Letters from Burma by Aung San Suu Kyi.

Rain Thoughts

The word "monsoon" has always sounded beautiful to me, possibly because we Burmese, who are rather inclined to indulge in nostalgia, think of the rainy season as most romantic.

As a child, I would stand on the verandah of the house where I was born and watch the sky darken and listen to grownups wax sentimental over smoky banks of massed rain clouds. When the rain came down in rods of glinting crystal, a musically inclined cousin would chat, "Oh, the golden rain is brown," a line from a popular song. I could not make up my mind whether the words were poetic or comic, but I was ready to accept that it was an apt description as I had often seen raindrops shoot out sparks of gold when hit by stray sunbeams against a sky bruised with shades of brown. I was also quite willing to go along with the adult contention that falling rain stirs undefined yearnings for times past even though as a 6-year-old I could not have claimed much of a past. It seemed very grown-up to regard a soft gray day of the monsoons with an appropriate expression of inexplicable sorrow.

One of the first poems I learned, written by our great poet Min Thu Wun and known to almost every Burmese child, was about the rains: "In the months of Wahso and Wagaung when the waters are high, let us go and gather the ripe /thabye/ fruit....."I would ask my mother for some thabye fruit (Eugenia jambolana) just to see what it was like, but it was scarce in Rangoon and I did not come across even one solitary specimen. It was only during my teens when I accompanied my mother to India that she was able to provide me with this fruit that had been so much a part of the poetic imagination of my childhood. "This,"she said one day, handing me a bulging packet, with that radiant smile that put the tiniest of dimples at one corner of her mouth, "this is the thabye fruit I could not get for you when you were a child."

In Delhi, the fruit was called /jamu/, and when it was in season it would be gathered in enormous baskets under the trees at the corner of the street where we lived. The shape and size of large olives with a shiny dark purple skin, the jamu had a sweet, astringent-tasting flesh that left bright magenta stains on the tongue and lips. It was as exotic as I had imagined it would be in the days when I chanted poems as I hopped around under a monsoon shower squelching mud between my toes, a thin brown urchin delighting in the cool, clean feel of the rain and the sense of freedom. When bathing in the rain was no longer one of the great pleasures of my existence, I knew I had left my childhood behind me.

There is another bit of poetry about thabye fruit and rain quite different from Min Thu Wun's happy evocation of small boys and girls valiantly tramping thorough thorny bushes and braving leeches to find a trove of delicious fruit. It is usually recited in a mournful tone in keeping with Burmese sentiment about the sadness of dripping rain:

"The thabye is in fruit, the waters are in flood;

The toddy nuts are falling, the rain is unceasing;

Oh, Ko Datha, I long to go back to Mother; Show me the way ...."

This is based on the Buddhist story of Padasari, the daughter of rich parents who ran away to a far place with one of her house slaves. After bearing two sons she was filled with such longing to see her parents that she asked her husband to take her back home. On the journey, she lost her husband and both children in a series of tragic incidents. She managed to continue on to the land where her parents lived only to discover that her whole family -- father, mother and brother -- had died and just been cremated. The unfortunate young woman lost her mind and wandered around in a state of mad grief until the Lord Buddha taught her how to achieve peace of mind. Padasari is seen as the epitome of the consuming fire of extreme grief. But her tale is essentially one of supreme joy: the joy of victory over the self. There are many pictures that depict Padasari's frantic despair at the loss of her husband and sons, often against a backdrop of rain and storm. On the surface it is not a scene calculated to induce much enthusiasm for wet weather, but because we know that the ultimate outcome is a happy on it does not really dampen one's spirits.

Once more the monsoons have come to Burma, the cooling rain bringing relief from the broiling heat of April. At this time six years ago, the first democratic general election in 30 years was held in our country. The people of Burma went to the polls with an exemplary sense of responsibility and discipline, buoyed up by the hope that after three decades of authoritarian misrule they would at last achieve a system that ensured respect for their collective will. Their hopes were cruelly dashed. The results of the election have been ignored and Burma remains subject to the whims of a small elite. Our struggle for a nation ruled in accordance with democratic principles continues, refreshed and re-energized by the new season.