Glass Palace

In 1946, when it became apparent that Burma would soon become independent, Doh Saydecided to leave Huay Zedi and move eastwards, into the mountainous regions of theBurma-Thailand border. The war had pitted the peripheries of the country against itscentre: Doh Say was one of many who had deep misgivings about what the future held forBurma's minorities.

Most of Huay Zedi's population took Doh Say's advice, Dinu among them. The village wasabandoned and its inhabitants settled in Loikaw, a small frontier town, deep in theKarenni hills, not far from the border of Thailand. For Dinu, there was one greatadvantage to being in Loikaw: he was once again able to find photographic materials --many of them smuggled across the Thai border. He set up a studio and became the onlyprofessional photographer within hundreds of miles. Even in difficult times, peoplemarried, had children -- they needed records and were willing to pay, sometimes in cashbut more often in kind.

In 1947, in preparation for the British departure, Burma's first national electionswere held. They were won by General Aung San. It was widely believed that he alone wouldbe able to ensure the country's unity and stability. But on 19 July, shortly before he wasto assume office, Aung San was assassinated, along with several of his would-becolleagues. Within months of the assassination, a Communist-led insurgency broke out incentral Burma. Some of the army's Karen units mutinied. The Karen were the country'slargest ethnic group after the Burmans; a major Karen organisation took up arms againstthe Rangoon Government.

Other groups followed suit. In a short time, there were sixteen insurgences raging inBurma.

One day, in Loikaw, a boy came running to Dinu's door. 'Ko Tun Pe -- someone comelooking for you.' Another child followed and then another. They stood in his doorwaypanting, watching in bright-eyed expectation. They all said the same thing. 'Ko Tun Pe --you have a visitor, she's walking up from the bus station.'

He ignored them, he stayed inside his studio, doing nothing, trying not to look out ofthe window. Then he heard more voices approaching -- a procession appeared to be makingits way towards his shack. He could hear people calling out: 'Ko Tun Pe -- look who'shere!' He saw a shadow on his threshold and looked up. It was Dolly.

It had taken Dolly several months to track Dinu to Loikaw. She had arrived in Burmalate in 1948, just as the insurgencies were getting under way. On coming to Rangoon, she'ddiscovered that the authority of the elected Government did not extend far beyond thecapital's municipal limits. Even the areas that bordered Mingaladon airport were in rebelhands. Much of Rangoon was in ruins, bombed to ashes by successive air campaigns. With theKemendine house burnt to the ground. she had nowhere to stay: a friend gave her refuge.

One day Dolly heard that Dinu's old friend, Thiha Saw, was back in Rangoon, working fora newspaper. She went to see him to ask if he had any news of Dinu. It so happened that UThiha Saw had recently attended a political conference where Raymond had also beenpresent. U Thiha Saw told Dolly that Dinu was safe, living in Loikaw. Dolly had leftRangoon by boat the next day. After a journey of several weeks she had boarded a rattlingold bus that was on its way to Loikaw.

Dolly and Dinu spent days talking. She told him about Neel's death and Manju's death;about the march across the mountains and how she and Rajkumar had made the journey fromthe Indian border, through Assam, to Calcutta, she explained why she had come back toBurma alone.

He took pictures of her. Dolly was very thin and the bones of her face could be seen asclearly as the ridges of a fluted cup. Her hair was tied tightly back at the nape of herneck: it was still dark and glossy, with only a few white streaks at the temple.

She urged him to write to his father: 'You should go and find him; you would not havethe trouble with him that you had before. He is changed, a different man, almost a child.You should go to him; he needs you - he is alone.'

Dinu would make no promises. 'Maybe. Some day.'

He knew, without her telling him, that she had not come to stay. He was not surprisedwhen she said: 'Next week I shall leave for Sagaing.'

