On the Road from Mandalay, 2013
By David Jenness
An ordinary day in a strange land, occasionally tinged with momentary confusion as to exactly what we were experiencing -- but as to actual events, quite unremarkable.
We were on a bus ride in hilly, dusty Myanmar, a very long bus ride from Mandalay to a trekking town in the hills. The quality of the road made it too bumpy to read. For us it was a traveler’s time-out; we had to do nothing but sit, and bounce, and look out the window. It is pleasant enough for one’s mind to wander. One of the rewards of travel in exotic lands is to scan the passing scene, to simply observe how humans do things: prepare and eat food, transport baskets and bundles, interact with children, construct shelters, pass time.
But nothing much was happening outside the window, along the roadway, and the bus was moving fast. We were sitting two rows behind but on the opposite side from the driver and his assistant, who sat on the floor of the aisle next to him. Across the aisle was a lovely young indigenous woman, dressed more beautifully than is customary on busses in poor countries. Her dress, white with embroidered trim, made a contrast with the sarong-like cloth wrap-arounds that most of the women wear, and the village where she boarded was as minimally defined as a village can be. She had a pretty cloth bag, and unlike the others carried no parcels. All her movements were elegant, discreet -- even when she used the sick bag, which she did in a fastidious fashion.
Those behind us were mostly Myanma, together with a scattering of Westerners, including a two or three European couples and two American young women travelling together. But I was too far away to eavesdrop, which might have served as diversion. So attention kept drifting to the mind-numbing television, imposing itself from above the head of the driver. We had an hour or so of staged videos involving indistinguishable young women delivering bleat pop with an Asian tinge. The tunes were predictable, the rhythms more so. Syncopation unknown, stress on main beats. Most of the songs fell into a pattern of two long and two divided beats: one / two-and / three-and / four. There was a bit of cross-cultural borrowing, once a version of an American country song and then again a song whose main tune was taken from an old movie song of the 1940s, “Buttons and Bows.” This struck me as quite odd. I have no idea what the words meant in Myanma. All the women looked alike, of light skin color accentuated by pale stage make-up.
Then we had a series of formulaic short films featuring three, always three, feckless male teenagers acting foolish. The idea was to impress one or two girls who were older, more mature, and elaborately disdainful of adolescent clowning around. From time to time they would, it seemed, lecture the boys about their immaturity and the hopelessness of their approach to seduction, and the boys would look abashed. American sit-com is of course a template for the entire Third World.
There followed a longer film in which three rather stocky men in their late twenties methodically beat the shit out of a younger boy, who did nothing to fight back. It was not clear what offense he had given, other than being slighter and prettier. The tormenters demonstrated no anger, no agitation -- primarily because they all wore dark glasses. The boy did not; otherwise we would not have been able to see the fear as his eyes were blackened and his cheekbones splintered. I was reminded of certain short tough-guy films of the 60s, underground work aimed at gays who liked rough stuff -- except those were better photographed.
It palled. Somnolence crept in, so I turned my attention again outside. For a while I performed my census of dogs, and was reassured to determine that, yes, the Little Brown Dog predominated here as in most Third World countries I have visited. This is a tidy, over-all-tan dog, twelve to fifteen inches tall at the spine, thin but not emaciated. It has a long bony face, and trots along smartly with a quizzical but on the whole trusting expression. The tail is long, with white hair on the underside; but the tail arches up like a scimitar, so that the tip touches down half-way along the back, the white now uppermost. There are thousands upon thousands of such animals, with minimal genetic variation. It’s a stunning demonstration of the founder effect. Some founder! That hound is enjoying dog heaven.
Like it or not, my mind did wander away from observation. For a while I pondered the minor contradictions of Buddhism, probably led down this path by noticing the extent to which the Myanma riders, especially the males, had enjoyed the sadistic film. Buddhists are thought to abhor violence; and indeed, in their real-life behavior, they do appear to be gentle and humane.
We seldom saw an altercation, never a fight. The treatment of children is notably sensitive. But evidently there is an element in humans, even in Buddhists, that is gratified by enacted or vicarious violence. Of course there are hypocrisies and amusing paralogical reasonings in all religions. In Buddhist culture, the trade of fisherman is looked down upon, yet people eat fish. One gloss is that those who pull fish out of the water are saving them from drowning. Another is that, once a fish is landed, it dies a natural death and so can be properly consumed. It is clear that all this is fiddle-faddle, not to be taken seriously, since truly devout persons go to the river, buy the catch, and return the fish to the water.
Of the major contradictions, involving the complicated relationship now and in history between the State and the religion, these too exist in all times and places and may be left to scholars. Yet it fascinates me that, today, Buddhists monks are cheerfully doing their bit to murder Moslems on the western border with Bangladesh. Indeed, we were told that the Buddhists of southeastern Asia detest Muslims, in part because they claim that Muslims are “black.” (In fact, many Muslims are lighter than many Burmese.) Some of the elements in what seems like religious hypocrisy, the world over, are not really contradictions within a belief system, but reflect the irrepressible cross-cutting force of inter-ethnic prejudice. All the more remarkable, then, that the Myanma people, and in my experience the Laotian people, are so gracious and kind to Westerners.
