Happy Ant-Heap by Norman Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

arranged for her to visit him there, I’m sure he would show his appreciation in any way he could.’
    ‘Well, I imagine we could do something about that,’ Major Stevens said.
    1997

Memories of an Indulgent Burma
    I AM PROBABLY ONE of the few persons to have been tipped by a taxi driver, instead of the normal reverse of this transaction being the case. It was a small matter, yet provided an unforgettable moment of illumination of a cultural and spiritual divide between the East, as represented by Burma, and the West. The driver, affectionately known locally as Oh-oh, charged reasonable sums for ferrying Burmese passengers in his canary-coloured taxi about the southern town of Moulmein, but offered his services free to foreigners deposited there for a day or two when the ship from Rangoon put into port. Most of these fares, Oh-oh had heard, were enjoying a temporary escape from the capital, where visits into the surrounding countryside were not permitted. Like so many of his countrymen he was constantly on the alert for an opportunity to acquire merit, and being kind to foreigners came under the heading of meritorious actions. When the Menam tied up, the yellow jeep would be seen waiting on the quay, with Oh-oh offering a free ride to the new arrivals to any part of the town, plus a visit to the pagoda at Mudon, a few miles away, if the road happened to be clear of insurgents.
    At the end of such trips passengers received a small present in the form of an ornament cut from mother-of-pearl. In my case the gift was a superior-quality bird’s nest. We had visited the caves where the earliest of the season’s nests were being collected, and this was the first ‘number one’ nest of that day. It had probably been finished only the day before, and was therefore spotlessly clean—a tiny amber saucer constructed from secretions in glands located in the bird’s head. The collector gained merit, too, by giving it away, and we shook hands and he congratulated me with a wide smile when Oh-oh passed it over.
    Oh-oh now proposed that we should take breakfast—it was by this time midday—by joining a party given by a local family to celebrate the entry of their son into the Buddhist novitiate. We found ourselves in a large hall in which we joined about 200 people seated upon mats on a polished floor. Oh-oh assured me that our host had collected many of the guests at random off the streets. Girls dressed in old-style finery were going round distributing snacks of pickled tea-leaves, salted ginger and shredded prawns. Once again merit-gain was what mattered, and it was an occasion for the family to give a substantial portion of their possessions away. It might take them two years, Oh-oh thought, to settle the debts incurred by this entertainment.
    It was Oh-oh who warned me, when I told him of my hope to travel in the interior of the country, that I should do something to modify the extreme pallor of my skin. ‘They will not stare because they are polite,’ he said, ‘but the young people in the villages have never seen an Englishman before and they will believe you are Japanese. We are entertaining bad memories of these people.’
    ‘What can I do about it?’
    ‘You may make your face darker by keeping it as much as you can in the sun.’
    I took this warning seriously, and after three days’ exposure as suggested on the deck of the Menam, my skin was the colour of freshly cut mahogany, except for white circles left by the sunglasses round the eyes. This caused some amusement among the European passengers, but evoked the sympathetic concern of the Burmese, one of whom being the assistant purser, who confided in me his belief that I was the victim of witchcraft.
    There was no outright prohibition on foreigners travelling in the interior of Burma at this time, six years after the conclusion of the Second World War, but those who arrived in Rangoon found that such were the obstacles encountered in their efforts to do so that