“Is it true?”
“One year after the bees moved in, your father returned.
Now you are sitting across from me.”
He smiled again and poured the tea.
“Where were we obliged to interrupt our story? Tin Win had become blind, and Su Kyi was trying to find help, correct?”
And so he resumed his tale.
Chapter 2
RAIN CLATTERED ON the corrugated tin roof as if the house were collapsing under a hail of stones. Tin Win had retreated into the rearmost corner of the kitchen. He did not like these downpours. The drumming of the water on the roof was too loud, and the vehemence with which it tore from the sky made him nervous. He heard Su Kyi’s voice, but the rain swallowed even her words.
“Where on earth are you?” she called yet again, poking her head through the kitchen door. “Come on now, let’s get going. It’ll stop soon enough.”
Su Kyi was right, as she almost always was when it came to the weather. She claimed to feel the storms and tropical showers in her gut and above all in her ears, which would first warm, then tickle, and finally itch terribly just before the first drops fell. Tin Win had long ago ceased to doubt her forecasts. Not two minutes later they were standing in front of the house, the rain having stopped, the only sound water dripping from the roof and from the leaves and racing in a wild torrent through the ditch across the yard.
Su Kyi took his hand. The ground was slick; muck oozed between his toes at every step. It was still early, not much after seven. The sun broke through the clouds and shined pleasantly on his face, though it would soon burn his skin and raise white clouds of vapor from the ground, sweating the earth itself. They trudged through the mud past huts ringing with the sounds of the morning: children crying, dogs barking, the clatter of tin pots.
She wanted to take him to the monastery in town where a monk named U May was abbot. She had known him for a long time and believed he would be able to help. U May was perhaps the only person whom Su Kyi trusted, whom she sensed was a kindred spirit. If not for him, she would not have survived the deaths of her daughter and husband. U May himself was already old, probably over eighty. She didn’t know for sure. Since going blind a few years earlier, he had been teaching a small class of local children every morning. Su Kyi was hoping he would be able to take Tin Win under his wing, too, to coax him out of the darkness that beleaguered him, to teach him what he had taught her: that life is interwoven with suffering. That in every life, without exception, illnesses are unavoidable. That we will age, and that we cannot elude death. These are the laws and conditions of human existence, U May had explained to her. Laws that apply to everyone, everywhere in the world, regardless of how dramatically times might change. There is no power that can release a person from pain or from the sadness one might feel as a result of that insight—unless it be that person himself. And in spite of it all, U May had told her again and again, life is a gift that none might disdain. Life, U May told her, is a gift full of riddles in which suffering and happiness are inextricably intertwined. Any attempt to have one without the other was simply bound to fail.
The monastery itself was surrounded by a high stone wall just off the main street, behind which half a dozen little white pagodas were festooned with colored streamers and tiny golden bells. As a safeguard against flooding, the monastery stood on pilings a good ten feet off the ground. Over the years a number of outbuildings had grown up around the main building. In the middle of it all a four-cornered tower jutted upward, narrowing in seven tiers to a single golden pinnacle visible far and wide. The walls were pine, browned by the sun, and each roof was shingled with blackish wooden shake. Across from the entrance, a massive wooden Buddha nearly as high as the ceiling sat cloaked in semidarkness and overlaid with gold leaf. At its feet stood tables crowded with offerings: tea, flowers, bananas, mangos, and oranges. On the wall behind the Buddha hung shelves with dozens of smaller Buddhas, shimmering gold, many draped in yellow robes, others holding parasols of red, white, or gold paper. Of course, Tin Win saw none of this.
He and Su Kyi walked hand in hand across the wide courtyard to the central staircase, passing two monks who swept the damp earth with twig brooms. Dark red monks’ robes hung drying on a line. The air around the buildings crackled with burning wood and smelled of smoke.