He went with her. This was the first time he'd ventured into the plains since the endof the war. He was stupefied by the devastation. They travelled through territories thathad been scorched not once but twice by retreating armies. River channels were blocked andrailway lines lay mangled on their sleepers. From village to village a different group orparty was in charge. Farmers ploughed round bomb-craters; children pointed out the placeswhere mines lay unexploded. They took roundabout routes, skirting round those districtswhich were said to be particularly dangerous. They walked and hired ox-carts, and took anoccasional bus or a river boat. At Mandalay they stopped a night. Much of the fort was inruins; the palace had been destroyed by artillery fire; the pavilions that Dolly had knownhad burnt to the ground.

They walked the last few miles to Sagaing and took a ferry across the Irrawaddy. Totheir intense relief Sagaing was unchanged. The hills were tranquil and beautiful, dottedwith thousands of white pagodas. Dolly began to walk faster as they approached thenunnery. At the entrance she held Dinu fast and then Evelyn led her in. The next day, whenDinu went to see her, her head was shaved and she was wearing a saffron robe. She lookedradiant.

It was arranged that he would come back to see her again the next year. The time cameand he went back, from Loikaw to Sagaing, making the long journey again. At the gates ofthe nunnery there was a long wait. At length Evelyn came down. She gave him a gentlesmile.

'Your mother passed away a month ago,' she said. 'We could not inform you because ofthe troubles. You'll be happy to know that it was very quick and she suffered no pain.'

In 1955 Doh Say died, in Loikaw. By this time, he had become a great patriarch and aninfluential leader. He was mourned by thousands. To Dinu, Doh Say had been almost as mucha parent as a mentor: his death was a great blow. Shortly afterwards, Dinu decided to moveto Rangoon.

The mid-1950s were a relatively quiet time in Burma. There was a stand-off in theinsurgencies and the Government was a functioning democracy. U Thiha Saw had become theeditor of one of the country's leading Burmese language newspapers and wieldedconsiderable influence in Rangoon.

On arriving in Rangoon, Dinu went to see his old friend: he had grown from a thin, tallboy into a portly, authoritative-looking man. He wore colourful longyis and floppy bushshirts, and almost invariably had a pipe in his hands. He gave Dinu a job as aphotographer at his newspaper. Later, when Dinu found a suitable place for a studio, itwas U Thiha Saw who loaned him the money to buy it.

Some of the best-known photographers of pre-war Rangoon had been Japanese. After thewar many had closed down their studios and disposed cheaply of their equipment. In hisyears in Loikaw, Dinu had made himself an expert in repairing and restoring old anddiscarded photographic equipment: he was able to set up his studio at very little cost.

U Thiha Saw was one of the first visitors to Dinu's studio. He looked round it withapproval. 'Very nice, very nice. He stopped to puff on his pipe. 'But haven't youforgotten something?'

'What?'

'A signboard. Your studio has to have a name, after all.'

'I haven't thought of a name . . .' Dinu glanced around. Everywhere he looked, his eyesmet glass: framed photographs, countertops, camera lenses.

'The Glass Palace,' he said suddenly. 'That's what I'll call it. . .'

'Why?'

'It was a favourite phrase of my mother's,' he said. 'Just something she used to say...'

The name stuck and Dinu's work quickly gained a reputation. The Fourth Princess was nowliving in Rangoon. Her husband was an artist. They were both regular visitors to the GlassPalace. Soon Dinu had more work than he could handle. He asked around for an assistant andU Thiha Saw recommended a relative, a young woman who was in need of a part-time job. Thisproved to be none other than Ma Thin Thin Aye -- the young girl who'd helped to shelterDinu when he'd passed through Rangoon in 1942. She was now in her mid-twenties, a studentat Rangoon University. She was doing research in Burmese literature, writing adissertation on The Glass Palace Chronicles -- a famous nineteenth-century history,written in the reign of King Bodawpaya, an ancestor of King Thebaw's. The name of Dinu'sstudio struck Ma Thin Thin Aye as a happy coincidence. She took the job.

