But December promises the people of Kalaw a respite from all this. December promises cold nights and mercifully cool days. December, thought Mya Mya, is a hypocrite.
She was sitting on a wooden stool in front of her house, looking out over the fields and the valley to the hilltops in the distance. The air was so clear that she felt she was looking through a spyglass to the ends of the earth. She did not trust the weather. Although she could not remember ever in her life having seen a cloud in a December sky, she would not rule out the possibility of a sudden downpour. Or of a typhoon, even if not a single one in living memory had found its way from the Bay of Bengal into the mountains around Kalaw. It was not impossible. As long as there were typhoons anywhere, one might well devastate Mya Mya’s native soil. Or the earth might quake. Even, or perhaps especially, on a day like today, when nothing foreshadowed catastrophe. Complacency was treacherous, confidence a luxury that Mya Mya could not afford. That much she knew at the bottom of her heart. For her there would be neither peace nor rest. Not in this world. Not in her life.
She had learned her lesson seventeen years ago on that scorching hot day in August, playing down by the river, she and her twin brother, when he slipped on the slick stones. When he lost his balance and flailed his arms about, helpless, like a fly under an inverted glass. When he fell into the waters that swept him away. On his journey. The everlasting one. She had stood on the bank, unable to help. She had watched his face emerge from the waters once again, one last time.
A priest would have called it God’s will, a test of faith that the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, had set for the family. The Lord moves in mysterious ways.
The Buddhist monks made sense of the tragedy by referring to the boy’s previous lives. He must have done something dreadful in one of these lives for which his present death was the consequence.
The day after the accident, the local astrologer offered his own explanation: The children had gone north to play, and they ought not to have done that, not with their birth date, not on that Saturday in August. It was no wonder they got into trouble. If only he, the astrologer, had been consulted earlier, he might have warned them. Life was that simple, that complicated.
Some part of her had died with her brother, but there had been no funeral ceremony for it. Her family hadn’t even noticed it was gone. Her parents were farmers busy with the harvest, with sowing, and with four other children. It was difficult enough just putting rice and a few vegetables on the table every evening.
Mya Mya, the half-dead, was alone. In the years that followed she worked hard to bring order into a world off-kilter. Every afternoon she went to the water to sit in the place where she had seen her brother for the last time, to wait for him to resurface. The river took his body as plunder and never returned it. At night before sleep she would tell him about her day, knowing he could hear her. She slept on his side of their shared straw mat, under his blanket, and years later she still had the scent of him in her nose.
She refused to help her mother with the washing down at the river. Indeed, she avoided water altogether and bathed only in the company of her parents. As if she could drown in a bucket. She wore certain clothes on certain days, refused until she was fifteen to speak on Saturdays, and always fasted on Sundays. She wove herself an intricate web of rituals and dwelt entirely therein.
Rituals offered security. Since her brother’s death, the family was no longer consulting the astrologer just once a year. They saw him almost weekly. They crouched beside him. They hung on his every word. They followed his instructions, desperate to be protected from any of the world’s harm. Even more than her parents, Mya Mya took the astrologer’s words to heart. Having herself been born on a Thursday, she had to watch out especially for Saturdays, a day on which misfortune loomed, particularly in April, August, and December. In order never to take any chances, she refused to leave the house on a Saturday, until once, in April of all months, when a blanket next to the cooking pit in the kitchen caught fire. The flames were ravenous. In a few minutes they had not only devoured the wooden shack but also robbed Mya Mya of the last shred of confidence she had that any place in the world could be safe for her.
Now, recalling these things, she felt a chill. The fire crackled in the kitchen, and she got to her feet. A thin layer of ice, delicate and brittle, covered the water in the bucket before her. She kicked it and watched the tiny fragments of broken ice disappear into the water.
She took a deep breath, held her belly with both hands, and looked down at her body. She was a beautiful young woman, even if she had never felt that way and no one had ever told her so. She wore her long black hair in a braid that reached nearly to her hips. Her dark, big, almost round eyes and full lips gave her face a sensual expression. She had long, thin fingers and muscular but slender arms and legs. Her belly was round and thick and big—so big that it seemed foreign to her, even after months. There was a kick, a knock, and she knew: Here they come again.
They’d started yesterday evening, an hour apart. Now they were coming every couple of minutes. Waves breaking against a fortification, always more and higher and stronger. She tried to get a purchase on something, an arm, a branch, a stone. There was nothing. She didn’t want the child, not today, not on a Saturday in December.
Her neighbor, who had already brought four children into the world, thought it was an easy birth, especially for a first child. Mya Mya herself couldn’t remember; she had lived for hours in another world, one in which her hands and legs no longer obeyed her, in which her body was no longer her own. She was nothing now but a giant wound. She saw fat black rain clouds, and a butterfly settled on her forehead. She saw her brother in the tide. One very last time. A thought sailed by, like a chicken feather carried aloft on the wind. Her child. On that Saturday. A sign? Her brother reborn?
