Double karma, p.9
Double Karma, page 9
Now and then, my jailers sent in a more skilled interrogator who knew my personal history. This MI type, focusing more on my personal network with the Federation of Student Unions, would try to figure out which of my comrades might be leaving Rangoon to join the rebellion. But no matter how long or how hard they grilled me — at least three times a week during the first month, always in the middle of the night — I never gave up a single name. After a few sessions, it should have been clear that I would not betray my sisters and brothers from the student movement. But this only seemed to puzzle them, since I was likely sold out by someone who attended that final meeting of the ABFSU. Didn’t personal interest trump solidarity? Weren’t we all just in it for ourselves? Wouldn’t we snitch on each other at the first offer of jail privileges? Didn’t I want revenge on those who had turned me in? They also tried to play my family against me. My brothers, they said, had told them I was planning to leave Rangoon with three members of the Burma Communist Party. Who were they? Nice try, I’d respond, Aye Maung and Hla Min would never give up information about me, and I did not make such plans. Those of us in that room had voted, as a collective, to keep demonstrating in the streets.
The one person my interrogators failed to ask me about was Min Lin. Even with the fake passport and different name, it seemed incredible that my fiancé had eluded the SLORC. Min and I had been together since at least April, and he had been everywhere taking photos, from before the general strike all the way up to the September 18 coup. No one knew about our engagement, but someone from the SLORC must have gone after him for the camera, no matter who he claimed to be. And yet no one at Insein ever mentioned his name, nor that of a farmer from Mandalay who happened to have an expensive Nikon and spent all his time with student radicals in Rangoon. Min had somehow escaped Military Intelligence’s notice. It seemed strange. How could he have remained at the centre of the uprising without being spotted? Was it simply his talent for blending in? Despite his status as an American who had not been to Burma until 1988, Min’s assimilation into Burmese society had taken only a few months. For this reason, I tried my best not to worry about him too much.
9
November 1989
Rangoon
Min:
Late one afternoon I was alone in the darkroom, running some prints through the chemical bath, when the office phone rang. Some kalar was here to see me, the private at reception informed me. Says he’s an old friend. Not good, I thought. Such an impromptu visit from an Aung Win acquaintance was bound to happen, but I hadn’t prepared for such a surprise at work. And my first visitor was from the Indian race; this would raise eyebrows among my peers, all of whom were ethnic Burmans who shared the private’s casual, unexamined racism. So I told him to pass on my apologies and say I was busy. Then I hung up. Moments later, the phone rang again. His name is Sayed Hosin, the private informed me. He insisted I would want to see him. I instructed him to send the man through. What the hell else was I going to do?
My office door opened, and the stranger walked in. Sayed Hosin’s presence was instantly disarming. He was quite young — seventeen or eighteen, I guessed — and a few inches shorter than me. Lean and well-groomed, wearing slacks and a silk shirt, he was not merely handsome but astonishingly so. He had great bone structure, a perfect set of sparkling white teeth, and a curly black mop of hair that shone as if the sun followed him everywhere. How did this kid know Aung Win? I welcomed him by name, perhaps a little too heartily, for the disappointment registered immediately in the dark brown pools of his matinee-idol eyes. Sayed Hosin said he was fine, but that I seemed different. Then, brushing aside the pleasantries, he asked what time I would be finished work. Five o’clock, I said. Could I leave early? I looked at the clock — it read four thirty — and told him to wait a few minutes while I cleaned up and turned off the lights. Then he led me outside onto Strand Road. We headed east on foot.
When I asked where we were going, he shook his head in disbelief. “We’ve gone there many times before,” he said. “You know it well.” Then he gestured toward the promenade along the Rangoon River, noting how lucky I was to find a job so close to it. We used to take a bus here, he told me. Trying to think of something convincing to say, I apologized for my foggy memory, which hadn’t been the same since the injury. He frowned. He knew that already, he said. Then, pointing at the river again, he directed me toward Botahtaung Pagoda. We continued walking in silence as we reached the gates, entered the temple grounds, and made our way down the road past the shrine until we reached the river’s edge. I began to feel awkward. Why would Aung Win have come here, several times, with this minority kid? There was nothing down here, nothing to see or do. Was Aung Win into drugs, and Sayed Hosin was his dealer?