Ma Thin Thin Aye was slim, petite and neat in her movements. Every day, at four in theafternoon, she walked down the street, past the pharmacy, to the wooden door that led tothe Glass Palace. Standing outside, she would sing out Dinu's name -'U Tun Pe!'- to lethim know that she'd come. At seven-thirty she and Dinu would close the studio: she'd walkaway down the street and Dinu would lock up and go round the corner to climb the stairs tohis room.

After a few weeks, Dinu discovered that Ma Thin Thin Aye's mornings were not spentsolely on research. She was also a writer. Rangoon had a thriving culture of smallliterary magazines. One of these had published a couple of her short stories.

Dinu tracked down her stories. They took him by surprise. Her work was innovative andexperimental; she was using the Burmese language in new ways, marrying classicism withfolk usage. He was astonished by the wealth of allusion, by her use of dialect, by theintensity of her focus on her characters. It seemed to him that she had achieved much thathe'd once aspired to himself -- ambitions that he'd long abandoned.

Dinu was a little awed, and this made it hard for him to tell Ma Thin Thin Aye of hisadmiration for her work. Instead, he began to tease her, in his earnest, staccato way.'That story of yours,' he said, 'the one about the street where you live ... You say thepeople on the street are from many different places . . . from the coasts and the hills .. . Yet in your story they all speak Burmese. How is that possible?'

She was not at all put out.

'Where I live,' she said softly, 'every house on the street speaks a differentlanguage. I have no choice but to trust my reader to imagine the sound of each house. Orelse I would not be able to write at all about my street -- and to trust your reader isnot a bad thing.'

'But look at Burma,' Dinu went on, still teasing. 'We are a universe on our own . . .Look at all our people . . . Karen, Kayah, Kachin, Shan, Rakhine, Wa, Pa-O, Chin, Mon . ..Wouldn't it be wonderful if your stories could contain each language, each dialect. Ifyour reader could hear the vastness of the music? Imagine the surprise?'

'But they do,' she said. 'Why do you think they don't? A word on the page is like astring on an instrument. My readers sound the music in their heads, and for each it soundsdifferent.'

At this point in his life, photography was no longer a passion for Dinu. He did onlycommercial work, making studio portraits and printing other people's negatives. Hebestowed a great deal of care and attention on what he did, but took no particularpleasure in it: mainly he was grateful for possessing a skill that could be parlayed intoa livelihood. When people asked him why he no longer photographed outside his studio, hetold them that his eyes had lost the habit of looking; his vision had withered for lack ofpractice.

The photographs that he thought of as his real work, he rarely showed. These pictureswere in, any case, very few in number. His early prints and negatives had been destroyedwhen the Kemendine house went up in flames; the work he'd done in Malaya was still atMorningside. All he possessed of his own work were a few pictures taken in Loikaw -- ofhis mother, of Doh Say and Raymond and their families. Some of these he'd framed and hungon the walls of his apartment. He fought shy of inviting Ma Thin Thin Aye upstairs to seethem. She was so young -- more than ten years his junior. It mattered very much that shenot think badly of him.

A year went by and every day Ma Thin Thin Aye left and entered the studio by the doorthat led to the street. One day she said: 'U Tun Pe, do you know what I find hardest in mywriting?'

'What?'

'The moment when I have to step off the street and go into a house.'

He frowned. 'Why. . . ? Why that?'

She wrung her hands together in her lap, looking exactly like the serious student thatshe was. 'It is very hard,' she said. 'And to you it may seem like a small thing. But I dobelieve that it is this moment that marks the difference between classical and modernwriting.'

'Of all things. . . ! How so?'

You see, in classical writing, everything happens outside -- on streets, in publicsquares and battlefields, in palaces and gardens -- in places that everyone can imagine.'

'But that is not how you write?'

'No.' She laughed. 'And to this day, even though I do it only in my mind, nothing ismore difficult for me than this -- going into a house, intruding, violating. Even thoughit's only in my head, I feel afraid -- I feel a kind of terror -- and that's when I know Imust keep going, step in, past the threshold, into the house.'

