Under the Dragon Read Online Free Page A

consistency of thanakha . Her sensitive touch could also advise them on a change of diet, even tell if they had eaten meat or made love last night. In a tea shop she could pick up a coffee cup and know if it had last been held by a man or a woman. Sometimes though the sensations became too painful and she could not bare even the lightest touch. The breath of air from a falling feather might send shivers to the ends of her fingers. A cooking fire’s warmth would scald her. She dropped things. Then she would withdraw, her young laughter disguising adult tears, and wish away her paper-thin skin. She longed to have hard hands like her father.
    Every evening Ni Ni’s father rode his battered Triumph bicycle into the fiery Rangoon dusk. He worked nights in a central hotel for foreigners near the Sule Pagoda, massaging tired tourist bodies. The hotel collected his fee, paying him only a small retainer, but he was allowed to keep his tips. So sometimes at dawn Ni Ni awoke to the vision of a ten-franc coin, an American Quarter or a pound note, tokens that her father had been given during the night. Over breakfast mohinga he told her about the faraway places from where the money had come, not with resentment for those who could afford to travel or with a craving to see other countries himself, but out of simple curiosity.
    ‘They are all yours,’ he told her with pride, ‘so when you marry you can be free to love your husband in the right way.’
    ‘I will always stay here with you,’ she assured him in childish devotion, then cheered away poverty’s imprisonment. ‘The right way is just to care for each other.’
    The notes and coins were tucked into the matted walls and Ni Ni’s father curled up beneath them, their sleeping room not being long enough for him to lie out straight. She and her father owned the two rooms and two thin-byu sleeping mats, a rice pot and betel box, her beauty stall and the bicycle. In a world so large they were content with their peaceful corner of it. Desire did not blind them, like the pickpocket who sees only the monk’s pockets.
    Ni Ni was thirteen years old when the bicycle vanished. Her father had left it leaning against the gate for no more than a minute. He had woken her with a crisp hundred-yen bill and returned to find his cycle gone. None of the neighbours had caught sight of the thief, not their friend Law San who owned the Chinese noodle stall or even the hawk-eyed gossip May May Gyi. Only Ko Aye, who ran a makeshift barber shop under the banyan tree, claimed to have seen an unfamiliar khaki lorry pass by, although nobody paid much attention to his observations. He had lost an eye back in 1962, and for more than twenty-five years had confused running children with pariah dogs, earlobes with tufts of knotted hair.
    All that morning and half the hot afternoon Ni Ni watched her father standing beside the Prome Road looking left and right then left again. He glared at every cyclist who clattered past him. His suspicions were aroused by any newly painted machine. He chased after a man who had turned to ride off in the opposite direction. Ni Ni had been taught that the human abode meant trial and trouble. She understood that the theft, though unfortunate, was not a tragedy. Yet the disappearance of the bicycle made her fingertips tingle, as if she could feel her father’s Triumph being ridden far away.
    The bicycle is man’s purest invention, an ingenious arrangement of metal and rubber that liberates the body from the dusty plod to ride on a cushion of air, at speed or with leisure, stopping on a whim, travelling for free. Its design is simple and its maintenance inexpensive. Yet for all its ease and economy, the bicycle possesses a greater quality. It offers the possibility of escape.
    Without his Triumph, Ni Ni’s father had to walk to work. He could not afford the bus fare, and needed to leave home two hours earlier to reach the hotel. At the end of his shift he returned long after Ni