Miss Burma Read online

  MISS

  BURMA

  Also by Charmaine Craig

  The Good Men

  MISS

  BURMA

  CHARMAINE

  CRAIG

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2017 by Charmaine Craig

  “The Great Pretender” by Buck Ram

  Copyright © 1955 by Panther Music Corporation

  Copyright Renewed.

  Used by Permission.

  All Rights Reserved.

  A portion of this novel originally appeared in Narrative magazine.

  Jacket design by Chin Yee Lai

  Jacket photograph courtesy of the author

  For everything that they have given to me and this book, my deepest thanks go to Ellen Levine, Peter Blackstock, Andrew Winer, and Arthur and Judy Winer.

  —C.C.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: May 2017

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2645-0

  eISBN 978-0-8021-8952-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  In memory of my mother, Louisa;

  and her parents, Ben and Khin—all born in Burma

  And for Andrew, Ava, and Isabel

  Look at the history of Burma. We go and invade the country: the local tribes support us: we are victorious: but like you Americans we weren’t colonialists in those days. Oh no, we made peace with the king and we handed him back his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we’d stay. But we were liberals and we didn’t want a bad conscience.

  —Graham Greene, The Quiet American

  Prologue

  There she is, Louisa at fifteen, stepping onto a makeshift stage at the center of Rangoon’s Aung San Stadium in 1956. Give yourself to them, she thinks. And immediately one hand goes to her hip, her head tilts upward, her awareness descends to her exposed thighs, to her too-muscular calves, now in plain view of the forty thousand spectators seated in the darkening stands.

  Give them what they need, her mother told her on the way to the stadium. And Louisa understands that her mother meant more than a view of her gold high-heeled sandals (on loan from a friend and pinching her toes), more than the curves accentuated by her white one-piece (copied from a photo of Elizabeth Taylor). Her mother meant something like a vision of hope. Yet what is Louisa’s appearance on this garish stage, during the final round of the Miss Burma contest, but a picture of something dangerous? She is approximately naked, her gleaming suit approximately concealing what should be private. She is approximately innocent, pushing a hip to one side, close to plummeting into indignity.

  A tide of applause draws her farther into the light. She pivots, presenting the judges and the spectators beyond them with a view of her behind (ample thanks to her Jewish father, who sits with her mother somewhere in the stands nearby). Before her now are the other finalists, nine of them, grouped in the shadows upstage. Their smiles are fixed, radiant with outrage. “The special contender,” the government paper recently called her. How strange to be dubbed “the image of unity and integration,” when she has wanted only to go unremarked—she, the mixed-breed, who is embarrassed by mentions of beauty and race. “We never win the games we mean to,” her father once told her.

  She pivots again, crosses the stage, moving through a cloud of some nearby spectator’s smoke, her eyes landing for a moment on her parents. Daddy is slumped away from Mama, his balding head slightly turned, his docile look catching hers. Though under house arrest, he has contrived special permission to be here. It is even conceivable that he has somehow arranged for the pageant to be fixed. Beside him, Mama, with her demurring aspect, appears anxious, overly engaged in the proceedings. She seems to lift off the edge of her seat, her eyes alight with pride and accusation and something resembling anguish. Move! she mutely cries from her perch, as though to avoid capture by Louisa’s recriminating glances.

  And Louisa does move—past her parents, downstage, to face a view of the smiling judges and the rows of eyeglasses glinting up at her, the rifles in the hands of the soldiers manning the stands. It feels nearly benign, the applause that gives way to a flurry of coughs; almost sweet, these whiffs of someone’s perfume, of putrefying garbage and dampness beneath the field; even liberating, this offering of herself, of her near nakedness. Aren’t they all compromised in Burma? They have been through so much.

  Several minutes later, before the crown is placed on her head, it occurs to her that the spectators could be worshipful congregants—or penned beasts—and she has the instinct to escape.

  But here is a sash being slung across her shoulder.

  Red roses shoved into her hands.

  A camera flash.

  “Miss Burma!” someone cries from the far side of the stadium, as if across the darkness of what has been.

  PART ONE

  Conversions

  1926–1943

  1

  The Pugilist

  When, nearly twenty years earlier, Louisa’s father saw her mother for the first time, toward the end of the jetty at the seaport of Akyab—that is, when he saw her hair, a black shining sheath that reached past the hem of her dress to her muddy white ankles—he reminded himself, God loves each of us, as if there were only one of us.

  It was a habit of his, this retreat from cataclysms of feeling (even lust) to the consolations of Saint Augustine’s words. Did he believe them? When had he felt singularly loved, when since he was a very young boy living on Tseekai Maung Tauley Street in Rangoon’s Jewish quarter? Even his memories of that time and place were unsatisfying: Grandfather reciting the Torah in the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue, Daddy behind the register at E. Solomon & Sons, and the wide brown circles under Mama’s eyes as she pleaded with him, her only child, Be careful, Benny. Dead, all of them, of ordinary disease by 1926, when he was seven.