He led me down a ramp onto the dock and then to a rusty, abandoned fishing boat. We stopped where the boat was tied up, then he climbed a short ladder onto its portside deck, entering the cabin through a hatch. Reaching for my hand, he told me to climb up quickly before anyone noticed. What the hell? I thought, obeying. Once I joined him in the darkness, the boy abruptly pulled my face to his own and planted his tongue in my mouth. Startled, I pulled away.
What was the matter? he wanted to know, confused. Didn’t I love him anymore?
Ah, so this was it. Of course, I told him. It was only that —
He pulled my face towards his and kissed me again. This time I went along with it, surprised but alert, my tongue wrapping around his. My first instinct was to keep performing. Strategic and task-oriented, focused only on doing whatever I thought Aung Win would do under the circumstances — something, I now realized, he must have done countless times with this enchanting young man. But soon I felt something else: the unmistakable stirrings of desire, prompted by the unexpected thrill of a first sexual encounter. As a teenager I had fantasized about boys I wanted to kiss but pushed away such thoughts, persuaded by daily reminders from popular culture and my father’s traditional ways that man-on-man love was wrong. Later, as the horrors of AIDS unfolded in the media and in homophobic society everywhere, I fought against gay feelings until convinced I had stamped them out.
Once in Burma and in thrall to Thandar’s charisma, I fooled myself into thinking I could marry a woman. But at twenty-six and still a virgin, I hadn’t gone further with my fiancée than an earnest peck on the lips; nor, since her arrest, had I enjoyed an erotic moment with anyone else — not even at the rebel base in Manerplaw, a cauldron of male hormones with no shortage of blue balls among the many attractive young trainees sleeping beside me. Now here I was at twenty-seven, sharing a deep French kiss with another guy, some stranger from an ethnic minority — a most unlikely candidate for sex, one would think, given my lack of exposure to his people. I felt like I’d come home at last, and Sayed Hosin was my one-man welcoming committee. His probing tongue behaved as if its owner knew every inch of me already — lucky Aung Win! — his full lips drawing me in with a tickle from the downy peach fuzz above them.
The revelation of our coupling was beautiful and sad all at once, for I now understood the pleasure of a human need I had denied myself for more than a decade. Until that moment, sex had seemed impossible; now I knew that this version of it was what I had always wanted. All these years later, I still get goosebumps recalling the moment I accepted that knowledge. I marvelled at Sayed Hosin’s ability to communicate so much without saying a word, at how fervently he desired Aung Win! The transgressive nature of our encounter — the seedy public setting, the fear of being caught — only added to my excitement as our tongues kept mingling.
As we kissed and caressed each other, I was clutching his buttocks when I noticed something in his right back pocket. Slipping my left hand into it, I found what felt like a credit card. For no reason but playfulness, I guess, I pulled it out and tucked it into the back of my longyi without Sayed appearing to notice. When we pulled apart, he looked at me longingly, evidently convinced that I was the Aung Win he remembered. Then he dropped to his knees and went straight for my longyi, tugging it from the top and sliding it down my legs without seeing what I had taken from him. But suddenly, with my loins fully exposed, he recoiled.
He was alarmed and demanded to know who I was.
I did not understand what he meant.
He shook his head and shuffled backward, moving further away. I was missing a scar.
“My scar?”
“Yes, your scar! Aung Win has a big, long scar,” he said, pointing just above my pubic hair. He told me it was from a battle injury, when Aung Win fell against a bamboo spear in a booby trap. A big, brown scar. I had nothing on my skin. No sign, no trace.