She heard a baby cry. Not whimpering, but defiant and angry. A boy, someone said. Mya Mya opened her eyes and looked for her brother. No, not this ugly, shriveled, blood-smeared thing. This helpless bundle with its distorted head and face.
Mya Mya had no idea what a child needed. She came to motherhood empty-handed. Any love she had possessed was gone, had long since been washed away, on a scorching-hot day in August.
Chapter 8
NO ONE COULD say that Mya Mya hadn’t tried during those first days of her son’s life. She did whatever the neighbor told her. She laid him on her plump, full breast and fed him with her milk. She rocked him to sleep or carried him about when he was restless. She wrapped him close to her body when she went to buy things in the village. She lay awake nights between her husband and her child, listening to hear the little one breathe, following the infant’s short, quick breaths and wishing that she would feel something. Feel something when her child nursed, when it grasped her finger with its dimpled little hand. She wished that something would come to fill the emptiness inside her. Anything.
She turned to the side and pressed him to her, an embrace somewhere between fainting and violence. She pressed more firmly and two big brown eyes looked at her, astonished. Mya Mya felt nothing. Mother and son were like magnets that repelled each other. Press as she might, they would never touch.
It might have been just a matter of time. She might have had a chance after all, and the instinct to provide might have developed into a feeling of affection, and the feeling of affection into the miracle of love—if it hadn’t been for the incident with the chickens.
It happened on a Saturday, two weeks to the day after the birth. Just after sunrise Mya Mya walked out into the yard to fetch wood for the fire in the kitchen. It was a cold morning, and she hurried along. Looking for brushwood and a few stout logs, she went behind the house. The dead chicken lay right in front of the woodpile. She had nearly stepped on it. She found the second one right around twelve o’clock, the hour of the birth, the third and the fourth shortly thereafter, and the rooster in the afternoon. Her husband looked at the dead animals but could find nothing. Just the evening before, they
had been strutting about the house, clucking feistily, and there was no indication that a dog or cat, much less a tiger, had gotten hold of them. For Mya Mya there was no doubt. The cadavers confirmed her worst fears. They were the sudden downpour—no, worse—the typhoon in December, the earthquake she had always dreaded and secretly desired: A curse lay upon her son. He was a harbinger of misfortune. The astrologer had prophesied it. She ought never to have borne a child on a Saturday, not in December.
Even the fact that in the ensuing days more than a dozen of the neighbors’ chickens died the same mysterious death could not console Mya Mya. On the contrary, it only confirmed the worst. She knew now that this was but the beginning and that the misfortune the boy brought would not be confined to her own family.
Now she lay awake nights, fearing the next catastrophe. She knew it was only a matter of time. Every cough, every gasp, every sigh sounded like thunder on the horizon. Hardly daring to move, she strained her ears every time the child stirred. As if his very breaths were the footfalls of calamity’s stealthy approach.
A week later her milk failed. Her breasts hung slack against her body, like two deflated balloons. A friend of the neighbor, a woman who had just had a child of her own, took over the nursing. Mya Mya rejoiced in every hour that her son was out of the house. She wanted to talk with her husband. It couldn’t go on like this. They had to do something.
Chapter 9
KHIN MAUNG RECKONED that his wife was overstating the problem. Of course he, too, believed in the power of the stars. Everyone knows that the day, the hour, even the minute of one’s birth can determine the course of one’s life—there was little doubt about that. And there were niceties one did well to observe, days on which one ought to remain inactive, rituals one needed to follow in order to avert catastrophes. There, too, Khin Maung was in agreement with his wife. No one was enthusiastic about a Saturday birth in December, of course not. Everyone knew that the stars did not smile upon these children, that they faced a difficult life, that their souls seldom sprouted wings. Every family knew an uncle or an aunt or at least a neighbor or a friend of a neighbor who knew someone who had a relative who had been born on one of those inauspicious days and who slunk through life like a beaten dog, who remained small and stunted like a shade plant. His son would not have it easy, Khin Maung had no illusions about that, but to jump to the conclusion that he was cursed, that was going a bit too far (even if the incident with the chickens did worry him, although of course he would never admit it to his wife). When Mya Mya suggested they consult the astrologer, Khin Maung readily assented, and not only because he was the kind of person who didn’t like to say no. He also hoped that the old man might console his wife with his wisdom or, should the stars confirm her fears, that he might advise them on how to minimize, if not exactly to forestall, the calamity that threatened their child.
The astrologer lived in an unassuming wooden shack on the edge of the village. Nothing betrayed the esteem that he enjoyed in the community. Not a house was built in the area without his first being asked whether the site was well situated or whether the day of the groundbreaking stood under a favorable star. Prior to any wedding, the prospective couple or their parents would come to him to ascertain whether the horoscopes of the bride and groom were suitably matched. The astrologer would ask the stars about the best dates to go on a hunt or to undertake a journey to the capital. Over the years his auguries had proven themselves so accurate that people started coming from remote corners of the province. His reputation was so good that supposedly—no one knew for certain, but there were persistent rumors—even many of the English who lived in Kalaw and who publicly ridiculed Burmese astrology as superstition regularly sought him out.
