheen from too much starch or too much ironing. They seemed a little like the UN Land Cruisers, incongruous and overdressed.