Felix Bravo’s Weblog

My literary romance with Burma began with Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay,” a piece that high school literature education could not do without. I dreamed of taking a dip in Irrawaddy River under the shadow of a pagoda on a cool afternoon, camping out in the outskirts of Rangoon while watching the stars frolic in the sky, or romping in the park with a Burmese tiger cub as a way of fulfilling my nostalgia for the youth that I’ve lost.

Other times I dreamed of getting a job as a police officer in Moulmein to see how it feels to be George Orwell, who wrote in his memoir: “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” I also fancied myself being taught the Manipuri language by a Burmese girl. A minority dialect in Burma, Manipuri is more common in India than in this country of Kipling’s Mandalay romances, therefore a Burmese girl who knows it surely rises above her equals. And I imagined taking up the challenge of the Hkakabo Razi, the highest peak in southeastern Asia, living there for a month. With my Burmese girl teacher for company, I thought that challenge was more pleasurable than Everest. There we could subsist on a Burmese diet— boiled rice, a little spicy meat, some vegetables; hot noodle soup flavoured with coconut; ngapi sauce made from fermented fish; mangosteen, custard apple, and tepid green tea poured in small cups. The gentle life that is Burmese land—far from the madding crowd that is the military junta— one can have on a platter as wide as one’s palm.

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