R., M. and me were sitting in this little sidewalk restaurant, drinking bottles of Myanmar Beer, eating river fish with watercress and rice. Our waiter sat on his stool, staring at the dusty nothing night, and at the only other table, a group of old men laughed over rice hooch. We were exhausted from the day’s cycle to Mandalay’s holiest temple, a glittering world of woodcarvers and shops selling all colours of holy this and that, and deep in the centre of the complex, the Mahamuni Buddha, layered fat with two hundred years of gold leaf. Ah.
Like I said, we were sitting and eating, not really talking, when this woman came from the darkness, brown with sun and filth, a dirty baby tied into her rags. She could have been thirty or fifty—I don’t know. She showed us her betel-stained teeth, the palms of her hands. Her eyes said hunger.
In a country like Burma, you can’t help but stand out. Tourist-free, impoverished and oppressed, we became well-acquainted with the palms of people’s hands. What could we do? I fumbled in my pocket for kyat and R. laughed and said “Check it out! She’s dancing!” With a wide, shit-eating grin, he got up from his seat and started in on the Chicken Dance, singing, “Doo doo du-du du-du doo, doo doo du-du du-du doo…” R. flapped his wings and the baby started crying. The woman didn’t move. R. finished the song, sat down, took a pull from his beer and went back to his dinner.
The waiter was staring at us, the men at the other table were staring at us, and the woman’s eyes had shifted from hunger to hate.
Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Shawn Otis
this one is very, very good…