U May sat cross-legged and motionless on a dais at the end of the hall, gaunt hands folded in his lap. A pot of tea, a small cup, and a plate of roasted seeds sat on a low table before him. His head was clean shaven. His lidded eyes sat deep in their sockets. His cheeks were lean but not sunken. Su Kyi was mildly taken aback every time she saw him. His features seemed so frank and naked to her. He was slender but not emaciated, wrinkled but not shriveled. His face was obviously the mirror of his soul. Not a trace of excess baggage.
Su Kyi could not help but recall the first time she had seen him. He had come in on the train from the capital, and he was standing in front of the station. That was more than twenty-five years ago. She had been on her way to the market. He was barefoot, and he smiled at her. His face had touched her even then. He asked her for directions. Out of curiosity she accompanied him all the way to the monastery. During that walk they fell into conversation, and so began their friendship. In the years that followed U May occasionally told her about his childhood, his youth, and the life he had led before becoming a monk. It wasn’t much to go on, just some scraps of stories that Su Kyi collected and out of which a contradictory picture slowly emerged.
He came from a wealthy family that owned several rice mills in Rangoon and that belonged to the Indian minority who had come to Burma after the English annexation of the delta in 1852. His father was a patriarch, authoritarian and hot-tempered, feared in the family for his violent outbursts of rage. His children avoided him, and his wife withdrew into illnesses that not even the British doctors in Rangoon could diagnose. After the birth of their third child, the father, weary of his perennially ailing wife, shipped her and the two younger children off to relatives in Calcutta. The medical care was superior there, he said. As the oldest son, U May was intended to one day carry on the family business and so was forced to stay with his father, who would soon have forgotten the rest of the family had not letters arrived from Calcutta every few months describing the mother’s remarkable recovery and announcing her impending return—a prospect that never failed to fill U May with indescribable joy. Over the years, however, the letters came less frequently, until U May realized he had seen the last of his mother and siblings there on the wharf in Rangoon harbor where, as a seven-year-old, he had stood gazing after the ship to India.
And so the domestic servants and nannies raised him—especially the cook and the gardener, whose company he’d sought since learning to walk. U May was a quiet, even reticent child whose particular talent appeared to consist in divining the expectations of others and in doing everything in his power to fulfill them.
Back then he loved best to play in the garden. In the rearmost corner of the property, the gardener laid out a plot for him that U May tended with assiduous devotion. His father, when he learned of it, had each plant uprooted and the soil turned over. Garden work was for servants. Or girls.
U May accepted this without a word, just as he accepted and followed all of his father’s instructions until the day—he wasn’t even twenty—when his father announced U May’s engagement to the daughter of a shipping magnate. The match would benefit both businesses and families. Shortly thereafter the father learned of his son’s relationship with Ma Mu, the cook’s daughter. The episode in itself would not particularly have troubled him; this kind of thing happened. It would even have been possible to find a solution for the sixteen-year-old girl’s pregnancy. But his son’s assertion that he loved the girl was ridiculous and inexcusable. Indeed, the father’s unsuppressed laughter filled the house for several minutes when he heard of it. Years later the gardener still swore that hundreds of blossoms withered at the sound.
U May
explained very simply to his father that under no circumstances was he prepared to wed the bride who had been selected for him. Later the same day his father packed the cook and her daughter off to a business partner in Bombay, refusing to give his son any information concerning their whereabouts. U May left the house in search of them. In the years that followed, he traveled ceaselessly throughout the British colonies in Southeast Asia. Once he thought he saw Ma Mu or at least heard her voice. It was in Bombay Harbor just before boarding a steamer to Rangoon. He felt as if someone had called his name, but when he turned he saw only unfamiliar faces and at some distance on the dock a cluster of men gesticulating excitedly. A child had fallen into the water.
Each month that passed without any trace of Ma Mu or her mother left U May more desperate and furious. It was a vague, ill-defined fury he felt. It had neither name nor face and was directed largely at himself. He took to drinking, frequented the brothels between Calcutta and Singapore, and earned more in a month in the opium trade than his father made in a year, only to lose it again in illegal gambling. On a passage from Colombo to Rangoon he made the acquaintance of an odd and loquacious Bombay rice merchant who told him one evening on deck of his former Burmese cook and of the tragic death of her daughter and the daughter’s little boy. They had fallen into the harbor and drowned when the young woman tried to follow a man who was boarding a passenger ship. According to eyewitnesses she had mistakenly taken him for an acquaintance from Rangoon. The cook’s meals had subsequently become inedible, leaving the rice baron no choice but to dismiss her.
