The Lady and the Peacock (32 page)

In a later interview, O'Brien recalled the same occasion: “Her daughter appeared and was introduced simply as Suu. I remember being struck by how she plunged into the conversation about politics. She was seventeen or eighteen and was already a commanding person . . . Her mother was shrewd, funny and generous; she said she felt that Suu was surrounded by people who deified her father, which she didn't think was a good thing. Her mother was a bit more relaxed than Suu. You could have a good chuckle with her. Suu was more correct.”
³
Erect,
correct, obedient, “under her mother's strict supervision,” “extremely plain” . . . so far in her story there are few glimpses of the woman who would one day galvanize her nation. Perhaps the docile, slightly hangdog impression that emerges from these years was the fault of those nuns. But soon all that was to change.

After two tough years under the thumb of the Jesuits, high school was over and all five friends went on to Lady Sri Ram College, Delhi's first degree college for girls. For Malavika it was a great improvement.

“The Convent of Jesus and Mary was horrible in the sense that I felt I was in a straitjacket,” she said. “So when we went to Lady Sri Ram, which again was like a nunnery, we thought we'd come to heaven. All our respective interests and talents flowered, Suu writing plays, all of us acting . . .”

In Delhi's rather buttoned-up, old-fashioned society—“we had post-colonial Victorian upbringings,” Malavika said, “more than half a century after the great lady passed on”—Lady Sri Ram was a breath of fresh, relatively modern air. Founded only six years earlier, and with three hundred students, it offered Delhi's brightest young upper-class ladies proper first degree courses in serious subjects, in surroundings that allowed them considerable freedom.

“Lady Sri Ram was different in that you didn't have to wear uniform,” Malavika went on. “There were horrible gates that were locked and you weren't allowed out of them, but there was no uniform, we wore saris and we could do what we liked; for example there was a canteen where we could go and sit. It was just so different.”

Although Malavika echoes Suu's own assessment of herself as a girl with the literary bug, Suu took political science at the college—but then so did her friends. “All five of us studied Political Science,” said Malavika. “I wanted to do Chemistry honors because that's what my father had done and I had got a distinction in that at the Convent, but my father said, ‘Chemistry . . .?' Remember, this was in the early Sixties. You don't do science, you don't go all the way to the dirty great university and hang around with boys, you go to a nice girls' college and do Political Science.”

There was a similar prejudice, Malavika remembers, against studying English. “Suu was a reader, and I think that English Literature was more
of an interest for her than Political Science. She had a literary bent and a literary mind—why she went into Political Science I don't know—but for some reason reading English Literature in those days was regarded as something we shouldn't be doing. I don't know why.”

But although the girls' parents had strong opinions about what their daughters should and should not study, there is no sense that they wanted to circumscribe their ambitions. Like the parents of Suu's friends in Rangoon, these were the most progressive and Westernized people in the city, and hoped and intended that their daughters, while remaining genteel and cultured, would go on to further study and then into significant careers.

Meanwhile Lady Sri Ram allowed them, in the most genteel way, to let their hair down. “We were all the teachers' pets,” admitted Malavika. “We were good students, nice obedient girls from appropriate homes. We didn't cut classes. We were not rebellious against our teachers—there was no arguing about Plato's
Republic
, or why did Rousseau say this rather than that—none of that . . .”

But there was clowning—and Malavika gives a tantalizing glimpse of the funny, irreverent Suu who was later to tease both her tormentors and her supporters in Burma—the self-aware, self-mocking Suu who was to share so many jokes with Ma Thanegi as they traveled around the country.

“She wrote this spoof on
Antony and Cleopatra
,” she recalled. “It was very cleverly done. She had an extremely intelligent turn of phrase. And she certainly acted, in the usual ham-handed manner we all did . . .” A couple of photos of the production survive, with Suu erect and very elegant in a waisted satin robe and sandals, and with a haughty look on her face. Malavika firmly denied that Suu played Cleopatra, but to judge by the appearance of the girls in the cast photograph, she seems the most plausible candidate for the part.

Aung San Suu Kyi with friends in the cast of
Anthony and Cleopatra
. Suu, whose early ambition was to write, made a precocious start at Delhi's Lady Sri Ram College, writing and acting in a spoof of Shakespeare's play.

“In a sense Lady Sri Ram was a finishing school,” said Malavika. “But that's not entirely true: My family had a long tradition of Oxbridge and that's what my father wanted me to do. It wasn't as if he was going to shove me off into an arranged marriage or anything. No way.” Instead Malavika, like Suu, was to take a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at St. Hugh's College, Oxford.

While the rest of the gang remained at Lady Sri Ram for two years and emerged with degrees, Suu stayed only one year, and much of it she spent applying for and then preparing for her move to England. The British High Commissioner in Delhi at the time was Sir Paul Gore-Booth; he and his wife Lady Pat Gore-Booth had been friends of Daw Khin Kyi when Sir Paul was posted at the embassy in Rangoon. Now they very gladly acceded to Daw Khin Kyi's request to act as her daughter's guardians while she was in England.

