Burmese Lessons Read Online Free PDF Page B

pest to anyone who would tell me the names of things. Part of the understanding Min Ley and I have involves vocabulary. When I point to something from the cart, he gives me the name in Burmese. Temple, water, horse, bell, tree, goat. I do not remember any of these words for long.
    I ask, he says, I repeat, and repeat, and ask again, until I get the sound right. Then we cover more terrain, and the dust gathering on the backs of my hands and the clank-jangle of the harness and the slap of leather on the mare’s bony withers combine to shake the word from my mind. I point at the same things over and over. He says the words. It took me a full day to realize that, as often as not, he gives a different word for what I believe is the same object.
    Perhaps he is not saying
tree
repeatedly; he is telling me the differentnames of the trees. Not
temple
but its name. The names of the goats? I don’t really care. I’m in it for the music. For hearing this world of brand-new things.
    We travel by horse cart to his house.
Ein
, for “house.” Yesterday I bought Min Ley a bowl of curry for lunch, and this morning, when he picked me up, he announced that today his wife is cooking lunch for me.
    The house is simple, wood and thatch and windows without glass. I never go inside. Min Ley’s wife, San San, is in the kitchen, which is outside, in a structure like a hut without walls, so that as I sit at the roughhewn table I also watch Min Ley take the harness off the mare, drop the cart shafts, and lead her to a bucket of water under a tamarind tree. San San smiles at me from her stool behind a charcoal burner. She scoops yellow curry out of a large pot into a bowl. I smile back at her, then our heads turn at the same time, toward the high whine of “May May! May May!”
    A toddler, about three years old, stands in the doorway of the house, naked but for a loose green T-shirt. The child’s large-eyed, delicate beauty suggests a girl, but his nakedness asserts boy and, as though to prove it, a colorless stream of urine stretches out toward me in a falling arc. His mother squawks, we both laugh, and an older sibling, another boy of about eight, scoops the little one up in his arms and disappears into the house.
    They reappear a few minutes later, the toddler looking pleased with himself, wearing baggy, threadbare underpants. He smiles at me, then presses his head against his brother’s hip. The older boy tousles the young one’s hair and looks past me imperiously, to his mother. My eyes are on the older boy, fascinated; he emanates pure jealous animosity—toward me. When I smile at him, he leans down and whispers something into his little brother’s ear.
    Two girls come out of the house as well. Their mother motions toward me with her chin—greet the guest—and they smile, link hands. Why are they not at school? Do they have a day off? Or is the family too poor to send them all to school? I know how to ask, “How old are you?” One is ten, the other six.
    Four children. In a small house. “How old are you?” I ask San San. Generally, this is not a rude question in Southeast Asia but a practical one, as many intimate questions are.
    “Twenty-six. And how old are you?” she asks. She ladles rice and curry onto one plate after another.
    “Twenty-seven.”
    “Do you have children?”
    Wishing I knew “Not yet,” I can only say, “No, I don’t.” Having children is the furthest thing from my mind, though I am attracted to them, and they to me, usually, as if the living ones know how to call out to their unborn playmates. I even like the grumpy kids, the screamers and growlers, this older boy here, so covetous of his mother’s attention. He sits at the bench, his head and shoulders just above the high table, waiting for his food, occasionally throwing a black glare into my eyes. Yes, it’s unfair that you have to share her with so many siblings. Now there’s a stranger at the table, too. Poor kid.
    Min Ley, who has rejoined