Video Night in Kathmandu (30 page)

Following me out of the creaking Fokker F-28 came fifty other shaken passengers, every one of them carrying an identical red-and-white bag bought at the airport duty-free shop in Bangkok. Within every bag—whether purchased by teetotaler, non-smoker or pleasure lover—was one carton of 555 brand cigarettes and one bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. Every visitor to Burma must bring such a bag, we had all been instructed by guidebooks,
returned friends, the lore of the road; even the Burma Airways boarding card had pointedly reminded all embarking passengers:
“PROCEED TO THE AIRPORT DEPARTURE LOUNGE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, TAX-FREE PURCHASES CAN BE MADE INSIDE
.” Identical red-and-white bags in hand, we trooped into the washed-out terminal.

Inside, several cheerful officials, trying hard to look grave, were lined up behind a long wooden counter like schoolteachers at a prizegiving. In the absence of formalities, passengers were invited to punch and pummel their way toward this central desk. A crush of bodies swept me forward, and I flung my health form toward an official. The scrum swayed and wobbled; I extended my Tourist Arrival Report in the direction of another official. Thrown off balance in the melee, and finding myself suddenly close to the front, I thrust my Customs Form at random into the air. A third official, unflustered and fastidious in his spectacles, plucked the paper from my grasp, asked a few questions, then handed it to a colleague. This fellow, in turn, copied down all the contents of my four-page form onto a separate form. The crowd shoved and shouted, and a soldier challenged an unfortunate who had brought no whiskey, only cigarettes, in his duty-free bag. A fifth man checked my carry-on case. What valuables did I have? None. How could that be? Curses rose up around me. Did I carry no watch? No glasses? No cuff links? By now, my third form, I was told, conflicted with a fourth, and a fifth would have to be completed. Did I have no wedding ring? Contact lenses perhaps? No spectacles? Elbows, passports collided. No American Express card? Not even a travel alarm clock? All, it seemed, were valuables; all had to be declared. An official began to add some of these items to my revised Customs Form and then, amidst a crash of voices, bodies, imprecations, to ask me, most cordially, to estimate the value of each piece. $5? $20? $7? Another official started rummaging through my bags, and then handed them to another for official inspection. Someone else gave me a copy of a Customs Declaration Form and a Currency Declaration Form and a Declaration Form, and told me that one had to be kept on my person and one had to be presented before every single transaction in Burma and one had to be shown upon departure. All of them, I noticed, already conflicted.

Then, as suddenly as they had converged, the officials released
me, red-and-white bag in hand, through an old door bandaged with cellotape. Instantly, I was assaulted by a gang of waiting unofficials. 100 kyats for a carton of 555 cigarettes! 200 kyats for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red! 270 kyats for cigarettes and whiskey! 250 kyats and a ride into town! 10 U.S. dollars for a taxi and a carton of 555s! 8 U.S. dollars and 100 kyats for …

I wasted not a moment; were it not for these black-market negotiations, I knew, I could easily find myself stranded at the airport indefinitely. Tourist Burma, ever eager to see the backs of foreigners, offered buses from Rangoon out to the airport; less pleased to welcome visitors, it ran no buses from the airport into town. Besides, it was illegal to bring kyats into the country and the only booth in the airport where local currency could be procured was closed.

A smiling man with pleading eyes and a greasy sarong led me outside. There, idling in the warm rain, were dozens upon dozens of cars, the youngest of them older than I. Battered Ford Fairlanes from the mid-fifties. Peeling Morris Minors from the Mountbatten years. Veteran Willys Jeeps left over from the war. Nearly all of them were gray, or green, or a khaki gray-green. Some had steering wheels on the right, some had steering wheels on the left and some, I’m sure, had no steering wheels at all. All looked like the final relics of some superannuated mobster.

Gently divesting me of my case, my guide flung it into the back of a 1953 Czech-made Skoda, ushered me happily into the back seat, and off we roared—or sputtered, rather, as the aging wreck gasped and creaked its way toward Rangoon. Every few minutes, it coughed up some phlegm and gave out completely. At that, the driver whirled around, flashed me a bright smile of helpless apology, jumped out, threw open the trunk, grabbed a container of water, flung open the hood, hopefully poured some water onto the engine, returned the container to the trunk, leapt into the car again and started her up. There were two dials on the dashboard, but neither of them worked.

