The Lady and the Peacock (34 page)

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Yet if Suu found Oxford intellectually frustrating and in steep moral decline, she did not react by retreating into her Burmese shell. On the contrary, she was quite as determined to master the exotic customs of the country as she had been to climb up to the glass roof of 25 Tower Lane with her brother fifteen years before. Ann Pasternak Slater wrote:

She was curious to experience the European and the alien, pursuing knowledge with endearing, single-minded practicality. Climbing in, for instance. Social kudos came with climbing into college after a late date. One actress friend was a precociously blasé habitué of late-night scramblings: By her second year she spent full nights and days away from college; by the third she was breaking college rules by renting a pad shared by a variety of boyfriends. After two demure years in Oxford, Suu wanted to climb in too, and requested a respectable friend to take her out to dinner, and then—as any gentleman should—hand her over the crumbling college garden wall. No infringement of university regulations could have been perpetrated with greater propriety.
¹¹

Pasternak Slater also identified the precise moment of Suu's white jeans metamorphosis—and the very practical reason for it. It was the summer of 1965: Suu had just emerged from her first northern winter, which must have struck her South Asian soul as unspeakably long and dark; the country was pulsating to the beat of “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds, “California Girls” by the Beach Boys and the new Beatles album,
Help
! And a cool new Suu emerged. “Most students have bikes,” Pasternak Slater wrote, “it is a practical way of getting about, but tricky in a longyi. In the first summer term Suu bought a pair of white jeans and the latest smart white Moulton bike with minute wheels. One sunny evening spent on the sandy cycle-track running alongside the University Parks and that was mastered.”

Rather more challenging was the art of punting, in which her Indian friend Shankar Acharya instructed her, and took an embarrassing photograph of her trying to do it.

Like cycling, Pasternak Slater pointed out, punting was “another essential qualification for an Oxford summer,” and Suu would not be found wanting. But she quickly discovered that it is more difficult than it looks. “A punt is a flat-bottomed, low-sided tray of a boat,” wrote Pasternak Slater. “Its weight, inertia and ungainliness defy description. It is like sailing a sideboard. It really is difficult learning to punt, especially on your own. The boat swings in dull circles that modulate to a maddening headstrong zigzag from bank to bank, until you learn to steer, like a gondolier, by hugging the pole tight against the punt as you push, and letting it swing like a rudder.

“Suu set out, a determined solitary figure in the early morning haze, to return at dusk, dripping and triumphant.”
¹²
But Acharya's snap of Suu afloat seems to have been taken before her mastery was complete. It may be the most unflattering photo of her ever published. The ugly duckling plaits have made a comeback, crowned by a white cap. Her dark jeans are wrinkled, and the profile they give her bears out Pasternak Slater's remark to me that “she was not completely blemishless—she had quite fat thighs and was still quite chubby when I knew her.” Rather than the grave, poised, vertical posture recommended by the experts, with the pole held as close to the breast as a walking staff, Suu is bent at the knees and holds the pole in her outstretched hand and looks as if she is planning to vault out of the boat and onto the bank.

Then there was alcohol. Buddhism's Fifth Precept requires the Buddhist to abstain from alcohol. Although it is not exactly a commandment as it is for most Muslims, and plenty of Buddhist laypeople drink in moderation, for Suu it has always been non-negotiable. But at Oxford everyone did it, often to excess, and Suu decided she must try it once. “She was curious to know what it was like,” wrote Pasternak Slater.

At the very end of her final year, in great secrecy, she bought a miniature bottle—of what? Sherry? Wine?—and, with two rather more worldly Indians as
accoucheuses
and handmaids at this rite of passage, retired to the ladies' lavatory in the Bodleian Library. There, among the sinks and the cubicles, in a setting deliberately chosen to mirror the distastefulness of the experience, she tried and rejected alcohol for ever.
¹³

Despite her shyness and her strict rules, Suu's circle of friends gradually expanded. Her punting teacher, Shankar Acharya, offered the comfort of familiarity: He was from the same top civil service drawer as her Indian friends in Delhi, but as he had spent the previous four years at school in London, where his father was a diplomat, he was more familiar with British ways.

