Latitudes of longing, p.13
Latitudes of Longing, page 13
In prison, Plato inquires about the price of smuggling a letter to the Andamans. “Using the post will be easier,” Thapa says. But Plato has no address. All he knows is that his mother lives with another man on the islands, that her name is Rose Mary, and that she is a Karen hailing from a village called Webi. “It means hidden, not lost,” Plato explains. That is all his grandmother had told him.
On the night of his arrest, there was a reason why the junta left him alive in the ditch. They wanted him to break down without resorting to the elaborate rituals of torture. They had succeeded. Lying in the ditch, shaking with tears, Plato had a vision of his mother. Never before had she come to him with such longing.
* * *
—
Once he’s on the Andaman Islands, it isn’t difficult for Thapa to track Rose Mary, now known as Mary, down to a neighborhood in Port Blair. The Karens on the islands are a small community. Surrounded by hostile seas, the archipelago’s capital is the farthest they got. In the busy market, a Karen woman points her out to Thapa as she waits for her turn outside a miller’s shop.
Her son has sent him to find her, Thapa explains. “He is not a criminal,” he says. “He is a university student who masterminded protests against the rulers.”
Specters of white escape the grinder, covering them as they watch. Mary’s tears flow down like rivers across the white to mingle with the afternoon sweat.
“He goes to university?” she asks.
“He did. Now he has given up studying for teaching. He teaches the rest to revolt, wherever he is.”
“Does he get good marks?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you study with him?”
“No. I barely went to school.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“By Inle Lake, skimming pebbles. He saw my pebble hop on the water more than five times and asked me to teach him. The trick is to not think, just aim. But your son cannot stop thinking.”
Thapa helps Mary collect the flour in a brass container. He pays the miller when he sees that she has left without doing so. He finds her again, wandering in the wilderness at the edge of the market.
“Do you have a bidi?” she asks Thapa as she sits on a boulder. He lights one and hands it over. Mary smokes the bidi in silence. Thapa surveys the surrounding thicket for the legendary giant centipedes of the islands. He has yet to see one.
“When was he arrested?” she asks him, before stubbing the bidi under her slipper.
“Six months ago.”
Mary tries to recollect what her world was like six months ago. “What was the date?” she asks.
“I don’t remember, but it was the month of July.”
Devi was home in July. Her visits were the highlight of life on Mount Harriet. Like the wheat grains in the flour mill, Mary is pounded by guilt. She had been fussing over Devi’s appetite and complexion at the time of her son’s arrest.
“What year is it?” she asks Thapa.
“1975.”
“How old is he?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three,” she repeats, affirming the reality of this man and her son. “He must leave prison soon and complete his degree. His father was a fisherman and his mother is a maid. Girls these days are very fussy. They want to marry graduates. My Devi will graduate next year too. I keep telling her father to get her married after that. She is difficult. One has to be careful.”
Mary sits up straight, as if she has suddenly remembered something. Thapa is about to tell her that he has paid the miller, when she interjects.
“What is your name?”
“Sharan Thapa.”
“What is his name?”
“Plato.”
“That’s not a Buddhist name.”
“He calls himself Plato.”
“It cannot be my son’s name.”
“It is a strange name, but he likes it. He adopted it himself.”
“What does it mean?”
“It is the name of one of the fathers of philosophy.”
“What is philosophy?”
“It is the art of thinking—thinking and doing nothing.”
“Sounds like his father.”
When she’d last seen him, he was only eight months old. Each new day, she had hoped, would bring him back. Each new hour, she had hoped, would bring news of him. If she had known it would take this long, she would have given up on life long ago. But how could she, without seeing him again?
Thapa looks around. He wants to console her, but he doesn’t know how. And then he sees it, the hundred-legged beast, bigger than any other he has seen. It is his first glimpse of the Andaman centipede. He shrieks.
Mary attacks it with her slipper. She attacks it with such blind ferocity, it disturbs him. She doesn’t stop, even after the claw-like legs have stopped wriggling, its body smashed against a rock. Thapa doesn’t know who the aggressor is, and who the aggrieved.
She wants to believe the stranger so much, desperation has flooded her with the opposite. She crumbles with disbelief.
“You are lying to me….My brothers have sent you here to take me back to the village. They want to punish me for eloping,” she says.
* * *
—
Four days later, Mary leaves for Rangoon with Thapa.
MARY LEAVES the Indian archipelago in a dinghy. Tears, as ancient as life and as young as the rain, push the dinghy toward the Irrawaddy Delta to a place where the river latches on to the sea with nine limbs, creating sandbanks to tighten its grip. Twenty-three years ago, Mary had left an eight-month-old baby on one such sandbank in time.
The dinghy has a motor engine and three boatmen, a luxury for a journey that seldom lasts more than eight hours in the open seas.