The old man sat cross-legged in the middle of his tiny room. A head as round as the full moon, thought Khin Maung. Eyes, nose, and mouth were equally shapely, and only the two large, protruding ears disturbed the image of a perfectly proportioned face. No one knew how old he was. Even the eldest in the village claimed to have no memory of him as a young man, and so everyone imagined that he had been born well over eighty years ago. He never spoke of it himself, though. His countenance and his mindful spirit seemed to defy the ravages of aging. Since time immemorial his voice had been gentle and quiet, his hearing and vision those of a twenty-year-old. The years had creased his face, but the skin did not hang slack from his body the way an old man’s usually did.
Khin Maung and Mya Mya bowed and hesitated on the threshold. Mya Mya had sat across from him so frequently since her childhood that she had long ago ceased to count the visits, but still she felt something in her knees and stomach every time. Not familiarity, only reverence. Even awe.
It was Khin Maung’s first visit, and his respect was mingled with curiosity. His parents had always visited the astrologer alone, and even concerning his marriage to Mya Mya it was they who had asked the astrologer whether they had found the right bride for their son.
Khin Maung glanced around before bowing a second time. The floor and walls were dark teak. Dust motes danced in the beams of light that fell through the two open windows. The sun drew two rectangles on the floor. They gleamed on the wood worn smooth by the years. This radiance had a power to make Khin Maung tremble. Then he caught sight of a glistening golden Buddha carved in wood. Never in his entire life had Khin Maung seen one so beautiful. He sank to one knee and bowed until his forehead grazed the floor. In front of the Buddha were two flower arrangements and a plate full of offerings. Someone had lovingly stacked four oranges into a pyramid. Beside them lay two bananas, a papaya, and several portions of tea artfully arranged into a small mound. The walls were covered with white papers crammed full of tiny numbers and letters. Smoldering sticks of incense stood in little sand-filled vases in each of the four corners of the room.
The old man nodded. Khin Maung and Mya Mya knelt down on two straw mats in front of him. Mya Mya heard and felt nothing but the wild beating of her heart. It was up to Khin Maung to do the talking, to ask the questions; she had made that unmistakably clear to him ahead of time. They had been married for hardly a year, but she knew too well her husband’s passivity. He was a quiet individual who might say no more than a few sentences all evening. She had never seen him cross, angry, or agitated. Even joy and satisfaction were barely perceptible in him. A smile flitting across his face was all he would reveal of his emotions.
He was no slouch. On the contrary, he was one of the most industrious farmers in the village, and often he would be cultivating his field at the crack of dawn, long before the others. But life seemed to him a tranquil river whose course, by and large, was predetermined. Any attempt to alter it significantly was doomed to failure. Khin Maung was hardworking without ambition, curious without posing questions, happy without radiating joy.
“Venerable master,” Mya Mya heard her husband say in a quiet voice after a long pause, “we have come to ask your advice.”
The old man nodded.
“Our son was born on Saturday three weeks ago, and we wish to know if calamity threatens him.”
The old one took up chalk and a little slate and asked for the exact date and hour of the birth.
“December third, eleven-forty a.m.,” said Khin Maung.
The astrologer wrote the numbers in little boxes and began to calculate. He added further numbers and signs, struck out others, and drew several full and half circles on various lines, as if he were writing the life in musical notation.
After several minutes he set the slate aside, looked up, and gazed at Mya Mya and Khin Maung. Any trace of a smile had left his face.
“The child will bring sorrow on his parents,” he said. “Great sorrow.”
Mya Mya felt herself sinking into a morass. Something was dragging her down, and there was no one to help her, nothing to hold on to. Not a hand. Not a branch. She heard the old man’s voice and her husband’s, but she no longer followed what was being said. Their voices sounded muffled and very distant—as if in another r
oom, in some other life. Great sorrow. Great sorrow.
“What kind of sorrow?” asked Khin Maung.
“Various kinds, especially medical,” said the old one.
He took up the slate and resumed his scribbling and reckoning.
“In his head,” he said at last.
“Where in his head?” asked Khin Maung, word by word, enunciating as if constructing each letter out of individual parts. In retrospect he would be astonished by his own utterly uncharacteristic bout of persistent curiosity.
The old one looked at the slate, which revealed to him all the secrets of the universe. It was the book of life and death, the book of love. He could have told the parents what else he saw, the exceptional capacities this child would develop, the magic and power latent in this individual, and the gift of love. But he knew that Mya Mya was not listening and that Khin Maung would not understand. So he said: “In his eyes.”
Mya Mya had not registered this part of the conversation, and afterward, too, on the way home, while her husband fell into a stream of talk the like of which she had never heard from him, she stumbled on, uncomprehending. The words buzzed through her head like flies. Great sorrow.
In the ensuing months Khin Maung tried several times to explain to his wife that the astrologer had indeed spoken of sorrow, even of great sorrow, but primarily medical sorrow, and that there had been no talk of a curse or of a harbinger of calamity. She would not listen. He saw it in her eyes. He saw it in the way she treated their son, taking hold of him without touching him, looking at him without seeing him.