Although Suu was so warmly accepted by her Indian friends, this girl from the edge of the empire had a lot to learn—and India had a lot to teach her. She and her mother were on friendly terms with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, though he was aging now and preoccupied with the problems that were shortly to flare up into war, first with China and then (after his death) again with Pakistan. She also met his daughter Indira, soon to become prime minister herself, and her sons Sanjay and Rajiv.
⁴

Suu and her mother of course had Burmese friends, too, including a monk called U Rewata Dhamma who had come to India to study in Varanasi, and who many years later was to play a significant role during Suu's detention. But their social set stretched far wider than that, encompassing the whole diplomatic strata of the city. Given the fame of Daw Khin Kyi's table, the generosity of her hospitality and her qualities as a hostess—“always full of good gossip about the latest political intrigues which she dispatched with much wit and humor,” as Harriet O'Brien recalled of her a few years later in Rangoon—24 Akbar Road must have been as lively a political salon in those years as 25 Tower Lane in Rangoon had been while Aung San was alive.
⁵

It is a little-known fact—little known except to those who have lived there—that Delhi is a very intellectual town. The conversation at dinner parties in the smart districts of London is never far from degenerating into chatter about property prices and celebrities, no matter how brainy the guests. Delhi, by contrast, where the intellectual elite has a sort of copper-bottomed stability guaranteed by the caste system, is much readier to plunge into the sort of political, philosophical or religious questions that are taboo on the other side of the world. And Suu, straight-backed, wide-eyed, and with an increasingly well-stocked mind, was paying attention.

And she was learning to hold her own, as Harriet O'Brien noticed. In Rangoon, although the sexes were in many ways relatively equal, youth deferred to age, women did not contradict men, and harmony was valued over the contentious pursuit of truth. In Delhi Suu learned, at an impressionable age, the ways of “the argumentative Indian”: the Indian delight in passionate, long-winded and often ferocious discussion, with no concern for the tender feelings of those on the other side of the table.
⁶
It became a part of her character—one that was to cause her endless trouble twenty years later, back in the far more protocol-heavy atmosphere of Burma.

In 1962 the trajectories of India and Burma split apart permanently: In India the Congress under Nehru won another general election, though with a reduced majority, while in Burma General Ne Win launched a carefully planned and all-but bloodless coup d'état and propelled the nation down the Burmese path to socialism. Suu must have asked herself why the two countries—both steeped in Asian philosophy and wisdom, both recently freed from the colonial yoke —should have such contrasting modern destinies. Studying the lives of Gandhi, Nehru himself, Nirad C. Chaudhuri and particularly Tagore, she was already noting the differences and ruminating on the different results they produced.

There was the English language—regarded as a colonial imposition in Burma, and one that was only grudgingly accepted, while for educated Indians it was a vital and ready tool, to be appropriated and used. There was the willingness in India to accept Western ideas without surrendering your own, and the self-confidence and creativity to make from the two a new synthesis. Tagore and Gandhi had had a serious falling out, but Nehru, the family friend of Suu and her mother, succinctly expressed what the two great men shared in common, in words written during his imprisonment in the Second World War.

“Both in their different ways had a world outlook,” Nehru wrote in his book
The Discovery of India
, “and both were at the same time wholly Indian. They seemed to represent different but harmonious aspects of India and to complement one with the other.”
⁷

They were also giants of their age—and Suu cast her eyes homeward in vain to find any contemporary Burman of comparable stature. Back home General Ne Win was rapidly closing the nation's doors and windows, expelling the Indian population, closing down the newspapers and the
opposition political parties and imprisoning those who spoke out against him. Meanwhile in Delhi Suu was discovering the great cry of freedom, written in English, of Rabindranath Tagore:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
⁸

St. Hugh's College, Oxford, where Suu was a student.

A
UNG SAN SUU KYI
's timing, like her father's, has always been good. She left her homeland just in time to be spared the slow death of her country by military rule. She arrived in Delhi in time to experience the last years of Nehru and India's transition from dynastic politics. And she arrived in England in the middle of the biggest explosion of popular culture the country had ever seen.

It was 1964, the year the Beatles had number 1 hits with “Can't Buy Me Love,” “A Hard Day's Night” and “I Feel Fine.” Harold Wilson became Labor prime minister one month after her arrival, ending “thirteen wasted years of Tory rule.” Men's hair was creeping down to their shoulders, their trousers were acquiring bell-bottoms and their shirt collars expanding to the point of absurdity. Skirts were racing up girls' thighs, and erotic boots were closing the gap. Dingy, foggy, smoky London, gloomy and sarcastic, woke up to find it was suddenly trendy. A man called Moulton invented a bicycle with tiny wheels.