Sea gypsies control these waters connecting the Andaman Islands to Burma. Traditionally, the gypsies choose the boatmen on this route for their emotional invulnerability. A seafarer’s song glorifies the boatman who can cross this stretch of the sea—impervious as clay, buoyant as rubber, resilient as gold. For a day spent on the choppy waters can easily turn into a lifetime traversing the faultline. No one, not even the cyclonic clouds and deep-sea currents, can escape its elemental pull. There is a danger of slipping into the earth’s cleft. It connects Burma to the islands, like a weeping eye to every disowned teardrop. Not all pain, certainly not all longings, can be swept away by the Indian Ocean.
Once a proud continent, Burma was crushed between India and Asia. India pushed it to the north with its drift; Asia squeezed it to the east in defiance. A weeping eye was all that was left of the face, buried under rubble. Burma’s aquiline edges were gouged into unconquerable peaks and gorges. Its complexion had rotted into damp jungle and dry desert. Despair was evident in the rolling highlands and tropical islands, a reminder of the beauty that once was. Faultlines ran all along it, from the edges to the heart—the biggest one in the form of the mighty Irrawaddy down the spine of Burma, connecting the islands below to the Himalayas above. As profound as the pressure was, Burma could never be one with the masses that surrounded it. It could only crumble.
The dinghy itself is carved out of a single trunk. It won’t come apart, even if the surroundings do. It won’t sink. Driftwood never does. The water might fling it around like a feather in a whirlpool, but eventually it will give up and toss it back to the shore.
Years later, the dinghy will lie derelict on a tidal sandbank. The twisted roots of trees, abandoned shells, and eels caught in plastic nets will give it company. During low tide, desperate villagers will walk over to hack at its skeleton and carry it away as firewood. Its forgotten bones will drift back into the sea. No one, besides an inquisitive dog, will notice the shapes on the bark. The holes, knots, triangles, and lines that Mary, years ago, had imagined to be mountains, whirlpools, and rivers.
As she sits trapped in the dinghy, Mary’s tears take her back to her childhood, to the days when she, in a fit of crying, would beat her head on the ground and strike anyone who tried to approach her. No one could understand the depths of her pain, least of all the profound sense of betrayal she carried. Hungry ghosts possessed her, her grandmother would claim, amidst attempts to feed her. Many decades had passed since Mary was a child. She had ceased to be one the day she reconciled to hunger.
Engulfed by madness in the dinghy, she pacifies herself with a story, like her grandmother would in the past. The faint triangle visible on the wood, is it a mountain or a thatched roof? Is it a fisherman’s hut, the kind they construct on the beach to shelter boats? The circles, are they whirlpools, the sun, or the moon? Could there be more than one sun or moon? Could there be more than one lover?
Drenched in seawater, the dinghy’s wood is soft and tender enough for Mary to etch on with her fingernails. She makes a symbolic boat, curved like her fingernail. Below that symbolic boat, she makes a symbolic sea. She draws a circle with limbs around it. Inside, she carves out patches, like a turtle’s shell. She gives it a head and two slits for eyes. She remembers those sorrowful eyes from a lifetime ago, when she cooked turtle soup for an entire week. She names it the Mourning Turtle.
As for the lines, they could be anything: snakes, trees, streaks of pouring rain, or ghosts without bodies. They are restless spirits in search of closure.
Undaunted by the wind ruffling her hair, Mary removes her hair clip to carve out her fantasies. She makes faces, hands, and legs around the lines. There are humans in the picture now. A man, a woman, and a child stare blankly from the edge of the dinghy at those who sit in it. Or are they three trees? Or three birds? She thinks she recognizes them, but she isn’t sure. Reality seldom bows down to fantasy.
The figures calm Mary down with their tale, as they often will.
* * *
—
“Stand up!” An officer prods Plato’s prostrate body with his boot.
“No,” says Plato. “I will not.”
For an entire week, Plato and his comrades are made to stand in different positions under the direct sun. They are made to imitate an airplane, balancing on one leg, with both arms in the air like wings. They are made to sit on an invisible motorcycle, while their thighs are smacked with a stick. They are made to hold positions from the traditional Semigwa dance. Those who fall, unable to resume their act in this circus of torture, are beaten up.
Plato has escaped the beatings so far. But he is certain his turn will come. It is inevitable. One can only delay it or bring it closer. Idealists call this liberty. Unable to bear the anxiety of waiting any longer, he tells the officer, “It makes no difference if I sit or stand or run. You will beat me anyway.”
By the end, Plato cannot walk back alone. Two inmates hold him up, grateful because he’d angered the officer so much that he forgot about the others.
Plato’s eyelids are stitched together in pain. His head stoops with the memory of the officer’s boots. There is the salty taste of blood in his mouth. He can still smell the coconut oil in the officer’s hair and the betel nut spewing from his mouth. He can still hear the seconds tick. The hand that slapped his face had a wristwatch on, reeking of sweat mixed with metal—the acrid stench of decaying time, ten years to be precise. Plato has been sentenced to ten years in prison for participating in three strikes.
He shares a cell of ten by twelve feet with twenty-two other men. Only four people can lie down at any given time, and two have sacrificed their sleep for him to recuperate. Urine rises from the chamber pot in the daytime heat and condenses, along with sweat and spit, on the ceiling, only to later descend as soothing dew.
