Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Damnable citizens,” Ducksworth often grumbled at the Lanmadaw YMCA, where every night after dinner the fellows would gather in the close, teak-furnished living room and fill their glasses with cognac (purchased, Benny learned with a pang, from E. Solomon & Sons, where his father had worked). Invariably, they would begin a game of bridge, and as they played and smoked and drank into the early hours, they would talk — about girls, about politics, about the splendor of the British Empire, the great Pax Britannica, which kept this country running with the ease and beautiful regularity of a Swiss clock.

“Unlike China,” Ducksworth cut in on one of these nights, “with Manchuria overrun by Japs. What the devil do you think Hitler’s up to by favoring the Japs, anyhow?”

There was something distasteful about Ducksworth, Benny thought. He was too eager to laugh, to lose himself under the annihilating influence of tobacco and drink. The fellow would never bloody his fists for anything, had he even the mettle to believe in more than a decent pension and a decent meal and a decent-enough game of bridge. No, his lightness appeared to be how he survived, how he sat so easily with not treating anyone but a white or a Burman quite as a man — and how he managed to get away with championing the imperialism that more and more of the Burmans were beginning to revolt against.

Just the other day, Ducksworth had been taking a break for tea at the firm when he’d revealed the shallowness of his convictions to Benny. They’d been alone in the office; Ducksworth had put his feet indecorously up on a chair, raising his teacup to his pursed lips; and Benny had decided to broach the subject of the law student, a Burman fellow at Rangoon University — someone by the name of Aung San — who’d begun raising a ruckus about the British presence. “A solidly anti-empire nationalist sort,” Benny had added rather breathlessly. “They claim he’s starting some sort of movement, saying the Burmans are the true lords and masters — Britons be damned, and everyone else along with them.” By “everyone else,” Benny had meant people like B. Meyer and him, and also the Muslims and Indians and Chinese and, well, the natives who’d been here for centuries, some before the Burmans. “It’s not anyone else’s country,” his new friend had disdainfully replied, reminding Benny that Ducksworth, born to a Burman mother and an English father, had a uniquely dominating perspective.

Yet Ducksworth was habitually unwilling to go so far as to side with the Burmans; it suited him better to sink into the plushness of the Pax Britannica. Indeed, during their conversations, each time Benny came close to the point of pressing him on political matters, Ducksworth would slip away into the haze of his tobacco-drenched musings about the fine pleasures of British tea (which he bought from an Indian) and British cut crystal (which he hadn’t any of) and British manners (which he rarely displayed). And, generally speaking, Benny had to admit that British rule did nurture a spirit of tolerance that appeared more to benefit than to harm many of Burma’s citizens. Certainly there was a kind of caste system, by which the white man was on top and the Anglo-Burmans just beneath them; certainly the British had the deepest pockets; but there was also freedom of religion, an equitable division of labor when it came to British civil and military service, and, for the most part, a general prospering of every sort. From the little Benny had read since landing back in Rangoon, he understood that the Burman rulers whom the British had conquered had shown no such charity (even of the self-interested sort the British practiced) to those they’d overthrown.

“I say, Benny,” Ducksworth said on this particular night, when no one rose to his question about Hitler’s favoring of the Japanese. “Have you put in that application?”

They’d begun to play the cards he’d dealt.

“What application?” said Joseph, one of the others who worked at the firm and lodged at the Lanmadaw.

“Benny doesn’t take our work seriously, Joseph — too ‘stifling,’ too—”

“Well, it is!” Benny said, hiding behind his hand.

“What application?” Joseph repeated.

“To His Majesty’s Customs Service,” Ducksworth answered. “It does have a distinctive ring, doesn’t it? You’re too bloody lazy for that sort of thing, Joseph — but not Benny. And wouldn’t he look dashing in a white uniform?”

Was Ducksworth mocking him? He’d been the one to urge Benny to apply for a junior position, so impatient was he to convert Benny to his chosen faith of imperialism.

“What’s the point?” Benny said. “The English will be out soon enough.”

For a moment, Ducksworth only peered at Benny over his cloud of smoke. Then he said, “Your problem is that you believe in right and wrong. Don’t you know evil will find you no matter what?”

It happened now and then in Benny’s wanderings that he caught a glimpse of a cheek, neck, delicate hand, or sweep of black hair that could have been Sister Adela’s. One evening in November — when the rains had fallen off and he’d wandered beyond the city limits — he noticed a girl walking swiftly along a deserted side street, tripping in her fuchsia sari as though her attention were on something higher than the procession of her feet. Up the steep hill leading to the Schwe’ Dagon Pagoda, he found himself shadowing her, until he was sure she had become as sensitive to his presence as he was to hers: two tuning forks, each dangerously setting off the other’s vibrations. The ground leveled off, and she scurried along a concrete path toward the pagoda, glancing back at him as she fled up a dilapidated set of stairs. Instantly, he saw that her terrified eyes were nothing like Sister Adela’s, and the spell was broken. She disappeared into the golden entrance, set between two enormous griffins covered with horrifying pictures of the damned.

“Are you a fool?” he heard. When he looked back at the entrance, he saw an Indian man facing him. The man’s long lax hands, hanging against his gaunt frame, were not a fighter’s, nor was the fierceness in his amber gaze. Rather, there was something wounded about him, ruined. Benny felt awfully ashamed, awfully sorry. “Are you a fool?” the man said again, in an English thickly accented by Bengali.

“Just foolish,” Benny responded.

“Where does your father work?”

“Forgive me, sir—”

“I insist that you take me to your family!”

Now the man descended the stairs and drew close, so that Benny could smell the tobacco on his breath.

“Are you stupid?” he said more quietly. “Terrorizing a child who only wants to light a candle for her mother? You should be honoring the dead yourself. What do you imagine they think when they look down and see you behaving this way?” His questions seemed to chase one another out of his throbbing heart. “Don’t you know that when no one is present to be strict with a man, he must be strict with himself?”

Benny hadn’t intentionally avoided his parents, or the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue in whose cemetery they lay. A few nights later, he ventured to the Jewish quarter, where the bazaar was still in full swing. His eyes flicked over the flares of the vendors’ stalls, up to the rickety buildings’ timber balconies, which his father had predicted would be burned down one day. (“ You wait and see, Benny. Careless, so careless with their flares, these street peddlers.” )

Farther up the road he soon found E. Solomon, shut up for the night and somehow less commanding than it had long ago seemed. He peered through the dusty window of the dark store at the rows of liqueurs and whiskies. Whenever he’d managed to keep his hands off the merchandise, his father had rewarded him with a bottle of orangeade. How he’d loved the way the marble in the bottle’s little neck gurgled as he swallowed down the sparkling, syrupy drink. Daddy had been head cashier at E. Solomon, which provided the British navy with drinks and ice from its wells on the riverbank. (“ The navy keeps us safe, Benny. And how do you imagine their sailors relieve themselves from the press of this heat? Our ice! Our fizzy drinks!” )