Everything Is Broken by Emma Larkin Read Free Book Online

Shwedagon is usually open by four in the morning so that worshippers may climb the steps to the marble platform around the golden pagoda before dawn. In the days following the storm, however, the Shwedagon was closed to the public. The shopkeepers who sell religious wares—gilded Buddha images, laminated photographs of holy sites, fresh flowers, candles, incense—from stalls along the stairwells were prevented from entering. Soldiers stood guard at each of the four entry gates around the pagoda.
    The story was just another Rangoon rumor, impossible to verify, but most people were convinced it was true and speculated that it must have had something to do with the jewels. At the very top of every pagoda in Burma is a conical structure known as a hti , or umbrella. The hti is traditionally draped with gems and serves as a crown for the pagoda structure. At nearly seventeen feet high, the hti at the top of the Shwedagon is an elaborate construction of multiple tiers, plated with gold and silver and hung with donations of personal jewelry. The structure reportedly holds some 83,850 pieces of jewelry. Among the treasures are rings embedded with clusters of sapphires and diamonds, ruby-studded earrings encased in precious metals, and prayers minutely etched in antique Pali script onto paper-thin sheets of gold. At the very pinnacle of the hti is a golden globe encrusted with 4,351 diamonds and topped by a single 76-carat diamond the size of a mandarin orange. It is an ostentatious and seemingly careless display of devotion; imagine the crown jewels of England strung together, hoisted up the steeple of Westminster Abbey, and allowed to twirl in the breeze above London.
    Gazing up at the Shwedagon, it looked—amazingly—as if the hti had not been affected by Cyclone Nargis. Perhaps to quell suspicions, the New Light of Myanmar even ran an article describing how a survey team used Japanese technology to ensure that the hti had not been tilted and remained intact. But the shopkeepers who work in the stairwells of the pagoda said that many jewels had been shaken loose by the cyclone and that emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and sapphires were scattered across the gardens like fallen fruit.
    Along with the general public, the ruling generals had also donated valuables for the hti . There is immense spiritual and symbolic significance in placing personal items at the highest point of the country’s most revered Buddhist site. The jewels are valuable in monetary as well as spiritual terms, and so it was said that the generals ordered their soldiers to retrieve the missing treasures. The soldiers were put in three-man teams, each composed of men from different battalions so that they would not be tempted to pocket any of their findings, as they would not know if they could trust their team members not to report them.
    It was a sad but not implausible answer to the question of the soldiers’ whereabouts. While Rangoon struggled to overcome the battering it had received from Cyclone Nargis, and unimaginable miseries were unfolding in the delta, some of those soldiers had been sent to collect gems for the generals in the gardens of the Shwedagon Pagoda.

TWO
    O ver a fortnight had passed by the time the country’s leader, Senior General Than Shwe, publicly acknowledged that a massive natural disaster had taken place in Burma. Than Shwe had sent felicitations to Israel for Independence Day and to King Harald V on Norway’s National Day. He had also remembered to convey a message of congratulations to the newly appointed Russian president, yet he had had no words for his own countrymen during this time of crisis. He and his wife had cast their votes in public on the morning of the referendum, which was held as scheduled on May 10 in parts of the country not affected by the cyclone. But it was not until May 18, sixteen days after Cyclone Nargis, that Than Shwe found time to inspect the emergency operation.
    Than Shwe is a famously reclusive