In the evening, a man wipes the dewdrops off Plato’s face as he tries to feed him rice. Head pounding and eyelids bound together, Plato can’t place him. Judging by the stench, they are all the same, students and criminals.
“Oh, they have broken your teeth!” the man exclaims as Plato opens his mouth. Plato rolls his tongue around the jagged contours.
“It resembles an Ambassador car’s bonnet,” someone says.
“Or an oyster shell,” another voice pipes in.
Plato’s smile inspires poetry in the cell.
When he returns to his senses, he wishes he hadn’t sent that letter for his mother. He isn’t willing to meet her like this, uglier than ever.
* * *
—
The Shwedagon Pagoda is bigger than any church or temple Mary has ever visited. It is bigger than all of them combined. From the center of the dome, a shrine rises in each direction. Hundreds of Buddhas bless the eight corners of the world.
Mary walks around in circles, undecided. Barely a month has passed since she set foot in Burma. Unknown to her, she arrived at a fishing village on the Irrawaddy Delta on the day Plato’s teeth were broken. Thapa settled her in with a Karen family in Rangoon while he waited to hear of Plato’s whereabouts.
Every Buddha is different under scrutiny. A thousand lives, a thousand faces, a thousand moods. Only the Buddha has the privilege of being so many, while creatures like Mary are forced to hang on to the only chance they’ve got.
Mary spots a statue that resembles her. This Buddha has a small tapering chin and a slightly protruding jaw. Instead of a smile, a frown hides behind the placid forehead. Mary can see it in the eyes. She is relieved. Estranged from one another by their own unique sadness, everyone smiles in this land. Except for this statue and her.
She stands by the pillar, unsure of herself. Where does she fit in this sea of seated and chanting people?
An old man looks up at her. He points. She is nervous. She follows his finger to the pillar she is standing in front of. There are mattresses hanging from it on a nail. She takes one and sits at the edge. The voices—ancient, certain, young, quivering—chant foreign incantations. They sway and, in turn, are swayed by one another.
Like them, Mary sits cross-legged. Her lower back still hurts from the journey in the dinghy. The walk here has scraped the skin off her soles. Her blouse is embroidered with threads of sweat. Some hooks are missing too.
The sun begins its ascent over the pagoda’s spire. Though she has been seated for almost half an hour, she can’t erase from her mind the image of the cat that had crossed her path. It carried a pigeon in its mouth—neck twisted and feathers covered in blood.
* * *
—
Mary had walked for two and a half hours to get here.
The route to the pagoda was like the road to hell. It began in the crowded neighborhoods infested with migrants where Mary lived—tenements up to four stories high. Only centipedes, cockroaches, and snakes could live piled up like this. The city was filthier than the Port Blair market. Mary walked through the darkness with no knowledge of the route and only dogs for company. She walked through boulevards lined with margosa, banyan, and gum-kino, onto narrow by-lanes. At dead ends, it wasn’t fear but filth that confronted her. The sight and stench of unresolved filth.
By dawn, she had made it to the pagoda’s township. The path cut across the monastery compound and markets that sold everything from betel nuts to quail eggs to brooms to Buddha statues. If only they sold faith. If only she could donate all her secrets to the monks, bald and barefoot, wandering with bowls, and enter the pagoda empty.
She had seen a man selling mynahs at the monumental steps leading up to the pagoda. To set one free from that three-story cage would be good karma, she was told. She had heard of this practice before. The birds were trained to return to the owner. They were trained to experience freedom in flight. As soon as Mary was given the bird, she let it go. The tiny thing trembled in her hands as if it were about to explode.
Seated before the Buddha, Mary prays for the pigeon and the mynah. Keep them safe, she chants. Keep them safe. Keep them safe.
Thapa had come over the previous night to give her the news. Plato was in solitary confinement. It could take days. It could take months.
“There is only one place for lonely people. I may be there sooner than I thought. If I don’t give in, they will put me in solitary,” Plato had written in the letter Thapa gave Mary in the Port Blair market.
She didn’t know if the handwriting really belonged to him, her son. She had carried it in her blouse ever since. It had begun to fall apart at the edges, but all the lines were still intact. “I grew up an orphan, raised by my grandparents,” he’d written. “My father had drowned in the sea, they said, and my mother had run away with another man. How ugly must I be, I would think, for my mother to abandon me?”
Amidst the foreign hum, Mary contemplates resorting to the only prayers she knows—verses from the bible. But her mind is blank. She came here, the holiest shrine in the land, to pray for something so ordinary, most mothers took it for granted. When the time comes to meet him, Mary fears, she won’t recognize him. To be in his presence and walk past…
THE MONTH OF MAY would be marked in the history of the Karen settlement in the Andamans. No one would remember the exact date, except that it was a suffocatingly hot morning when Rose Mary was born. The last in a line of nine children, she was also the first child to be born in the Karen villages. The pastor proclaimed, “She has turned this settlement into home. The Lord speaks to us with the glory of her birth.”