U May never told Su Kyi, or anyone, what he went through that night. When the ship reached Rangoon, he left his baggage on board and went from the harbor directly to the Shwegyin monastery at the foot of the Shwedagon Pagoda. He spent a few years there before journeying to Sikkim, Nepal, and Tibet, seeking tutelage in the teachings of the Buddha from several famous monks. He lived for more than twenty years in a small monastery in Indian Darjeeling until deciding to leave for Kalaw, Ma Mu’s birthplace. The young lovers had dreamt of Kalaw during their trysts in the cellar, in the rambling garden, and in the servants’ quarters. They planned to flee there with their child. Afterward, when he was wandering ceaselessly from place to place, U May never dared visit. Now he felt the time was ripe. He was over fifty, and Kalaw was where he wanted to die.
Standing before U May now, Tin Win held Su Kyi’s hand. He followed her across the room and they both knelt down. Tin Win let go of her, and they leaned over until their hands and foreheads brushed the floor.
The old man listened attentively while Su Kyi related Tin Win’s story. Occasionally he rocked a little with his upper body and repeated isolated words. When she had finished, he said nothing for a long time. At last he turned to Tin Win, who had crouched mute beside Su Kyi the entire time.
U May spoke slowly and in short sentences. He described the life of the monks, who knew neither home nor property aside from robe and thabeik, a bowl they carried when gathering alms. He explained how the novices walked the streets every morning, just after sunrise, how they stood silently in front of a house or paused in front of a doorway, accepting with gratitude whatever offerings they were given. He described how, with the help of a younger monk, he instructed his pupils in reading, writing, and arithmetic. In essence, however, his principal aim was to pass on the lesson life had taught him: that a person’s greatest treasure is the wisdom in his own heart.
Tin Win knelt motionless before the old man, listening intently. It was not the words or sentences as such that transfixed him. It was the voice. A gentle and melodic intoning, subtle and well-tempered like the soft ringing of bells of the monastery tower, bells that needed only a breeze to set them singing. It was a voice that reminded Tin Win of birds at dawn, of Su Kyi’s quiet and even breathing as she lay sleeping next to him. He did not merely hear the voice; he felt it on his skin like two hands. He wanted nothing more than to entrust the weight of his body to that voice. The weight of his soul. Something happened then for the first time that would happen ever more frequently in the future: Tin Win saw the sounds—saw them as smoke rising from a fire into the air and spreading throughout the room, wafting back and forth in gentle waves, moved as if by an unseen hand, curling and dancing and slowly dissipating.
On the way home neither Tin Win nor Su Kyi spoke a single word. He held her hand. It was warm and soft.
Tin Win was agitated on the way to the monastery before sunrise the next morning. He would be spending the next few weeks with the monks. He would be given a robe and would be going out with the other boys to collect alms in the vicinity. The thought of it made him queasy, and his dread deepened with every step. How would he find his way in the town when he could barely walk a few yards—even on familiar terrain—without stumbling? He asked Su Kyi to just let him be, to leave him in peace. He preferred to stay home on his sleeping mat or on the stool in the kitchen corner, the only two places he felt at all safe, or at least unthreatened.
There was no talking her out of it. Tin Win followed her reluctantly, dragging his feet all the way down into the town. Su Kyi felt as if she were leading some stubborn animal. All at once the sound of children singing in the monastery stopped them in their tracks. The voices calmed Tin Win. As if someone were stroking his face and his belly, soothing him. He stood frozen, listening. The soft rustling of leaves intermingled with the voices. It was more than a simple rustling, though. Tin Win realized that leaves, like human voices, each had their own characteristic timbre. Just as with colors, there were shades of rustling. He heard thin twigs rubbing together and leaves brushing against one another. He heard individual leaves dropping lightly to the ground in front of him. Even as they drifted through the air, he noticed that no two leaves sounded alike. He heard buzzing and blowing, chirping and cheeping, rushing and rumbling. A daunting realization was creeping up on him. Might there be, parallel to the world of shapes and colors, an entire world of voices and sounds, of noises and tones? A hidden realm of the senses, all around us but usually inaccessible to us? A world perhaps even more exhilarating and mysterious than the visible world?
