Bangkok, Thailand
1973–1978
Lieutenant Colonel Phuphathna cruised along the district of Pat Pong in the city on his daily exercise in the upholding of the law of the land. An intelligence official, his chief interest was in monitoring the influx of refugees, exiles and dissidents from neighbouring countries into Thailand—particularly Burma. The inflow had been on the incline, and with it, the potential for crime had also increased. Drug trafficking, arms dealings and prostitution were the bane of the phenomena that his country had, in its passivity, tolerated until the authorities of the land had decided to suffer it no longer. He was the instrument to exact stringent measures to stem the decay afflicting the land.
The lieutenant colonel cruised by the dingy bars, the garish nightclubs and the seedy whorehouses—the sort of places where decadent tourists, sex-starved sailors, perverts and the scum of the underworld would haunt for their days’ worth of self-fulfilment. He couldn’t deny that Bangkok was a city of sin, no less than the other cities of sin on the planet. What infuriated him was that, apart from the cheap entertainment that the world could wallow in while the wealthier patronized its islands like Phuket enjoying exotic holidays, the world was beginning to see it as the capital of sleaze, stalked by poverty that denigrated the magnificence of the land of the Buddha, its benign religion and its scintillating pagodas, maintained by a culture of saffron-robed monks, intrinsic to ancient Siam.
He steered his car out of the district and drove on to the outskirts of the city, where he eventually pulled up by a monastery. He got out of the car and walked towards a shrine to give offerings when he caught sight of a gathering of worshippers, attentively listening to a monk. The monk who was speaking looked genial, which typified a life of disentanglement from the caprice of mortal attachments, but the language he spoke alerted the lieutenant colonel. The language was Burmese! A gallery of faces flashed across his mind until he stumbled upon the identity of the monk. It was the former prime minister of Burma!
U Nu.
‘What is U Nu doing here?’ Lieutenant Colonel Phuphathna raised the question in his mind. He had been informed that the former prime minister had been released from jail to take up his religious calling, but found it strange that U Nu was preaching in Thailand. He decided against approaching the former prime minister and, instead, drove back to his office. The matter would have to be reported to higher authorities immediately for them to instruct him on appropriate measures to be taken.
His government was tolerant and sympathetic towards the refugees in the country, whether they be Cambodians, Laotians or Burmese—or, for that matter, the Karens, who had been taking the brunt of the Burmese Army’s belligerence. While the Thais accommodated them on humanitarian grounds in accordance with Buddhist compassion, they were sensitive to any exploitation of their kindness by these foreign elements exporting hostilities from their soil.
‘Are you certain that you saw U Nu?’ questioned General Pawa. ‘Was he giving a political speech or a sermon?’
‘It’s hard to say, General, I don’t speak Burmese,’ replied Phuphathna. ‘And I left immediately, thinking that you should know about it.’
‘Good. Keep an eye on him and if you suspect any covert activity, let me know immediately,’ said General Pawa. ‘We don’t want a major problem with the Burmese.’
‘What if he is making political speeches? Should I arrest him?’ asked the lieutenant colonel.
‘Let him make a little noise if he wishes to. In fact, let him make more than a little noise, but that’s all,’ the general advised. ‘I like the idea of embarrassing those gargoyles in Rangoon.’
‘Very well, General, I’ll let him do just that,’ complied the lieutenant colonel.
Phuphathna understood the antipathy the general had towards the Burmese. He himself regarded them as barbarians and could not forget that in ancient times the Burmese had sacked and looted the wealth of Ayudhya—the capital of Siam as Thailand was known then—and had defiled the grandeur of the kingdom. And in recent times, the Burmese Army had, on some occasions, strayed into Thai territory in pursuit of the Karen guerrillas—their excuse being the meandering Moei River, known as Tong Yin in Burma, which their confusing natural borders shared.
*
Meanwhile in India
Dora returned home one evening from work most excitedly, and couldn’t wait to blurt out the news to Stanley.
‘U Nu is in Thailand, and he says he’s raising an army to defeat General Ne Win!’
The excitement that bubbled from her was short-lived when Stanley said laconically, ‘Dora, it will take more than that monk and his army, if he can raise one, to beat Ne Win.’
‘What about the CIA?’ Dora asked.
It was a notorious and popular assumption that preceded a reputation in the subcontinent that the CIA was the only bogey behind any subversive activity to topple elected governments throughout the underdeveloped world, and Dora’s enthusiasm with the possibility that the CIA would help U Nu restore democracy in Burma reflected not only that sentiment but a wistfulness that it would facilitate a visit to her people sooner than she had anticipated.
‘They’ll probably give some weapons at the most, but I doubt whether they’ll be able to provide the men,’ Stanley opined. ‘U Nu will have to mostly depend on fugitive students and exiles, and that hardly qualifies as an army, does it?’ Stanley asked.
‘No, I guess not,’ replied Dora as disappointment set in her, displacing the enthusiasm that had robbed her of reason.
‘Even the Karens would think twice before they joined him,’ Stanley continued, aware that the Karens had taken up defensive positions for a while, and were more concerned about holding on to those positions in the face of a looming new threat.
