Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Where are your shoes?” Khin demanded of Louisa one evening, when the girl and Johnny returned after a long day out, and Benny found the strength to limp to the kitchen to greet them.

Louisa stood barefoot within the doorway, gripping Johnny’s hand. “I gave them to a little girl who didn’t have any,” she replied — so boldly Khin slapped her across the cheek. But Louisa didn’t cry; she didn’t repent of her generosity. As Johnny held up one foot at a time to display the shoes he was still wearing, Louisa stood resolutely glaring at Khin with a kind of wounded pride that made Benny’s heart break all over again.

By June, though, they had all mostly recovered. Khin sold one of her rings, and she and Benny decided to buy a plot of land to till in a nearby valley. With Louisa and Johnny between them, they planted peas and avoided involvement in the war and each other’s eyes. Avoided each other’s touch, too. Only after Khin came to him one night and tried to straddle his weak thighs did he become aware of her metamorphosing body, of the hardening under her belly button and the slightest swelling that did not allow him to harden and swell toward her.

The child was born to them in January, after they had begun to harvest and dry the overabundant peas, a portion of which they sold to some of the gentler Japanese who began to infiltrate Tharrawaddy, one explaining to them with a chuckle that it was now assumed by the Japanese secret police that Benny was part Negro — part black, part kuro , the fellow chided him, pointing to his twists of hair. (Wasn’t kuro , Benny wondered, the word he’d been called by the soldiers who’d apprehended him in Khuli?) The child was a girl, and they named her Grace, because even the most painful life is still life, still inexplicable and blessed. And they never spoke of how she had come to be. He loved the little girl. She had Saw Lay’s placid eyes. Saw Lay, who had disappeared into the hills after giving a piece of himself to them, and for all they knew died soon thereafter.

The loyal are fully capable of deceit. That was something Benny told himself four months later, in May 1945, after the last of the Japanese had evacuated Rangoon and more than twelve thousand of their troops had been killed by Karen guerrillas supplied by British airdrop. Those Karens — a network of more than sixteen thousand by the end of the war — had not been the only irregular forces to resist the Japanese, Benny learned. Among the other intelligence and paramilitary groups working separately in Burma in support of the Allied cause were Kachin Rangers, Chin levies, Communist Party cadres, socialists, and even, in the final weeks of the campaign, Aung San’s renamed Burma National Army. (Benny heard that when a British military commander had quipped that Aung San changed sides only because the Allies were winning, Aung San had told him, “It wouldn’t be much use coming to you if you weren’t, would it?”) They had all fought the same enemy, yet what they had been fighting for apparently diverged widely. Thus, with the Japanese exodus, the alliances and promises that had been made or received (alliances and promises supporting individual causes, and leaving the future free in all the details) couldn’t be kept. Benny was distressed to learn that the same British and American intelligence and military officers who during the worst had guaranteed the “loyal” Karens their own state, or had convinced Kachin leaders of their support in a liberated Burma, appeared far less invested in the country and its peoples now that the Burma Road had been regained and the pipeline to China thus restored. And Benny could only shake his head when Aung San began preparing to fight the British as soon as they’d helped him oust the other imperialist enemy. Mutual effort gave way to mutual chaos, to widespread distrust, even before the war at large had formally been won.

Benny was so wasted by the breaches of faith near and far, he found himself turning his back on making any kind of sense of it all. Instead, suddenly liberated from the threat of the Japanese occupation, he found himself setting his sights on the future — a future in which he needn’t be a victim of others’ disloyalty or self-interest or viciousness, but could become a force to be reckoned with, a pugilist. Yes, a pugilist once more! A man prepared to fight for his share of the dream in Burma’s remaking, prepared to prove that he was still the kid who could counter life’s blows and make something of himself!

And so, as the Allies trooped through the country from May to August, installing units of both British forces and Aung San’s Burma National Army to “mop up operations” and restore the peace, Benny chose to look past the madness (was anyone less qualified to broker peace than the Burma National Army, whose leaders had ushered in the Japanese, and whose throngs of dacoits had raped, pillaged, and slaughtered those most loyal to the British effort?). He chose to look past what any of these deserters owed the Karens in particular (the Karens, who, when all was said and done, did more damage to the Japanese than any other irregular military force during the war). Instead, he seized the moment to extract something concrete from the British army: a food contract. With the earnings from the sale of dried peas to the Japanese, he’d doubled the size of his tillable land and hired several Karens to help him sow a new crop. It was really quite simple, in the postwar pandemonium, to convince a British quartermaster that his forthcoming pea yields would be excellent.

The problem was how to transport to the Brits the almost obscene amount of peas he soon harvested — a problem that worked to Benny’s benefit when those Brits decided to scrap many of their old lorries, and he took advantage of the old bookkeeping skills he’d acquired while pushing his pen back at B. Meyer. He bought a fleet of three hundred junkers, mostly three- and five-ton trucks capable of years of service once they’d been overhauled by a flotilla of mechanically inclined Karens from Tharrawaddy. Then, over the following few months, he sold half the trucks — to civilians wanting to get on with their own lives, for the most part. With the stunning profit, he hired his mechanics to transport not just piddling peas, but all the supplies and foodstuffs the army posts needed — even posts in China and India once the war was done with. Sure, a few Chinese soon got into the same racket, but with the partial profit-sharing plan Benny put into action, his well-paid, loyal employees soon made his the biggest postwar transportation company in Southeast Asia.

Within ten months of the Japanese retreat, he wasn’t just supplying the British army; he was hauling teak and rice back to long-dormant export companies (such as good old B. Meyer) in the Rangoon port of his youth. That sector of his business became so explosive he almost couldn’t keep up: he bought another fleet of lorries and a parcel of land eight miles from the port, where on a hill overlooking the Karen village of Thamaing he built a sprawling house, several cottages to house his personal assistants, a gas station to fill his trucks, and a machine shop and garage to service and station them. The problem was that many of his new trucks, though stuffed with supplies for export on their way to the Rangoon wharves, were wastefully empty going north. Then one day he remembered that E. Solomon, where his father had worked as a cashier, used to provide ice to the British navy. He was at the port, keeping an eye on a couple of workers unloading one of his trucks, when it occurred to him that a stone’s throw away on the Strand his father had pointed to a British navy ship and first illumined for him the essential concept of supply and demand. (“And how do you imagine their sailors relieve themselves from the press of this heat? Our ice! Our fizzy drinks!” ) Hadn’t Benny’s drivers moaned that if there was one thing civilians and soldiers needed in the outposts, it was ice to prevent their food from rotting?