Many years later, in New York, when he sat for the first time in a concert hall and the orchestra began to play, he would remember this very moment yet again. He was nearly drunk with happiness when he heard in the background the quiet drumbeats that opened the piece, and then the violins joining in, the violas and the cellos, the oboes and the flutes. Each raised its voice just as the leaves on that summer morning in Kalaw. Each instrument independently at first, and then in a chorus that so overwhelmed his senses he broke into a sweat and lost his breath.
Su Kyi nudged him along toward the monastery and through the music; he staggered along at her side like a drunk. A few moments later it all left him as quickly as it had come. He heard his own footsteps and Su Kyi’s labored breathing, the choir and the crowing roosters—but nothing more. Still, he had savored the first taste of a life so intense that it hurt. Indeed, it was sometimes unbearable.
Chapter 3
DAY WAS JUST breaking when they arrived at the monastery. U May sat meditating in the hall, surrounded by older monks. A young monk sat on a stool below the kitchen, breaking dry branches. Round and round him two dogs circled and frisked. A dozen novices in their red robes, heads freshly shaven, stood in a row beside the staircase. They greeted Tin Win and gave Su Kyi one of the dark red robes for him. She draped it around his slender body. She had shaved his head the night before, and when she saw him standing there amid the other monks she realized again that he was tall for his age and a beautiful boy. The back of his head was distinctive. He had a slim neck, a prominent nose, not too long, and teeth as white as the blossoms of the pear tree that stood before her house. His skin was the color of light cinnamon. His many falls and scrapes had left no more trace than two scars on his knees. His hands were narrow, the fingers long and elegant. One would never have guessed his feet had never known shoes.
In spite of his s
ize, he seemed to her as vulnerable as a baby chick flitting terrified across the barnyard. The sight of him moved her, but she did not want to pity him. She wanted to help him—and pity made poor counsel.
She found it hard to leave him behind, even if only for a few weeks, but U May had offered to look after him for a while. U May felt the company of the other boys would do him good. The communal meditation and the lessons, the peace and predictable routines of the monastery would strengthen his sense of security and confidence.
The novices took him into their midst, pressed a black bowl into one hand and a bamboo staff into the other. The monk standing in front of him in the line clenched one end of this staff under his arm. This is how they intended to lead Tin Win around. In a matter of moments the line of monks was on its way, taking small, cautious steps so that the blind one, too, might easily follow along. The novices marched through the gate, then turned right, making slowly for the main thoroughfare. Though Tin Win would not have noticed it, they were accommodating themselves to his tempo, moving more quickly when he picked up the pace or easing up when uncertainty slowed his steps. In front of nearly every house stood a man or a woman with a pot of rice or vegetables they had cooked for the monks in the wee hours of that morning. The procession halted again and again. The benefactors would fill the novices’ bowls and bow humbly.
Tin Win clung to his thabeik and his staff. He was used to wandering across the fields with a long stick when he was out on his own. He would swing it back and forth in front of him like an extended arm scanning the ground for ruts, branches, or stones. The bamboo staff in his hand now was no substitute for his own. This one made him dependent on the monk in front of him. It upset him to be out and about without Su Kyi. He missed her hand, her voice, her laughter. The monks were so quiet. Apart from a modest “thank you” for anything put in their bowls, they said nothing, and their silence only agitated him further. After only an hour or so Tin Win noticed that his bare feet were gradually gaining confidence on the sandy ground. He had not stumbled. He had not fallen. Neither the bumps nor the holes in the street had thrown him off balance. His hands relaxed. His stride grew longer and quicker.
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats Page 8