‘Why do you say that?’ asked Dora. ‘They still remain opposed to the regime in Rangoon; they’ve not signed any truce with the government.’
‘True enough, Dora,’ replied Stanley, ‘but you must realize that the teak jungles have always been the haven of the guerrillas all along, shielding them with its thick foliage and deterring the Burmese Army from hot pursuit.’
‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ commented Dora. ‘Is it the Burmese Army selling the teak to Thai contractors or are the Karens doing it for revenue?’
‘It’s also a question of Karen sovereignty. Either way, the Karens could lose their sanctuary if the trees are cleared, exposing them to the Burmese Army which has largely been cautious enough to keep away,’ Stanley observed.
After a few incidents of being lured into its labyrinthine death traps with calamitous consequences, the Burmese Army had had to review their strategy and before long, Stanley read in the papers about the sale of the teak. The dragnet was closing on the Karens who were now digging in.
‘Yes, you’re right Stanley,’ Dora conceded, ‘they’d know better than to risk an ill-founded venture at this time.’
Dora realized that she had not heard of a major Karen exploit that made the news, except the accounts in Thailand of the bloody riots in Rangoon against the Chinese and the crackdown on the students again in 1974. It was no longer the KNDO now, she recalled. The sagas of the sea princes and the Alexanders were over. It was now The Karen National Liberation Army defending themselves in earnest. They were past the purpose of liberation.
Newsweek or Time, she recalled, had once run an article with colour photographs, the insightful lens of the cameraman graphically capturing in makeshift bunkers and bivouacs, a people: men, women and children enduring a Burmese shelling with nothing more than a fierce determination to hold on to their little hamlets and their dream. She remembered how for days she had carried the magazine, empathizing with her people, their terror and suffering when the deluge of motor bombs exploded about their little bunkers, while mothers tried to soothe the frightened, wailing children.
‘Well, there’s dinner to be made,’ she said, shrugging the pang of anguish for a family that she had left behind, and prepared to tackle the last chore of the day. Was theirs a lost cause, she wondered…the question weighing heavily in her heart as she entered the kitchen.
It was the beginning of the end of unchallenged ethnic supremacy on the borders of the country. Ne Win’s Tatmadaw was getting stronger, and the general, older and more domineering; the infantry remained young, with the induction of fresh indoctrinated blood. Their armouries were now swelling with weapons procured from certain northern neighbours—the Israelis and USSR satellite countries. Ne Win even had a refurbished air force of some squadrons of modernized World War II spitfires and several helicopters, not to be feared by their neighbours but potent enough to change the game on their domestic chessboard.
So when U Nu, the former soft-spoken prime minister, announced to his captors that he was renouncing political ambitions and would spend the rest of his life as a monk, they had released him from prison. True to his word, U Nu became a monk and had started preaching Buddhism to the populace at large, travelling the distances to spread the message of non-violence and non-attachment, much to the delight of the generals. The monk then suddenly disappeared from Burmese soil and appeared in Thailand—no longer a monk but a warrior now, threatening to overthrow Ne Win and his junta.
Ne Win and his junta laughed, a little embarrassed perhaps that the monk had foxed them, but not in the least perturbed by military confrontation. U Nu’s rhetoric was a bark without a bite, a nuisance across the border that they tolerated and, in 1980, the junta allowed him to return to the country on the promise that he would strictly adhere to a religious life. U Nu had turned around to become monk-like again. Meanwhile, Ne Win’s army commenced consolidation of their ground for the long-awaited offensive against the Karens and other ethnic peoples.
And along with the dissipation of U Nu’s threats, Dora’s hope of seeing her people vanished into the closet of her imagination. In early 1977, she received the news of the death of her mother and, later in the year, the death of her two elder sisters. In a cascade of silent tears, her spirit accepted the inevitable. There was a time for everyone to die, the Bible had said, but the pain lingered in her heart and she was not to find the balm of comfort for long.
In 1978, Stanley died.
The death of Stanley had impacted upon the family in different ways, varying in intensity and desolation, but was hardest upon Dora. It seemed to have wrenched away from her the zest for life. The death itself was violent and rude. A cancer that had a primary origin in the stomach, routed its secondaries through lung and lymph nodes through periods of dormancy and malignancy.
It had ravished Stanley beyond any hope of remission, despite the care the cancer hospital had provided. How his father had borne the early spasms and preferred not to seek medical attention in order to avoid the expense distressed Simon tremendously, hounding his conscience with guilt whenever his thoughts returned to a heritage that now lay in the ground. What awed Simon was that no amount of sedatives could keep the excruciating pain from savaging the withering body in the last days. It was as if all the bullets and the bayonet thrusts that Stanley had escaped during the War had found their elusive victim with a vengeance, unmerciful and unrelenting in their frightful assault.
‘God! Cure him or take him!’ Simon had yelled in anger at the sky the night before Stanley died, no longer able to see the banal suffering and indignity of a friend and a father. God seemed to have understood Simon’s anger and sent the angel of death the next morning to relieve Stanley from the fathomless agony of living. And in the serenity of death, a curtain call had come, ending the hostility that the cancer had declared upon Immanuel Stanley David.