The heat of moments earlier, the electricity between us, was gone. Within seconds, the promise of ecstasy with this beautiful boy was withdrawn. I looked down at the unblemished part of my body he was pointing to. I could not possibly be Aung Win, he said. He demanded to know who I was. I pulled up the longyi, tied it in a knot, and looked away. After living successfully as an imposter for eight months, I hadn’t been directly challenged this way since that one soldier at the hospital in April, the one who filed a complaint after visiting me. Since then, not a single person had raised any doubts about my identity so directly. Now this Sayed Hosin, alarmed by the discovery I was not his lover, was confused and angry.
I asked him for a cigarette, playing for time. He pulled out a pack of Red Ruby from his shirt pocket, took out a smoke, and threw it at me. When I caught it, he grudgingly dug out a match and lit it. I cupped both my hands to his left one as he took the match to the cigarette, an intimate gesture now ruined by my exposure. Apologizing for the shock, I told him I had no idea who I was. All I knew was that I’d woken up in a hospital bed not remembering anything, and that I had been told I was Aung Win. I still could not recall anything from before the hospital and had been trying to cope with this fact ever since. Sayed Hosin absorbed my words, his delicate features tightening into a frown. I prayed he would believe me, but he didn’t.
It made no sense to Sayed that I looked like Aung Win in every other way. He repeated his demand to know who I was. I took another drag from the cigarette before dropping it on the boat’s dusty floor and stubbing it out. Just someone who’s trying to keep his head above water in the New Myanmar, I said. His reply was direct: he could report me. He should report me. People at the Ministry, and others who knew Aung Win, would be angry to learn that I was not him.
I had run out of moves. I could not think my way out of this. Then I noticed something on the floor: the card I had taken from the boy, undetected, while our lips were locked. Picking it up before he could grab it, I held it up to examine it. “Hey!” he shouted. “That’s my ID card!” The laminated white card bore a faded, black and white mug shot of a younger Sayed Hosin, with his vital stats. Birthplace: Akyab, Arakan State. Ethnicity: Bengali. He must have taken it out to show security at The Working People’s Daily and forgotten to return it to his wallet. “Give it back,” he said, his anxiety growing. At that time, I don’t think I’d ever heard the word “Rohingya,” but I had some sense that, as a “Bengali” — a term the government had long adopted for his people, marking them as foreign — Sayed Hosin did not belong to one of Burma’s officially recognized minorities. And his white card was all that allowed him to stay in the country. It was his lifeline. There was no way he could leave this place without it, and soon he was begging for its return.
I looked him in the eye. “Are you going to report me?” He seemed self-confident enough to do such a thing, although — as a member of a reviled minority with no citizenship status — his word might not be worth as much as the fake Aung Win’s.
Then he promised not to reveal my secret. How good was his promise?
He stepped forward and brought his face back to mine. The kiss, which lasted almost half a minute, said this: You may not be Aung Win, and I don’t like you for tricking me, but you’re still pretty hot, and in better circumstances we might be lovers. So no, I’m not going to rat you out.
“I promise,” he said, pulling away again.
I handed him the card. He turned toward the door.
“Wait,” I said. “If you’re not going to report me, can we see each other again?”
He shook his head. He was sorry, but this was all too much. I was not Aung Win, and I could never replace him in his heart. And with that, he walked through the door and left me — to my everlasting regret — alone on that rusty old fishing boat.
10
There was no question of escape before the 1990 elections. With so many Ministry staff watching my every move, I was afraid to do anything that might suggest Aung Win had plans other than loyally serving his country. Office colleagues were frequently taking me out to dinner and golf games, angling for invites to the Inya Lake mansion, or inviting me to their homes. All complained that I was such a loner. Constantly on everyone’s radar, I could not imagine finding time alone for myself, even for a few hours. Escape meant stealing a car and racing for the border without being caught. Living under the microscope as I was, I knew that any dereliction of duty would be noticed at once, lowering my odds for escape. That’s how I rationalized it while still under the bubble. I would make a run for it only when the time was right.