  Be careful, Benny. Mama’s terrified love had kept him safe, he’d felt sure of it, until there was nothing between him and death, and he was shipped off to Mango Lane in Calcutta to live with his maternal aunties, daughters of that city’s late rabbi. Their love was nothing like Mama’s. It was meek and bland and threw up little resistance to his agony. So he took to throwing up his fists, especially when the boys at his new Jewish primary school taunted him for his strange way of speaking, the odd Burmese word that decorated his exclamations. His aunties’ solution to “the problem of his fists,” and to the way those fists brought other boys’ blood into their house (“Jewish blood! Jewish blood on his hand
s!”), was to pack him off again, to the only nearby boarding school with a boxing program, Saint James’ School, on Lower Circular Road. The location was a comfort to his aunties, who mollified their anxiety about the school’s Christian bent by insisting that no institution of serious religious purpose would ensconce itself on a road whose name sounded, when said briskly enough, like Lower Secular. “And no more Jewish blood on his hands,” they reminded each other with satisfaction.

  And they were right. Over the next five years on Lower Secular his fists found everything but Jewish blood: Bengali blood, English blood, Punjabi blood, Chinese blood, Tamil blood, Greek blood, Marwari blood, Portuguese blood, and Armenian blood—lots of Armenian blood.

  Poor Kerob “the Armenian Tiger” Abdulian, or whatever his name was. In a swollen gymnasium that reeked of feet and stale tea and wood rot, seventeen-year-old Benny fought him for the crown in the Province of Bengal’s Intercollegiate Boxing Championship, and never had one young man’s face been so rearranged physically in the name of another’s metaphysical problems. Before going down in the first round, the Armenian took a left to the chin for the loneliness Benny still suffered because of his parents’ deaths. He took another left to the chin for a world that allowed such things to happen, and another just for the word “orphan,” which Benny hated more than any anti-Semitic slur and which his classmates cruelly, proudly threw at him. The Armenian received a right to his gut for all the mothers and fathers, the aunts and uncles and grandparents and guardians—colonized citizens of the “civilized” British Empire, all of them—who banished their young to boarding schools like St. James in India. But none of these jabs could vanquish the Tiger. No, what sent the Tiger to the mat and all the spectators to their feet was an explosion of blows brought on by something Benny glimpsed in the stands: the entrance of a young, dark St. James’ novice called Sister Adela, to whom Benny had hardly spoken, yet who—until today—had arrived precisely on time for each of his fights.

  He took her presence at his matches as some kind of exercise of devotion on her part—to him or to the school (and by extension God?), he wasn’t sure. Now, as the referee began to shout over the collapsed Armenian, Sister Adela positioned herself in her white habit near a group of students whose raucous display of support for Benny only illumined her stillness, the alertness of her black gaze presiding over him. But when the match was abruptly called and Benny struggled to free himself of the spectators flooding the ring, she slipped out of the gymnasium, unnoticed by all but him.

  That evening, the proud schoolmaster hosted a feast in Benny’s honor. Leg of lamb, roasted potatoes, trifle for pudding—those were the Western dishes that Benny could hardly taste because he was directing all of his attention to the tip of Sister Adela’s fork, which she repeatedly used to probe her uneaten dinner while stooped over her corner table with the other nuns. Only once did she meet and hold Benny’s gaze, her focus on him so sharp and accusatory that he felt every flaw in his face, especially its swollen upper lip, the result of the one right hook the Armenian Tiger had managed to land. Was she angry at him?

  As if to deprive him of an answer to that question, her father came to take her away the next morning. She left in a deep pink sari that clung to her hips and set off the impossibly black strands of hair falling from the knot at the base of her neck, the most elegant neck Benny had ever seen. A queen’s neck, he told himself over the following few weeks, as he tried and failed to assert himself in the ring. Remarkably, his desire to fight had followed Sister Adela right out of the stands.

  A month later, a letter from her arrived:

  Dearest Benny,

  Do you remember when I came across you sitting in the library talking to yourself? I thought you had become one screw loose because of all the pummeling your head receives. But no you were going over the lecture on Saint Augustine and you were saying God loves each of us as if there were only one of us. Well you were saying it with a good amount of mocking but I have seen from the start that you are a very sweet and immensely gentle being. And maybe you were thinking what I have come to. That sometimes it is necessary to go without human love so God’s love can touch us more completely. It is true that no human love can be as untroubled as God’s don’t you agree? Try as I am trying to think of God’s love whenever you are blue. Oh I know you will do the opposite! Well let this be a test and a reminder that true rebels are unpredictable. I told myself I COULD NOT FACE your match when I learned my father would come for me but then I changed my mind. Did you have to be so hard on that boy? You can’t imagine how very very very very happy it made me when you beat him so happy I am crying all over again. Oh Benny. Pray for me. Your very dearest Sister Adela is now a wife.

