Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Lynton. Increasingly, she was overpowered by a physical desire to be overcome by that beautiful man again, to be overcome by the sheer, strong certainty of him. The thought of never again being vanquished by such satisfactions staggered her. And she started shouting at the children because she couldn’t take her frustration out on anyone else. “He’s gotten fat and lazy, your father,” she told the younger girls as she tugged at their unruly hair. “He sits around, expecting to be served, as if it were the old days when he was making money. His lordly ways. Doesn’t even see what the rest of us do for him. How I have to sew the shirts he sweats in. Hta Hta doing the work of ten servants while he refuses to pitch in. It must be wonderful to pretend that chores and bills don’t exist.”

Under the influence of her roughness, the younger girls grew peevish. “You’re hurting me!” Molly cried, while Gracie dashed out of the house to climb the trees.

“Stop it!” Khin screamed when Johnny slugged Molly, who swung wildly back at him with her fat little fists. “You’re twelve, for God’s sake, Johnny! What’s wrong with you?”

“How do you expect any of them to behave when you’re so mean to Daddy?” Louisa challenged Khin one evening.

Khin had been trying to get the younger children ready for bed, having told Hta Hta to take a break with her own little Effie, and having just bathed Molly with extraordinary difficulty. Louisa, it seemed, had come to the nursery to tell them good night — she was heading out to a party — and Khin was stunned to see how serene and striking the fourteen-year-old appeared, standing at a sort of regal remove from the rest of them and wearing her best sarong, with her hair done up and a scarf draped elegantly around her shoulders. Khin was reminded of that moment during their reunion at the Forest Governor’s house, when Louisa had emerged in the dress that Khin had brought her, looking transformed by newly discovered self-possession. And hadn’t Khin, too, been transformed then? Transformed by a subtle envy toward Louisa that would later blight her days with Lynton.

Now, in the girl’s wide-set eyes, there was the spark of upset and accusation, as if she stood in judgment of her mother — of Khin’s pathetic diminishment in the face of ordinary motherhood and her own superior dignity. Never before had she dared look at Khin that way.

“You are your father’s daughter, aren’t you?” Khin snapped at her.

And it was true. Louisa had always adored Benny, as he had her. The injustice of that exclusionary love — the injustice of all three of Khin’s eldest children preferring Benny after everything she’d done for them — struck her so forcibly, she had the momentary thought that she hated Louisa, hated all of them.

In October of that same year, a terrible thing happened. They woke to a loud banging coming from down the hill, and soon discovered half a dozen Burma Army soldiers assembling a hut at the bottom of their driveway. Benny had been sentenced to an indefinite term of house arrest, one of the soldiers informed them. “Without charge or trial?” Benny asked the soldier, but the ignorant thug had no idea what he meant.

Khin had all but forgotten the larger world of politics, of the war, since returning home to Insein. Of course, she knew from Benny that the Burma Army had been focusing its offensives on the hills rather than the delta region, and she’d thought with concern of Lynton out on the front lines. But the threats he faced — the threats they all continued to face with the war unresolved — menaced her as if for the first time.

And all that first day of his house arrest, Benny sat as if menaced in his study, amid the forest of his papers and books, staring at the shadows on his wall to glean some truth they obscurely reflected. He could have been a child both fascinated and frightened by his unknowable surroundings.

To rescue him, Khin finally charged into the room with a shot of brandy. “Does this sentence have something to do with what you weren’t at liberty to tell me?” she ventured to ask. She meant what he wasn’t at liberty to tell her about the source who’d informed him of her affair with Lynton.

The face Benny turned to her twitched with confusion. “If it does,” he finally responded, “either I’ve been discovered, or I’ve been an idiot.”

That was all he would say. But it was enough. Khin later reasoned that he had either been turned on by someone he trusted or discovered by the enemy — that enemy being U Nu’s government or Ne Win’s army. Ne Win, whose children attended the same school as Louisa, Johnny, and Grace, she thought with a shudder. How carelessly Khin had brushed shoulders with that despotic general’s wife, Katie, whose tight little mouth always seemed to be suppressing a smile of disdain when she passed Khin on the school grounds. How stupid Khin had been not to find a way into the woman’s good graces. How self-absorbed and naive. It would be impossible now for Benny to conduct business — and, as it was, the diminished returns from his ice plant were barely keeping the children schooled and fed!

Still, there was something reassuring about the thought of Benny being hidden from others’ scrutiny, hidden from others on whom he might turn his own scrutinizing eye. Surely his view of Khin would be altered now that she was the only woman within his sight.

The Miss Burma idea came about several months later, when they were hosting a dinner for a small gathering of friends, one of whom asked what Benny proposed to keep himself busy with, to which Khin spontaneously answered, “With his thoughts, of course.”

She hadn’t meant to be derisive, but all she’d seen Benny do since his house arrest was sit and scratch out the occasional line in one of his notebooks (notebooks she’d peeped at to find an impenetrable morass of tangled English script). Anyway, her mocking tone with Benny and his with her had become something of a habit, so she wasn’t surprised when he, seemingly unable to restrain himself from deriding her in turn, surveyed the dining table with a sort of glee and said, “Khin would no doubt rather I spend my time drumming up business from within my new prison. Or, if I really must engage my higher faculties, she’d probably be happier if I were to join the government’s scribes and report for the Nation ”—the Rangoon Nation being one of the country’s sanctioned newspapers. “You would prefer that, wouldn’t you, darling?” he said, turning to her. “Just think of what I’d write. Perhaps a little ditty about the Miss Burma pageant later this year — if I could somehow contrive a way to go and watch it.”

His outburst — which she’d heard over a pounding in her ears — seemed to have taken him aback more than it did her; yet on the heels of it came a suggestion that deeply injured her: “Or, even better,” he pressed on, while his friends hid their embarrassed faces over their soup bowls, “I could do much as you once did, my dear, and get to work on a campaign making our Louisa over and entering her into the beauty pageant.”

“She’d have to win Miss Karen State first,” one of his friends helplessly put in.

“Why not use her loveliness to our advantage?” Benny said, ignoring him.

It was a new low for him, these depths of cruelty to which he sank; not quite submerged within their murkiness herself, Khin made out obscurely the resentment he must have felt toward her since she’d sacrificed some of Louisa’s innocence for the possibility of his release — a release he hadn’t actually wanted, she suddenly glimpsed. And now he was stuck in this house with her.

“Now that I think of it,” Benny said to the table, “Louisa becoming Miss Burma would give me something useful to write about, wouldn’t it?”