The Buddhists of Myanmar loathe Hindus ardently, perhaps because Hindus are most immediately challenging, in that the two faiths share in large part a common existential view. Next on the scale of contempt come Muslims, who are a world apart and thus more easily defined as other. According to Norman Lewis, Buddhism recognizes a scale of about seventeen degrees of conscious existence. At the top are several strata of Buddhists, ranked by devoutness and the likelihood of being reincarnated as a good and happy human being. (A rich man or king or official who builds a temple is already halfway to this outcome.) Then Hindus, then Muslims. Humans tend to despise those who are close to themselves, but perversely different or heretical.
About halfway down the scale of being come the nats, ancient animist forms still worshipped, especially by rural folk. There are, I believe, thirty-seven types: good spirits, bad spirits, threatening ghouls, or harmless wee beasties. You see in the landscape little homemade shrines nailed to trees where the nats are propitiated. Nats are not human, of course, but they are conscious beings. Much further down on the scale are Westerners, alternatively categorized as White / Christian. Such beings are hopelessly fated: they cannot lead a good life, so cannot attain the karma to return for another attempt. One reason, some anthropologists claim, that native societies in Southeast Asia, such as the Burmese, the Thai, or Shan peoples, did not majorly resist European conquerors was that the indigenous people never believed that such a domination could last long, that Western whites might have any deeply formative role in their world. And so it turned out.
Well, it was too much a puzzle. I just felt grateful that my hosts treated me so graciously -- me, barely human in their eyes. I tried to bring to mind some poetry, but a few lines wouldn’t come. I mentally designed my dream house, which I will never build. If I had been a woman, I would have filed my nails.
One’s eyes reflexively track movement in the surround, and so at a point my gaze travelled outward again, becoming entrained in a rhythmic pattern of attention. The bus driver was playing chicken, though perhaps he thought of it as simply making time. Most of the way in this stretch of the journey was an ascent through hills, on narrow paved roadway. On straight stretches, the driver wanted to gain ground. There were few cars but many busses and trucks, and on a moderate upslope his bus could accelerate and pass a heavier truck. He lost no opportunity. So there were, for me, repeated moments of not unpleasant shivers from momentary danger, slightly thrilling as I imagine Russian Roulette to be. The driver was challenging the universe, playing the odds, and it was clear to the passengers in front that every time he passed a vehicle, he was betting our lives. It brought a repeated tiny ebb and flow, quite stimulating, of anxiety and release: Oh my God!, followed by, Not this time.
Of course the thrill attenuated. The breath ceased to catch, the adrenaline ceased to flow.
There now came a moment when everything changed. It was, unexpectedly, this time. We were on a stretch of one-way single-lane road, so that when the bus passed another vehicle it had to move well onto the shoulder, very close to the trees that lined the way. A boy appeared: on a bicycle, going in the wrong direction, directly in front of the left corner of the bus as it nearly skimmed the trees. He had on a yellow shirt. He was perhaps thirteen. His face expressed stark terror. The bus swerved a bit to the right, but had no room to maneuver. There was a gasp, a hiss of startlement from me and others on the left side of the bus. Then a metallic clatter, and then, a second later, the sound and the feel of a thump. The bus travelled on. “Stop! Stop!” I and a few others called out. The bus went on. I sprang out of my seat toward the driver’s seat, but the driver’s helper blocked my way, turning round to me with that half-smile cringe that is universal in such dire moments: Well, what can be done?
I fell back into my seat. “Aren’t we going to stop?” some Westerner called out. I could not look around.
In ten minutes or so the bus pulled into a roadside restaurant, into a parking lot with many busses where passengers were scheduled to use the toilets and get something to eat. We stood in the dust, shifting from foot to foot. The two American girls came up, stricken.
-Was he killed? One of them asked
-I certainly hope so, I replied
-What can we do?
-I don’t know.
-Thank you for trying to stop the bus, the second girl said fervently, the way one says just something, anything, to one bereaved.
-It accomplished nothing, I replied.
The English couple joined us. The man said, self-importantly, “In this country the bus driver is an important person.” His wife said, out of a more actual understanding, “And he has a schedule to keep.”
As inane as they were, the comments helped to establish some fatalistic distance. Voicing any pointless thing, when you are stunned, seems to externalize what you are feeling. We looked around, hoping to find a policeman or a sign of some other authority. Of course there was no one to intervene, to absorb, to deal with our shock. One by one we drifted inside, looking for the toilet. The bus driver was standing at a high table, having a bite to eat and some beer. I kept a bit back from him, looking at his face, I think, for some visible sign, some stigma of Criminal Carelessness. The driver’s face was bland.
There are moments in life when you feel like a beetle immobile on its back.
When it came time to get back on the vehicle, we did, and took our seats.
Just an ordinary day in a strange land, now stained with shame, but as to actual events quite unremarkable.