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Authors: Karen Connelly
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famished child. Only after eating can he think clearly about the palm-reader’s news.
W hat does it mean, really, that Daw Suu has been released from house arrest? He would like her freedom to mean something, to change everything, but his lips shut tightly and pull inward like an old man’s. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s hands are clean of blood and of blood money. But she’s no different from her many supporters, the brave, outspoken ones, the silent ones. She is no different from her brilliant, murdered father. She is only human.
He shakes his head and gazes around his cell. His memories can be so painfully vivid. Perhaps some law of physics intersects with a law of incarceration: that is why prison chronology runs backward. The past is the most compelling evidence toward a future different from this moment: the walls, the lizards, his bucket of shit and piss, the clay water pot, its sides slicked with algae.
He touches his hair. Sein Yun is full of crap. How can he wash his hair with water from his drinking pot? Why don’t they just shave his head? On a sudden impulse, he yanks out a few oily strands. As soon as the interrogators were finished with him, white began to salt the hair directly above his left eyebrow, the one split in two by a boot. Jailer Chit Naing told him there’s a thick swath of white now. Teza stares at the pulled hairs in vague disbelief. No one in his family, not even his grandparents, had such pure white hair. He might as well have snow on his fingers.
H e wonders if his mother’s hair is graying now. After all she’s been through, he wouldn’t be surprised. Hpo Hpo, his maternal grandfather, had streaks of white in his always-pomaded black hair; hisgrandmother, who died years before her husband, dyed her hair so dark that he remembers it shining velvety purple.
They are the faces that made my face, Teza thinks. He closes his eyes and brings them to the surface of his mind one after the other. His mother. His father. His grandparents on both sides. Aung Min too. And Thazin. Daw Suu Kyi. These are the faces he keeps in his heart. His aunties and uncles, his cousins. Friends from university. Certain beloved teachers. He wonders how much the living have changed. Not as much as he has. And the dead stay as they are.
He remembers the old family photographs displayed on the wall of the sitting room, below the altar. In one of them his mother was still a girl, wearing a traditional blouse of homespun cotton, the cloth-knot button closed gracefully at the neck. She is smiling demurely, round-faced and dimpled, but from the glint in her eye and the almost ironic tilt of her head, you suspect that she wants to stick out her tongue and cross her eyes. In some of the photographs from the early years of her marriage, Daw Sanda
did
make funny faces, mugging for the camera or grinning broadly. As their lives became more difficult, her smiles grew subdued or disappeared altogether, and her arms cradled each other, as though carrying some invisible weight.
Her serious expression in the more recent pictures was similar to much older photographs of great-uncles and -aunts and grandparents. These people stared bleakly forward, pressed into time through the narrow black hole of the camera. Most of the portraits were taken shortly after World War II, and the harshness of the Japanese occupation still showed in their solemn eyes.
There were photographs of his father, Dr. Kyaw Win Thu, on the wall too, a slender man with a slightly impish grin and penetrating eyes, eyes that looked so directly at Teza that he sometimes had to turn away from their gaze. The doctor’s mouth often seemed to be puckered slightly, as if he wanted to speak but was hesitating. What? What was he going to say? When Teza was a teenager, his father’s photographs impressed him as much as Bogyoke Aung San’s did; both men’s faces showed so much purpose and intelligence. And both were inseparable from a devastating sense of loss.
Bogyoke
W hat does it mean, really, that Daw Suu has been released from house arrest? He would like her freedom to mean something, to change everything, but his lips shut tightly and pull inward like an old man’s. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s hands are clean of blood and of blood money. But she’s no different from her many supporters, the brave, outspoken ones, the silent ones. She is no different from her brilliant, murdered father. She is only human.
He shakes his head and gazes around his cell. His memories can be so painfully vivid. Perhaps some law of physics intersects with a law of incarceration: that is why prison chronology runs backward. The past is the most compelling evidence toward a future different from this moment: the walls, the lizards, his bucket of shit and piss, the clay water pot, its sides slicked with algae.
He touches his hair. Sein Yun is full of crap. How can he wash his hair with water from his drinking pot? Why don’t they just shave his head? On a sudden impulse, he yanks out a few oily strands. As soon as the interrogators were finished with him, white began to salt the hair directly above his left eyebrow, the one split in two by a boot. Jailer Chit Naing told him there’s a thick swath of white now. Teza stares at the pulled hairs in vague disbelief. No one in his family, not even his grandparents, had such pure white hair. He might as well have snow on his fingers.
H e wonders if his mother’s hair is graying now. After all she’s been through, he wouldn’t be surprised. Hpo Hpo, his maternal grandfather, had streaks of white in his always-pomaded black hair; hisgrandmother, who died years before her husband, dyed her hair so dark that he remembers it shining velvety purple.
They are the faces that made my face, Teza thinks. He closes his eyes and brings them to the surface of his mind one after the other. His mother. His father. His grandparents on both sides. Aung Min too. And Thazin. Daw Suu Kyi. These are the faces he keeps in his heart. His aunties and uncles, his cousins. Friends from university. Certain beloved teachers. He wonders how much the living have changed. Not as much as he has. And the dead stay as they are.
He remembers the old family photographs displayed on the wall of the sitting room, below the altar. In one of them his mother was still a girl, wearing a traditional blouse of homespun cotton, the cloth-knot button closed gracefully at the neck. She is smiling demurely, round-faced and dimpled, but from the glint in her eye and the almost ironic tilt of her head, you suspect that she wants to stick out her tongue and cross her eyes. In some of the photographs from the early years of her marriage, Daw Sanda
did
make funny faces, mugging for the camera or grinning broadly. As their lives became more difficult, her smiles grew subdued or disappeared altogether, and her arms cradled each other, as though carrying some invisible weight.
Her serious expression in the more recent pictures was similar to much older photographs of great-uncles and -aunts and grandparents. These people stared bleakly forward, pressed into time through the narrow black hole of the camera. Most of the portraits were taken shortly after World War II, and the harshness of the Japanese occupation still showed in their solemn eyes.
There were photographs of his father, Dr. Kyaw Win Thu, on the wall too, a slender man with a slightly impish grin and penetrating eyes, eyes that looked so directly at Teza that he sometimes had to turn away from their gaze. The doctor’s mouth often seemed to be puckered slightly, as if he wanted to speak but was hesitating. What? What was he going to say? When Teza was a teenager, his father’s photographs impressed him as much as Bogyoke Aung San’s did; both men’s faces showed so much purpose and intelligence. And both were inseparable from a devastating sense of loss.
Bogyoke
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