Groaning and gagging, the Skoda bumped through wide avenues built for a queen. Above us, on an overblown billboard painted in faded comic-strip colors, a white-skinned woman with a fifties hairdo offered “English for Everyone.” By the side of the road, broad driveways swept up to somber, white-pillared
mansions that now stood discolored and empty, their walls mildewed, their gardens overgrown, moisture dripping from their Kent or Sussex eaves. In the midst of all these tombs of Empire, the Burmese went calmly about their daily rounds. On Thirlmere Avenue, monks in burgundy robes stood in line for buses. Thick-spectacled old Indian gentlemen, with folded brollies and ancient briefcases under their arms, waited to cross Windsor Road. In the Landsdowne area, schoolchildren in spotless white shirts and bright blue skirts sauntered, satchels swinging, homeward down muddy lanes.

Trying in vain to direct the dance of juddering jalopies that careened like Dodg’ems through the collapsing city, policemen presided over every roundabout, stern in their odd white shirts with shiny blue buttons. A frayed notice board advertised “Public Latrines” and behind it the steeples of red-brick Victorian churches poked into the sky. Shabby, dark little booths offered “Cake and Snacks.” Other solemn institutions, puffed up with an air of earnest self-importance, stood unvisited along the streets: the Military and Civil Tailors, the Foodstuffs and General Merchandise Trading Corporation, the Burmese League of Moslem Women. Above us, on a Day-Glo cartoon of a billboard, a dashing young couple—she a proto-Grace Kelly in white dress, he a dinner-jacketed sophisticate—danced beside a goblet of Super Star ice cream several times bigger than themselves.

At last, with an apologetic cough, the Skoda lurched up to the Strand Hotel. Inside, behind a semicircular wooden counter, a stern-looking woman pulled out a ledger thick with the dust of ages. I filled in my name, my address and, most important of all, the date on which I planned to leave Burma. A dirty-turbaned man led me past grand and desolate assembly halls where groups of schoolchildren might have gathered each morning for prayers. A skeletal 1940s elevator creaked up its chute, the bellboy led me down a naked, well-scrubbed corridor, a dungeon key turned in a door and we entered my room: a hard bed with hospital covers, a black
film noir
phone, a spartan tub in the bathroom, a Yale lock. The turbaned man flicked a switch, and, lazily, a fan began to whir.

“This is Burma,” Kipling had written, “and it will be quite unlike any land you know about.”

———

BURMA
is
THE
dotty eccentric of Asia, the queer maiden aunt who lives alone and whom the maid has forgotten to visit. A quarter of a century ago. General Ne Win introduced his people to his own homemade political system—a slaphappy mixture of Buddhism and socialism. Almost overnight, he eliminated all private enterprise, expelled all foreigners and sealed up his nation’s borders. Nothing should enter the country, he decreed, nobody should leave, and nothing should change. Burma is hardly a negligible little banana republic: it has as many citizens as Canada and Australia combined and its area is more than sixteen times greater than that of Switzerland. When Win took over, his country was the world’s foremost exporter of rice, and even today it is rich with 80 percent of the globe’s teak, vast quantities of rubies, even oil. Yet with one wave of his wand, its new leader managed to put the entire country to sleep. Ever since, the country had continued to slide further into poverty, deeper and ever deeper into the past. In 1974, it had emerged from its solitary confinement just long enough to announce its willingness to enter into joint-venture projects. But fully a decade passed before the first such deal was agreed upon, and it involved nothing more than the manufacture of obsolete German rifles for the Burmese Army. In Burma, Time itself had been sentenced to life imprisonment and History was held under house arrest.

Having seceded in this curious fashion from the world at large, Burma had retired, half monk and half misanthrope, to live amidst the changeless furnishings of the past. With the absoluteness that can come of isolation or idealism, it had also remained resolutely democratic in its mistrust of every aspect of the foreign, and the modern, world; an equal-opportunity recluse, it had no time for the West, no patience with the East. A founding member of the nonaligned movement, it was also the first to quit, charging that the body was no longer innocent of politics. The so-called Burmese Way to Socialism bore a fair resemblance to a one-way trip to solitary confinement.