  In faith,

  Pandita Kumari (Mrs. Jaidev Kumari)

  He sailed for Rangoon later that year, in June 1938, when a cyclone crossed the upper Bay of Bengal and swept his steamer into its violent embrace. With each pitch and lurch, he leaned into the wind over the upper deck rail, purging himself of his choked years of loneliness in India—years that had ended with his rebellious proposal to his aunts that he convert to the faith of Saint Augustine (whose God he truly hoped loved him as uniquely as a parent), followed by their retaliatory proposal to perform his death rites. By the time the cyclone passed and he caught sight of the placid mouth of the Rangoon River, he nearly felt dispossessed of what had been.

  At the wharf, he was met by an employee of B. Meyer & Company, Ltd., a lucrative rice-trading house based in Rangoon and run by one of his second cousins. The employee—a young Anglo-Burman called Ducksworth—was chattier than any fellow Benny had encountered. “They didn’t mention you were a heavyweight!” Ducksworth exclaimed when Benny insisted on lifting his own trunk into the carriage drawn by two water buffalo (he’d had the fantasy of being met by an automobile, and stared with some envy at one idling on the road). “Mr. Meyer should have put you to work hefting bags of rice instead of pushing a pen! Not a hopelessly boring job, being a clerk—nor a hopelessly low salary. Enough to live respectably, to take care of your board and lodging at the Lanmadaw YMCA. Well, you wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. A lot of jolly fellows, many of them British officers, half-whites. You’re . . . half Indian?”

  Before Benny could answer, they were caught in an afternoon downpour, and Ducksworth busied himself with helping the driver raise the rusted metal roof of the carriage. In any case, Benny thought, better to avoid the subject of his race. He wasn’t worried about ­bigotry—Mr. B. Meyer was a shining example of Jewish ­success—but he was tired of wearing a label that no longer seemed to describe him. His Jewishness was like a feature lost to childhood; it had been part of him, to be sure, but he saw no recognizable evidence of it in who he had become.

  Ducksworth was eager to take him under his wing—just as eager as Benny soon became to take flight from anything constraining his newfound freedom in Rangoon. Over the weeks that followed, Benny discovered that if he did his job well, if he worked very hard at pushing his pen, and then was adequately polite to the fellows at the YMCA (where he was the youngest boarder and roundly liked)—if he rewarded Ducksworth with a few generous smiles or minutes of attentive conversation, he could escape into the city on his own. And so every evening after supper he found a way to flee down Lanmadaw Street to the Strand, where, amid the grand official structures and residences built by the British, his pace slowed and he drank in the evening air. He was thirsty, desperately in need of replenishing himself with the kind of sights he’d missed while shut up at St. James’—sights that had become so foreign to him he felt himself taking them in with the embarrassing curiosity of a newly transplanted Brit: the men sitting on the side of the road smoking cheroots, chewing betel, or singing together; the Indians hawking ice cream and the Muslim shopkeepers reading aloud from their holy book; the stalls advertising spices, canned goods, and umbrellas varnished with fragrant oil; the clanking workers in the passageways; and the buse
s, the trishaws, the bullock carts, the barefoot monks, the Chinese teetering past on their bicycles, and the women in their colorful, tightly wound sarongs, transporting sesame cakes or water on their heads and even meeting his shamed eyes with a grin. How closed in he had been on Lower Circular!

  Painfully, it struck him that his aunties had stopped routinely inviting him to Mango Lane long before his talk of conversion, and that the intoxication he felt here was partly due to his burgeoning sense of belonging. In truth, he knew little more about Burma than what he’d learned in history classes: that the region had been settled centuries (or millennia?) ago by a medley of tribes; that one of the tribes, the Burmans, had dominated; and that the problem their domination presented to everyone else had been solved by the British, who’d taken possession of Rangoon nearly a century before and who continued to rule by staffing their civil service and armed forces with natives. The very names of these tribes bewildered his ignorant ears: Shan, Mon, Chin, Rohingya, Kachin, Karen (these last pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, it seemed to him—Ro-HIN-gya, Ka-CHIN, Ka-REN), and so on. He could no longer speak more than a few phrases of Burmese—English had always been his language (though he could make his way with the Bengali and Hindustani coming out of the odd shop). But as he passed the people gossiping in their impenetrable languages and playing their energetic music, he felt seized by a powerful sense of understanding. It was something about their friendliness, their relaxed natures, their open courteousness, their love of life, their easy acceptance of his right to be among them, elephantine as he must have appeared in their eyes (and hopelessly dumb, miming what he wanted to purchase). He had the sense that wherever they had come from (Mongolia? Tibet?), however many centuries or millennia ago, they had long ago accepted others’ infiltration of their homeland so long as it was peaceable. Yet he also had the distinct impression that they’d never forgotten the dust of homelessness on their feet.