The humble Khan Pwint is woven into Royal wreaths.
In all the tales that were hard to swallow, what U Thar Kyaw was telling me was truly more unbelievable then most. But he said it was no fairy tale.
“It’s the truth, Khin Lay is still living, right in my own village”, he insisted.
The story he told was simple yet lovely. The time when he told me was in misty March, and it seemed perfect for the tale. When he described how at sunset the mist would rise over the fields I could see it as if painted on canvas.
He did not reveal the name of the village.
Poets sing of the moon’s silver rays but country girls see its light as pale gold. As the moon rose in the east it seemed as if the Moon Goddess had loosened her hair and let the strands sweep down softly to earth. It was a time when moonbeams touched the paddy fields that U Thar Kyaw and his neighbouring farmers met Thakin1 Kyaw Zeya.
In the village, in the front yard of almost every house has a rack to grow gourd vines. The girls of the village would sit under this rack to gossip. A long time ago they used to spin, but now they no longer weave at home. The rays of the moon would seek out the girls through the thick foliage.
It was said that Thakin Kyaw Zeya met Khin Lay under this very gourd vine. He, too, like the moonbeams, had seen her as he made his way through the vines and trees of the village. Khin Lay’s parents were landowners but she seldom lived in the village, as she went to school in town and only returned occasionally. Her mother insisted that at home, she must live and behave like a country girl. So at every dew-soaked dawn she must cook the rice to offer at the household shrine and to the monks who making their alms rounds. She had to help her mother prepare lunch to take to the labourers working in their fields. At night, under the light of the moon, she had to husk peanuts. Her mother would give her a hand and talk about their farm.
Her mother always sounded uncertain whatever she said, as if she did not believe her own words. In fact, she always thought Khin Lay would abandon them and the farm and settle in town, and it was not an unreasonable fear. Everyone exclaimed at Khin Lay’s beauty and they would say that she was too pretty to be hidden in the country. Every time Mother heard this, she would adamantly shake her head.
Khin Lay wanted to become a teacher and that was the one reason she was sent to town to be educated. While she was sitting for the exam for the appointment of a Middle School teacher, she had met Thakin Kyaw Zeya, who had often been to their village, but only then met Khin Lay. Thakin Kyaw Zeya had come to organise the farmers so most of them knew him well. Campaigning with the farmers, he loved having green tea and fried peanuts. He loved the cool breeze that swept to him across the farms. He said he loved the simple and sweet fragrance of the wildflowers.
He whispered poetic words to Khin Lay under the gourd vines; and Mother did not like it, not one bit. But when U Thar Kyaw himself, who was like a son to her, said it was a fortunate meeting of the two young people, Mother could not protest. In her eyes the fact that Thakin Kyaw Zeya wore the rough Pinn2i cotton and the cotton longyi woven in Pakokku was testament enough that he was no stranger to the countryside. But she could not be quite sure; she felt uneasy. Whatever could the reason be for this?
Wild roses lined the dirt road leading out of the village on both sides. It was on this very road that Thakin Kyaw Zeya took away his bride Khin Lay from her home, on a bullock cart. It was so early in the morning that the dew was falling thickly and one could hardly see anything. The winter of the countryside was chilly and crisp. Khin Lay sat close to Thakin Kyaw Zeya, huddling against the cold. The sweet smell of the wildflowers greeted her. She looked and looked in the mist to see if she could catch a glimpse of her mother’s house, but to no avail; the dew was falling too fast. She gave up and leaned against Thakin Kyaw Zeya, tears welling in her eyes.
Mother could not even sit to pray, as was usual for her at that time of dawn. She stood looking from the front door into the mist until she could no longer hear the cartwheels.
“I’ve never gone away from the village, so never been on that road,” she said to the maid watching with her. Now, since her daughter left, she did not even go near that road.
U Thar Kyaw paused when he reached the part in his story of Khin Lay leaving the village. Was he seeing again in his mind that country morning hidden under the mist? He did not say why he paused but when he picked up the story again, the scene had changed to one of spring.
He said, simply, that spring was a time of both the old and the new. Aged and worn leaves drift to earth, leaves that had once fluttered green and fresh on the high branches, showing off their youth and beauty and they had breathed in the winds of high places.
“So now that they are old and worn, how ill is their Fate! Like old men sitting to meditate before they finally die, wouldn’t the leaves want to rest a bit? But no, the harsh and hot wind swept them away hither and thither. The old leaves looked up at the branches they had left, and new green leaves were already sunning themselves. A wild wind brought the smell of flowers from distant woods and reminded the fallen leaves of their life. If they had been human, they would surely weep. Was it not this same wild wind that swept over them last year as they, too, sunned themselves after they had burst forth in their youth, the same wind with the scent of paradise itself? Now, they are exhausted, skittering all over at the whim of the wind?
Many times Khin Lay, with food in a basket on her head, walked out their village, past the big Kapok tree into the woods where Thakin Kyaw Zeya and U Thar Kyaw and others were hiding. Sometimes she sent a villager with the food.
She went so often, that the ground under the Kapok tree could well turn into a stream.
“Ask the Kapok tree and the earth under it if you want to know how much she helped her husband,” U Thar Kyaw said. What a strange thing to say! I stared at him.