This paranoid mindset — only reinforced by the incident with Sayed Hosin — convinced me that casual wanderings through the streets of Rangoon, the luxury of spontaneity I had enjoyed before the September coup, were now part of my past. Before the SLORC, my sense of entitlement as a foreign visitor — including one who posed as a Mandalay farmer — had allowed me to explore the city completely at liberty. But the pleasures of an evening stroll at Kandawgyi Lake or a morning browse in the downtown markets became less feasible after Thandar’s arrest and all but impossible after I woke up in that hospital bed as Aung Win. In my new role on behalf of the Burmese state, posing as a national hero, I had no choice but to self-monitor my every public appearance. There could be no more missteps. If I wanted to avoid another Sayed Hosin–like incident, I would have to check my behaviour and body language whenever out in the city. To minimize the risk of exposure, I spent as much time as possible indoors at the office or at home.
Had I been forced to endure such wilful imprisonment of my identity for much longer, I would have gone insane. But I knew that wouldn’t happen — not with elections scheduled for May 27, 1990 and the National League for Democracy expected to win. In such an event, I was confident I could safely leave the country soon afterward. Until then, my only justification for remaining in Burma — the only way to endure the guilt-inducing stress of working for the SLORC — would be to regard the whole experience as a kind of absurdist research project. An American spy by default only, I wasn’t in Burma on anyone’s agenda but my own. In my unique position, I was able to see first-hand how a dictatorship works. By probing the authoritarian mindset through observation, I would come to some understanding of how total power can turn some of us into monsters.
The Burmese people had been living under military rule for twenty-six years when the Tatmadaw launched the second major coup in ’88. They already knew the generals couldn’t govern their way out of a paper bag. The rot had set in not long after the first coup when Ne Win fired, arrested, or forced into exile all the great minds that could have run the civil service and national treasury. By 1987, the senior general’s solution for national prosperity was to devalue bank notes and reorder the national currency to be divisible by his favourite number, nine. His fellow generals, instead of dismissing the idea as despotic lunacy that would ruin the economy, lauded Ne Win as a visionary genius. Now, under the SLORC, things appeared to be getting worse. Like an ambulance-chasing journalist with the scoop of the century, I happened to have a front-row seat to this train wreck of a country now calling itself Myanmar.
One of my first assignments was the opening of a new military museum in Rangoon. The SLORC were spending millions on these monuments to themselves, which were being built in cities throughout the country. Like the Uncle Ho museums in Vietnam, aimed at distracting the public from Communist government atrocities by ramping up the cult of personality around the people’s dearly departed visionary leader, the SLORC-sponsored military museums aimed to distract the Burmese public from Tatmadaw atrocities by celebrating the Army’s role in Burmese history as defender of the Union. At the opening, I found myself barking orders at some of the junta’s worst offenders as I herded them like cats for a group photo. The regime’s top three — Senior General Saw Maung, Military Intelligence chief Khin Nyunt, and General Maung Aye — were there, along with half a dozen other decorated officers. They all laughed and chortled away about various banalities, a macho mutual admiration society, while I arranged their positions in front of the museum entrance. Peering through my lens before pressing the shutter, I took a moment to regard this ghoulish collection of mostly overweight, post-middle-aged military men, their uniform breasts bursting with unearned medals that gleamed in the sun. For all I knew, their underlings were engaged at that moment in “clearance operations” in ethnic minority villages, raping and killing peasants at will.
“Come on, Captain,” said Saw Maung. “We haven’t got all day …” Oh, what I wouldn’t give for this Nikon to turn into a Kalashnikov right about now …
Around the same time, the SLORC presented its “Exhibition on Historical Records of the State,” an attempt to justify Tatmadaw atrocities by claiming that Burma had been the victim of multiple conspiracies. The Army had little choice, this logic went, but to save the country by “maintaining law and order” and “preventing anarchy.” I wasn’t assigned to cover this dreary exercise in SLORC propaganda, to which state employees and children were subjected. But I did take a photo of some graffiti a bold dissenter had spray-painted outside the exhibition hall: Come, everyone, and witness Khin Nyunt’s magic show! The chief spy was not amused.
