Under the Dragon Read Online Free

Burma, in spite of pressure discouraging visitors to the country. The evil unleashed by the country’s unelected rulers had to be assessed and articulated. I knew that the journey could be dangerous, and not just for us. The political reality would oblige me to conceal the identities of people about whom I would write. To protect their lives, and to tell the truth, I would have to weave a necessary fiction.
    ‘We’ll start at the beginning,’ I answered Katrin. ‘In Rangoon.’

TWO
Love in a Hot Climate
    IN FRONT, BEHIND. In front, behind. She recalled his hands, so large that they had held her as a nest holds a bird. In front, behind. She felt his touch, his lips on her neck and thigh against hip, and let her head roll back in surrender. The gesture had excited him, making her laugh like the bulbuls that hid in the green groves of peepul trees. She felt foolish, always laughing at the wrong time. In front, behind. He had cupped her, clutched her, then found her again. Twist into upright. His urgency had scared her yet still she traced an ear and knotted a finger into a thick curl of fair hair. She felt the white heat blaze out of him. His broad limbs wrapped her to him, pulled her body hard onto his own. In front, behind. Leave the end. Lay in a new strand. He rose inside her, so deep that she thought she might burst, weaving himself into her flesh, coming with a sudden violence that made her want to cry out loud. In front, and behind the next stake. He fell silent, was unable to move, yet held her with no less intensity, his pale skin folding around her own burnished brown. Through the fevered February afternoons it had been that single moment of stillness which had touched her, knitting their fingers together as she now wove her baskets, her small copper hand contained within his palm. In front, behind. She had believed herself to be safe in his arms, as secure as she had felt with her father. The two men of her life – her lover and her father – had protected her. Now both were gone. Ni Ni finished the weave, working the bamboo in pairs, picking up the right-hand stake as she moved around the border, and tried to remember; was that what it meant to love the right way?
    It had begun with theft, and ended in ruin.
    Ni Ni had grown up alone with her father in two small rooms that opened onto leafy Prome Road. She was an only child because her mother, who had never loved her husband properly, had run off with the refrigeration manager of the Diamond Ice Factory. The manager’s cold demeanour had made Ni Ni and the other children shiver. It was his icy feet, they had whispered, which cooled the bottles of Lemon Sparkling and Vimto which no one could afford. But he had been a bolder man than Ni Ni’s father, with better prospects. He had also come home at night to sleep, an important consideration for any young wife. The desertion had condemned her father to an existence on the periphery of life, for it had left him not tied to any woman’s heart. Yet he continued to try to provide for his daughter. She may have worn longyis of plain cotton, not Mandalay silk, and sometimes found no ngapi fish paste on the table, but they seldom went hungry. Ni Ni wanted for nothing, except perhaps for less sensitive hands.
    Ni Ni ran a small beauty stall from their second room selling lotions, balms and tayaw shampoo. Her hands had earned her a reputation for preparing the township’s finest thanakha , the mildly astringent paste used by Burmese women as combination cosmetic, conditioner and sunscreen. She would have preferred to go to school – pupils at Dagon State High School No. 1 wore a smart uniform with a badge on the pocket – but her father didn’t make enough money to pay for the books, let alone the desk and teaching levy. So instead she helped to earn their living by laying her fingertips on her customers’ cheeks. She leaned forward, willing from them confessions and complaints, then prescribed the ideal