For years, foreigners had been allowed to visit Burma for no longer than twenty-four hours. Recently, the maximum length of stay had increased to seven days. But Burma was hardly eager to attract tourists. Visitors were permitted to enter the country only by air. That meant flying into Rangoon. That in turn meant
leaving from Kunming, Dhaka, Calcutta, Singapore or Bangkok. And the handful of carriers that plied these forgotten routes—the national airlines of Burma, Thailand, China, the Soviet Union and Bangladesh—did so only a couple of times each week. Arriving in Rangoon was difficult. Arriving at the right time from the right place was more difficult still. Managing to leave, exactly seven days later, for one’s chosen destination, was nigh impossible.

I had enjoyed a taste of the Burmese Way to Socialism well before my arrival in Rangoon. At the Burmese consulate in New York, I had, in applying for a visa, submitted an Arrival Form, a Tourist Visa Application Form, another Tourist Application Form and three recent pictures of myself. A day had passed, and then a few more. I went back to the consulate to consult the man in charge. He was, he said with genuine courtesy, very sorry, very sorry indeed, for the delay. His country, he explained, did not have sophisticated technology. Were there no computers? “Oh no.” Could we telephone? He shook his head sadly. What could I do? Well, he said, he could send a telex through New Delhi to Rangoon. But once it got to Rangoon, who could tell what would happen. I shrugged. He shrugged. Three more days passed, and then a week. I was due to leave in a matter of days. The man at the consulate handed me back my passport, minus a visa, and apologized. “Perhaps it will be easier in Bangkok.”

As soon as I arrived in Bangkok, I hurried to the regally dilapidated Burmese consulate. Two men were sitting next to chaotically overcrowded desks behind a booth on a terrace marked “Visas.” I would like to apply for a visa, I said. The office, they said, was closed. Could I get a form at least? The office, they said, was closed; I should come back the following day. I came back the following day. I would like to apply for a visa, I said. Where, one of the two men asked, was my plane ticket out of Burma? There seemed little point, I said, in getting a ticket out of Burma before I knew whether I could get into Burma. The two men shook their heads gravely. Soon, they said, the office would be closed.

A few minutes later, tucked away between snack shops and money dealers, I came upon a dusty, lightless little cell that looked like the back room of a warehouse. Inside, the Burma Airways head office was empty, save for a three-year-old boy
wandering around vaguely among unpeopled desks. A few cheerless black-and-white posters of the homeland were stuck on the walls. A short typewritten schedule for such destinations as “Kathmadu” lay in an old Air-India folder. A postcard or two. Nothing else. Finally, a round-faced matron, huffing impatiently, shuffled up to the counter. I asked whether I could buy a ticket. She looked gloomy. It was difficult, she said. I asked why; she said nothing. At last, with lugubrious reluctance, she pulled out a Dickensian ledger and a fountain pen and entered my name on a list. Was that all? It had to be; after all, there were no typewriters in the place, and certainly no computer terminals. If I actually wanted to buy a ticket, she warned, I should go to Nepal Tours; their prices were much better than Burma Airways’. With that, she padded back into her room.

Proudly bearing my receipt, I returned to the two men at the consulate. The office, they said, was closed; I would have to come back the following day. I came back the following day. I would like to apply for a visa, I said. One of the men scrutinized my receipt unhappily. All right, he said. But he would have to warn me that his office could provide no staples.

HALF AN HOUR
after arriving at the Strand, I turned off the fan in my room and walked across town to the central offices of Tourist Burma. There a middle-aged lady with black glasses, a severe bun and an air of hockey-mistress briskness began informing me of my rights. Tourists, she said, were allowed to visit only five places in Burma. It was possible to take the train, but—here she looked portentous—there were many delays. Given the seven-day limit, she did not recommend the train. Much better was to take a Burma Airways plane. An aircraft connected the country’s four main sights each day.

She stopped and peered at me for a moment. Was I American? Not really. “Ah,” she said with a relieved chuckle. “That is good. Americans do not like our ways here. Sometimes a plane will not leave because the pilot is sitting drinking tea. They do not understand that. They do not understand that here in Burma we live in the eighteenth century.”

With that unsettling parenthesis, Miss Tourist Burma resumed her litany of rights. There was one good hotel in every town; it was not possible to stay anywhere else, unless one
procured a special voucher from the Tourist Burma office. Often, she said, the office was closed. There was more or less one restaurant in every town (in the hotel), though Rangoon boasted two. And I should not on any account forget to list every transaction on my financial form. The gist of her message was clear: it was possible to choose any way at all of seeing the country, so long as it was the Tourist Burma way.