“She was more comfortable with Indians than with Brits to begin with,” he remembered, “because they were similar to her own cultural background, vaguely Victorian.”
¹⁴
Both he and Suu were studying PPE, and soon after Suu arrived at Oxford they became friends. “Our backgrounds were quite similar and we hit if off easily and well,” he said. “These things happen. Basically she had led a sheltered life in terms of dealing with the opposite sex: She had been to an all-girls' college in India, and presumably her life at Oxford was fairly cloistered, too, in terms of going around with boys. I think she was quite a shy person. I was less shy as I had already been in England.”

Although Acharya did not deny having “a little bit of a crush” on Suu, “like every male she met,” their friendship remained on the calm, platonic plane; soon he was courting the Indian student who later became his wife. When Suu had overcome any awkwardness she experienced in dealing with English people, that sort of relationship, founded on common interests but going no further than simple affection, proved to be one she had a gift for.

Robin Christopher, who later became a diplomat, said of his relationship with Suu, “It wasn't a romance. It was an utterly genuine friendship. But we were very close as friends—she came and spent Christmas with my family, down in Sussex. It was a lovely friendship. We worked together mornings and afternoons and very often had lunch together. I'd see her virtually every day.”
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Suu was close enough to have, Christopher said, “no inhibition about criticizing my choice of girlfriends.” But that did not, it appears, mask an ambition to displace them.

In the same summer that she discovered the joy of cycling, Suu had a very different experience which, in the longer perspective of her life, was to be much more significant.

A vitally important figure in Suu's life, almost a guardian angel and certainly a role model, was a middle-aged Burmese woman called Dora Than É. A striking beauty in her youth, and an acclaimed singer, she became nationally famous in the 1930s as one of Burma's first recording stars. When Aung San came to London to negotiate independence, Ma Than É had become friendly with him, and at his request sang at the farewell reception thrown by the Burmese party in England. Also at his request she selected and purchased on his behalf souvenirs for him to take home to Rangoon. When she met Suu many years later she was pleased to learn that the large doll she had chosen for her was still in good shape.

After marrying an Austrian documentary film-maker, Ma Than É moved to Europe, and in the second half of her career had a succession of jobs with the United Nations. The first was in Delhi, where she managed the UN Information Center and became close to Daw Khin Kyi and her family. Then she was transferred to newly independent Algeria, where she set up a similar center in the capital.

She was living in Algiers while Suu was at Oxford, and Suu flew out to meet her there in the summer of 1965, arriving a few days after President Ahmed Ben Bella had been ousted from power in a bloodless coup. The authoritarian backlash to colonial rule that had occurred in Burma after Suu and her mother moved to India was now unfolding before her eyes among the date palms and sand dunes of the Mahgreb. Suu had just turned twenty, and if the dusty texts on politics which she was required to read at Oxford did not inspire her, the striving and suffering she saw all around her in Algiers were a different matter. Here was the politics
of liberation, being enacted before her eyes in all its passion and difficulty. For the first time in her life her sympathies and energies were fully engaged, however briefly, as a participant in the sort of struggle that she was to find waiting for her in Burma twenty-three years later.

Suu “was much more interested in getting to meet Algerians and in what was happening in the country than in the many parties to which she was invited,” Ma Than É wrote later. “We got in touch with an Algerian organization which ran several projects to help those affected by their long struggle.”
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Volunteers were needed to help build houses for the widows of freedom fighters, she learned. Suu joined other volunteers from around Europe and North Africa laboring on the project at a large camp and stuck with it for several weeks.

Back at Oxford, her student life resumed. But it was not working out well. She was committed to a course of study that did not really interest her, imposed by her mother. “She didn't want to be doing PPE,” said Ann Pasternak Slater, “she tried to change, she wanted to do Forestry, which would have been useful for Burma, and the stupid Oxford authorities wouldn't allow her.”
¹⁷
Then she wanted to do English, which she would have loved and which (Pasternak Slater is sure) she would have got “a perfectly good Second for,” but they wouldn't allow that, either. In the end she obtained a third-class degree, which is perhaps an indication of the extent to which she had lost interest in the subject: Her friends are in no doubt that she could have done much better. (As she told Alan Clements many years later, “I would study hard only when I liked the teacher or the subject.”)

