Burmese Lessons Read Online Free PDF Page A

Narathihapate fled from the Mongol invaders who destroyed the splendor that was the kingdom. Successive generations of raiders and thieves came, and sun and wind. But the strength of stone and brick is surprising. And the people who have lived here for centuries—they call themselves the slaves of the temples—have protected the holy sites.
    The crumbling hands of the statues are like the faces, eerily alive. See them in a certain light and you freeze, waiting for the fingers to curl or straighten.
The beginning and the ending / The final moment / My hands
. The hot dust and the sawing cicadas remind me, at every turn, of Greece. My mind grapples for foreign words that will fit the landscape, and, because I don’t have Burmese, I hear the Greek poet Seferis over and over. I have spent hours reading his poems, in Greek and English, on the shores of an island not far from his birthplace:
These stones I have carried as long as I was able / These stones I have loved as long as I was able
.
    At various sites, I find dozens of young women helping with the restoration work, each with fifteen bricks balanced on her head. With little regard for the demands of archeology and architecture, the generals are fixing things—laying slabs of concrete over temple pediments, crudely whitewashing Buddhas, rebuilding walls without much thought for appropriate materials or methods. Their earlier fixing of the ancient city involved forcing entire villages to move away from the holy sites.
    The soldiers arrived in 1990. They destroyed the temple keepers’ thatched and wooden houses, razed their little shops, and carted everything away like so much garbage. The villagers were forced to resettle in a few dusty treeless settlements on the plain, too far away from the river to easily carry water home. When people refused to leave their homes, the soldiers beat them; other troublemakers were chased down with helicopters and arrested.
    All that was done for me, and other tourists like me. The military government wanted these ancient sites to be authentically empty and tidy for our appraising eyes. Near one of the “new” villages, I come upon a fewchildren hauling water from a dubious-looking water hole. They struggle up the incline from the hole with buckets hanging off the ends of thin poles.
    “Hello,” I say to them. “How are you?” Several of them put down their buckets to take a break, and rattle off a half-dozen questions. I don’t understand.
    “Have you eaten rice yet?” a girl asks, and giggles. A boy bows theatrically and says, “Big sister, how are you?” I bow in return and say, “Very fine.” A paroxysm of laughter shakes the ragtag lot of them. It’s the only time one of the girls tips water from her buckets.
    The spillage makes her stop laughing. Her thin face becomes thinner as she carefully lowers her load to the ground. I lean over, raise my eyebrows at her—May I?—and pick up one of the buckets. Then gasp, grimace, and rub my shoulder. The other kids laugh harder. I’m hamming it up for their benefit, but it’s true. How can these small children carry two large buckets filled to the brim without spilling? Uphill? The girls and boys are so young—eight, ten, twelve. The thin-faced girl squints at me suspiciously, without a smile. Does she think I’m making fun of her? I carefully set the bucket down.
    She steps forward, hooks it back onto its carrying pole, ducks under the smooth length of wood, and lifts. The tendons in her neck cinch tight. The other kids also pick up their loads; she is their leader. She bites her lower lip and walks away, quickly, lightly, catching the rhythm of the swaying buckets. The other children follow. In a moment, I am alone again, beside the brown water hole, and absurdly lonely.
    We come and go, the tourists and the intrepid travelers (who differ mostly in luggage), the well-wishers and the do-gooders. I have come and I will go, taking away stories and photographs of these