He nodded but made no comment. He gave himself a little time to think about what she'dsaid. One afternoon he bought biryani from Mughal Street and invited her up.

A few months later, they were married. The ceremony was a quiet one and they invitedvery few people. Afterwards, Ma Thin Thin Aye moved into Dinu's two rooms. She marked offa corner for herself and set up a desk. She began to teach literature at the university.In the afternoons, she still helped at the studio. They were happy, content with thesmallness and privacy of their world. Their childlessness did not seem a great lack. Herwork began to gain notice, even beyond literary circles. She became one of the selectgroup of Burmese writers whose presence was regularly sought at festivals in thecountryside.

One morning, Daw Thin Thin Aye was tutoring a promising young student at theuniversity, when she heard a burst of gunfire close at hand. She went to the window andsaw hundreds of young men and women running by, some covered in blood.

Her student pulled her away from the window. They hid under a desk. After a couple ofhours they were found by one of Daw Thin Thin Aye's colleagues. There had been a coup,they learnt. General Ne Win had seized power. Dozens of students had been shot down, rightinside the university.

Neither Dinu nor Daw Thin Thin Aye had ever been directly involved in politics. Afterthe coup, they kept to themselves and waited for the winds to change. It was not untilmany years had passed that they realised that this was a storm that had come to stay.

U Thiha Saw was arrested and his newspaper was shut down. General Ne Win, the newdictator, began to juggle with the currency. Notes of certain denominations were declaredto be valueless; overnight, millions of kyats became waste paper. Thousands of thecountry's brightest young people fled into the countryside. Rebellions multiplied andflourished. Raymond went underground with several hundred followers. In the east, on theThai border, the insurgents gave a name to the territories under their control: theybecame a Karen Free State -- Kwathoolei, with its capital at the riverbank town ofManerplaw.

With each year the generals seemed to grow more powerful while the rest of the countrygrew ever feebler: the military was like au incubus, sucking the life from its host. UThiha Saw died at Insein gaol, in circumstances that were not explained. His body wasbrought home bearing marks of torture and the family was not permitted a public funeral. Anew censorship regime developed, growing out of the foundations of the system that hadbeen left behind by the old imperial Government. Every book and magazine had to bepresented to the Press Scrutiny Board, for the perusal of a small army of captains andmajors.

One day Daw Thin Thin Aye was ordered to report to the Scrutiny Board's office. Thebuilding was plain and functional, like a school, and its long corridors smelt of toiletsand disinfectant. She went to an office with a plywood door and sat for several hours on abench. When at last she was shown in, she found herself facing an officer who looked to bein his late twenties. He was sitting at a desk and the manuscript of one of her storieswas lying in front of him. His hands were in his lap and he seemed to be toying withsomething -- she could not tell what it was.

She stood at the desk, fidgeting with the hem of her blouse. He did not ask her to sit.He stared, looking her up and down. Then he jabbed a finger at the manuscript. 'Why haveyou sent this here?'

'I was told,' she said quietly, 'that that is the law.'

'The law is for writers,' he said. 'Not for people like you.'

'What do you mean?'

'You do not know how to write Burmese. Look at all these mistakes.'

She glanced at her manuscript and saw that it was covered with red pencil marks, like abadly filled schoolbook.

'I've wasted a lot of time correcting this,' he said. 'It's not my job to teach youpeople how to write.'

He got up from his chair and she saw that he was holding a golf club in his hands. Itstruck her now that the room was full of golfing paraphernalia -- caps, balls, clubs. Hereached for her manuscript and crumpled it into a ball, with one hand. Then he put it onthe ground between his feet. He took many little steps, swinging the head of his club backand forth. He swung, and the ball of paper went sailing across the room. He held the posefor a moment, admiring his swing -- the bent knee, the flexed leg. He turned to her. 'Pickit up,' he said. 'Take it home and study it. Don't send anything to this office againuntil you've learnt to write proper Burmese.'