But she was also living and making new friends, and towards the end of her second year she fell in love. “She got to know a young Pakistani student by the name of Tariq Hyder, who went on to join the Pakistani Foreign Service,” Shankar Acharya remembered. “He was in Queen's College. We knew each other but were not chums.”
¹⁸
Mr. Hyder, who recently retired after a distinguished ambassadorial career, and now writes on foreign affairs in the Pakistani press, declined to be interviewed for this book. As Suu has never spoken publicly about the affair, it is hard to know how much it meant to her; but it is clear that her affection for him lasted a considerable time, and that, at least in the end, he did not requite it. One university friend mentioned that she was still talking about him “at least a year after she left Oxford.”
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Some of her Indian friends did not approve of Hyder.
²⁰
“He was a bit of a sleazeball,” said one. “Not a terribly nice guy. Let's put it this way, we weren't terribly happy that Suu was going around with him. He just didn't come across as someone you'd want to be very friendly with.” Whether the antipathy was partly a reflection of the ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan, who had fought their second war since independence in 1965, is not clear.

A problem was slowly crystallising for Suu, and her lingering and unhappy love affair with Hyder points it up: Her path ahead was by no means clear. For her friends from the civil service elite of the subcontinent, by contrast, it was plain sailing. The careers of two of them are exemplary.

After obtaining a good degree at Oxford, Shankar Acharya went on to do a PhD at Harvard, which led to an important post at the World Bank. Eleven years later he returned to Delhi, where at the climax of his career he was appointed chief economic adviser to the government—one of the most important civil service jobs in the country. Malavika Karlekar returned to India after graduating from St. Hugh's, where she took up important university positions and edited the
Indian Journal of Gender Studies
. Both of them married Indians who had shared their experience of study in Britain. Back home they slotted neatly into the stimulating and comfortable life of the Indian ruling class.

For other friends like Ann Pasternak Slater the future was even easier to map out. Born and raised in Oxford, she married a fellow student, Craig Raine, who went on to become one of Britain's best-known contemporary poets. Both she and Raine became dons at the university, and today they still live in the house where Ann grew up, five minutes' walk from St. Hugh's.

But no such straightforward course presented itself to Suu. She went back to Rangoon more than once during her undergraduate years, and given her age and beauty and bloodline there was great excitement about finding her a suitable mate. But whether because of Mr. Hyder or for other reasons, the chemistry was not there.

Her school friend Tin Tin was tangentially involved in one attempt. “She would discuss these things with me when she came to Burma,” she said.

They were trying to make a match for her with someone from the university, I'm not going to mention names. Unfortunately he was a bad one, and I said, “Oh no, don't think of marrying him, he's an idiot!” His brother was in our class and he was quite intelligent, but a girl is supposed to marry someone older than herself and his elder brother was not so intelligent. I said, “You will be bored, you know,” and she said “Okay, okay,” because she wasn't in love or anything. I said, “That's my honest opinion but it's entirely up to you . . .”
²¹

Suu was in full agreement.

Compared to her friends at Oxford, the choices for Suu were both stark and unappetizing. Soon after coming to power Ne Win had begun closing down Burma's links to the West, banishing the Ford Foundation and the British Council and other similar organizations, banning the teaching of English in schools, making it more and more difficult for Burmese to travel abroad and for foreigners to visit Burma—in every possible way turning the clock back a hundred years to what some sentimental nationalists conceived as the Golden Age of Burmese isolation, before the British turned up and blew the doors off. These policies led slowly and inexorably to the tensions that resulted in the uprising of 1988. But in the meantime they had a more immediate impact for the likes of Suu: They made a return home, after the richness of her experiences in India and England, deeply unappealing.