1568584989 (N) by Delphine Schrank

Author:Delphine Schrank [Schrank, Delphine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2015-05-08T17:41:05+00:00

THE BOTHER, then, about this sudden spot of trouble in which Nway found himself—hounded out of Rangoon by intelligence agents—was that he needed to be back in the action, not in some pigshit rural boondocks where you could barely get cell phone reception, and connection at the lone Internet café was as hit-or-miss as an exile’s honesty.

This was no time to be arrested.

It was never the right time. But right now there was a major crisis. Police had seized Auntie after an uninvited American tourist had swum across the lake to her house on the evening of May 3. For giving him overnight refuge, she had been transferred to the Insein Prison guesthouse to face charges that she had breached the terms of her house arrest. The trial had begun May 18. How long it would drag out was anyone’s guess.

From what snatches of information Nway had gleaned, the American, John Yettaw, wasn’t so much malicious as touched in the head. According to his wife, Yettaw appeared to have been driven by some messianic mission premised on “peace and forgiveness.” With his homemade flippers, he was easy to dismiss as one more kook on the extreme end of Auntie’s global cult of personality.

He seemed, on first analysis, just the kind of nuisance to make life tricky for activists. As a rule of thumb, Auntie’s devotees, abroad or within the country, didn’t much skew the cause to the negative. The adulation she generated ensured at least a slow burn of concern for the general situation. Complications could arise when they achieved that pipedream of participatory democracy. At that point, the country needed a citizenry capable of understanding their responsibilities, willing to engage in the day to day of parliamentary politics, not crowning a queen and ceding their responsibilities accordingly. That such a prospect would be antithetical to every molecule of Auntie’s body was of little consequence.

There were those at home who even revered her as a spirit nat, the hallowed “Angel of University Avenue,” a female bodhisattva whose rise to the forefront of the movement in 1990 had coincided miraculously with the swelling of the breasts on Buddha statues. So far as Nway was concerned, she could frankly use all the magic powers that they would give her.

But was Yettaw really so innocent?

Grandpa had first heard the news of Auntie’s arrest when a phone call from a journalist in Japan had shaken him from sleep for predawn comment. He had been horrified. Digging where he could for all the facts to hand, he’d learned that Yettaw had tried this odyssey only a year before. Why, then, had the authorities given him a visa? How was he able to bypass officials on the lake? They had chucked stones at his passing form as if he were a duck. In Grandpa’s view—and Nway agreed—Yettaw’s history in the country had been more than sufficient to earn him a lifelong sentence on the visa blacklist.

Most suspicious was the man’s timing. He had crawled wet and

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