I searched U Thar Kyaw’s eyes. They were clear and bright and I continued to listen to his words without qualms.
He said that man’s change of heart and situation and man’s true nature were known well only by the earth. As the hot wind of March drove the old leaves away, so had their revolution scattered the cruelty of Japanese fascism to the winds. Blood from both sides fell to the earth and only the earth would know which blood was whose.
The footsteps of the freedom fighters were left all over the earth as they ran and fought, and if historians by chance left out the some faithful revolutionaries, the earth knew them all.
When peace was restored, the freedom fighters gained positions and honours. When some who had been hiding in fear stood up to declare that they too had fought with valour, the earth had laughed deeply.
When the monsoon begins the winds are no longer hot and harsh. They blew steadily and only from the south. The parched and hardened earth became damp and dark brown. One could smell the rain in the wind and sense the moisture. Flowers woke up, the trees became fresh and green under the raindrops. Is it not natural that the searing heat and violent changes of March should be followed by the compact coolness of the early rains? In this time of the beginning of monsoon Khin Lay for the second time had to follow her husband where he went. This time, it was to Yangon, the city. Although Khin Lay begged, her mother refused to go with them.
The early rainfall had pressed down the earth so the road was not dusty. The cartwheels sank into the softened earth. This time too, her mother watched from her door. The two cart tracks stretched out far into the distance, a long, long way.
U Thar Kyaw and his comrades went along and said goodbye only when the cart passed into the woods where so many of their friends had fallen. This time too Khin Lay could not see the village as she looked back, not because of the mist but for the tears in her eyes.
The tall trees swayed as if saying goodbye to her; she waved at the profusion of wild flowers by the road, feeling sad to be leaving the village. When they passed under the Kapok tree she did not look up.
Letters came, instead of Khin Lay, to her mother. U Thar Kyaw had to read out the letters. When there were delays between letters, Mother would worry that her daughter had forgotten her.
In one letter Khin Lay described her life.
Before, I was too busy working as a teacher so that he could concentrate on his politics, and now I am no longer the wife of freedom fighter Thakin, he is now an aid to the minister. But I am still busy, but this time in the kitchen, so I could not write to you often.
Just now while writing this I had to stop as he came back from his game of tennis and I had to make orange juice for him. He plays tennis everyday, to be fit.
U Thar Kyaw had stopped reading to glance at Khin Lay’s mother. She looked a bit confused. She asked him what ‘tennis’ and ‘Peggy’ meant and he had to explain.
Her mother smiled at this. She was quite happy; it was the thought that mattered.
U Thar Kyaw wished out loud that he could see Thakin Kyaw Zeya again. It was four years since he and Khin Lay left. In the following months Khin Lay wrote more often.
When she heard the words, Khin Lay’s mother was shaky with happiness.
U Thar Kyaw stopped reading. Now what was this?
At this point, Mother grabbed U Thar Kyaw’s arm.
“What does she mean by that?” she asked. He shook his head slowly and continued to read.
“You know, my husband, he is going to marry Peggy tomorrow4. How can I remain here? He said I lack so many things, but he did not say what. I wanted to ask him so much, but I dared not. Maybe it is a lack that I do not know what my faults are! You will remember I once told you about Peggy, how she never even looked at him when he was a poor ‘Thakin’, the woman who looked down on him once. I will come back, mother. Be sure to come and meet me on the road.
U Thar Kyaw sat glumly with the letter in his hand. Mother however was smiling.
“She’s right to come home,” she said simply.
She raised her two hands together to Buddha; she smiled but her eyes were full of tears.
The evening that Khin Lay was due to arrive, both her mother and U Thar Kyaw waited on the road outside the village. For the mother it was the first time she set foot here after her daughter left all these years ago.
Every time that the dark shape of a cart meandered out from the woods, Mother trembled in anticipation. From this road her daughter had left but from this road she would come home.
The setting sunlight had lost its heat and its pale gold was left only on the tips of the trees. In the underbrush and along the road, mist had begun to rise.
“This is where three of our villagers fell,” U Thar Kyaw said. The earth beneath the Kapok tree that he pointed out no longer bore any bloodstains.
The cart stopped under it and Khin Lay jumped down and walked slowly towards her mother. She held tight to her mother’s hands. Her mother could not say a word.
“I’m home, Mother,” Khin Lay said simply.
Her mother clutched Khin Lay’s shoulder and looked into her face as if she were seeing a stranger.
“Promise me you won’t go away again,” she finally said. Khin Lay nodded and tears fell from her cheeks onto the earth beneath the Kapok tree. They walked back into the village.
It is said, U Thar Kyaw told me, that at the place under the Kapok tree there now grew a huge bush of the Trodden Flower.
He did not however tell me if it grew out of Khin Lay’s tears or the villagers’ blood.
1 “Thakin” means master. Nationalists rebelling against the colonial British used Thakin as a prefix to their names.
2 Rough, home spun unbleached cotton sewn into jackets. A symbol of not using foreign-made goods.
3 March 27th, Revolutionary Day.
Republished on my blog with the kind permissions of Daw Mi Kyaw Thaung, one and only daughter of the late author Daw Khin Hnin Yu, and Daw Thanegi.
It’s very simple yet touching and meaningful story.Thank you for sharing!