Charmaine Craig: Miss Burma

“Beautiful,” she heard the officer say over the whistling wind.

He had stepped back from the gate. And when their eyes met again, she felt so embarrassed that she yanked the boy forward, yanked open the gate, and hurried past the officer and his spontaneously stricken face.

That the officer had taken an interest in her was something she found both agreeable and unsettling — unsettling just because it reminded her that she had been avoiding taking an interest in herself for fear of discovering something distinctly disagreeable inside.

She could remember moments of tranquillity from her youth, when her father still had his land and life, when her mother still had her smile. There hadn’t been the features of what others might call an easy childhood. She and her younger sister had never attended school, but worked their orchards from the start. Yet there had been ample time to climb and run and play, to bathe on the riverbank, to sit as Mama braided their hair, and to sing.

Singing — that was their ease, their art, their prayer, their lesson. They sang to the Karen god Y’wa, who, she had been taught, was also the Christian Creator. Stretching out under the mosquito net at night, they sang to the spirits of the orchard. And then, as she and her sister fell into sleep’s embrace, they listened to Mama sing their people’s story. Long ago, the story went, we came here along a river of sand. We came upon a fearsome, trackless region, where, like waves before the sea, sands rolled before the wind. We came to this green land, to the sources of the waters and the lakes above. Until we fell among the Siamese and Burmans, who made slaves of us. They took our alphabet and holy books, but our elders promised the coming of our Messiah. White foreigners would bring a holy book, they said. Give thanks exceedingly for the coming of the white men. Give thanks, sons of the forest and children of poverty, for before their coming we were poor and divided and scattered in every direction.

Before the white men, we lived on one stream beyond another, and the Burmans made us drag boats and cut rattans. They made us collect dammer and seek beeswax and gather cardamom; weave mats, strip bark for cordage, pull logs, and clear land for their cities. They demanded presents — yams, bulbo-tubers of arum, ginger, capsicum, flesh, elephant tusks, and rhinoceros horns. If we had no money to give them, they made us borrow and thus become their slaves again. They made us guard their forts, act as guides, and kidnap Siamese while they tied our arms. They beat us with rods, struck us with fists, pounded us for days on end, till many of us dropped down dead. They made us march carrying rice for soldiers, so that our fields fell fallow and great numbers of us starved. They kidnapped us, so that we sickened with yearning for one another, or begged for mercy and met with immediate death. We fled to the streamlets, to the mountain gorges, so they could not take our paddy or our women. But they found us and took from us again and forced us to assemble near the city, where great numbers of us perished.

And in our turmoil we prayed beneath the bushes. “Children and grandchildren,” the ancient sayings of the elders went, “Y’wa will yet save our nation.” We prayed as the rains poured and the mosquitoes and leeches bit us. “If Y’wa will save us, let him save speedily. Alas! Where is Y’wa?” we asked. “Children and grandchildren,” said the elders, “if the thing comes by land, weep; if by sea, laugh. It will not come in our days, but it will in yours. If it comes by sea, you will be able to take breath; but if by land, you will not find a spot to dwell in.”

“And how did the white foreigners come, Mama?” she sometimes sleepily asked from her mat under the mosquito net.

By sea! By sea! Mama’s song replied, yet Mama sang it like a lament.

The following evening, she was in the kitchen of the sessions judge’s mansion with his boy, feeding him his rice and soup at the table, when she looked out the window and saw a black car crawling to a stop before the house. Soon the officer was emerging hesitantly from the rear, while she was taking the boy into her lap and hiding her face in his soft neck.

“What’s the matter, nanny?” the boy asked. “Are you sad?”

“Shall we hide?” she found herself murmuring to him.

There was a knock and the familiar squeak of the sessions judge standing up from his mahogany chair. “Someone’s here!” the boy exclaimed, darting from her lap out of the kitchen. Since his mother’s death two years earlier, such social calls had become rare.

Khin listened with all of her attention to the rise and fall of the muffled conversation in the other room — the judge’s halting questions and pronouncements, the deep force of the officer’s disclosures, muted, she thought, by nervousness and respectfulness. Only a few English words—“girl,” “port,” “sun” (or “son”?) — leaped cooperatively to her ears, and the conversation’s opaqueness increased her sense that she was being temporarily shielded from a confrontation with her fate.

“Khin!” the judge called to her.

She stood with a jolt and then proceeded to the living room, where she found the officer seated calmly in the judge’s chair, his hat in his hands, his dark hair smoothed down in brilliantined waves. He sought out her eyes at once, nodding politely to her as though silently beseeching her for something, and she looked sharply away — to the judge, who assessed her from the settee across the room while the boy rested against his knee.

“Do you know this young man, Khin?” the judge asked in their language. There was nothing insincere about the question, nothing pejorative. The judge’s kind, graying eyes told her that he simply wanted to hear from her.

“I have seen him before,” she confessed.

If the judge heard the tremor in her voice, he made no sign of it. “And do you care to see him again?” he asked. A soft smile passed over his mouth. “He very much would like to see you,” he went on. “You will think it funny, but he has already decided to marry you if you will have him.”

She glanced back at the officer, whose ears — without the cover of his hat — appeared to stick out even farther from his head, and whose long-lashed eyes pitiably batted at her, all of which struck her as funny indeed. And as if she had downed a cup of rice beer, she felt abruptly dizzy, delighted, delirious. Her lips began to emit an odd, barely audible twittering laugh, which only redoubled in force when the officer looked at her with an enormous sheepish grin (sheepish because he thought that she and the judge had exchanged a joke at his expense?). She held her fingers over her mouth, commanding herself to stop, thinking she would weep if she didn’t, but for some reason the boy began laughing, too, and then the judge chuckled, and even the officer joined in — and what a resonant, kind, innocent laugh he had!

“The thought pleases you then,” the judge said to her when their laughter had run its course.

She caught her breath, composing herself. “No,” she said quietly to him.

“No?” he asked.

“I mean to say yes.”

“Yes?”

The officer looked between them, clearly as mystified as she was by her responses. Then, after a long moment of silence, he startled her by tumbling into what sounded like a series of half-sung professions of devotion and regret. Again, his eyes lavished her with attention, even as they admitted a suffering that she couldn’t comprehend.

The judge raised a diplomatic hand and interrupted the officer with a few English words of his own. Then he turned to her. “What he has just expressed to you, Khin,” the judge began, “is that he is in Akyab for only the month, after which time he will be transferred back to Rangoon. He says he was so taken by your beauty, he followed you and Blessing from the port, for which he begs your pardon.”