He seemed to represent the melancholy I felt in this return. He wasn't downhearted. He was realistic. He did not want to live well, only to have the meager rent for his bamboo hut and some money for food. What was the point of living if you had no food?
He seemed to find it mildly amusing that I was shocked by his saying he'd rather die.
Oo Nawng preyed on my mind. Thinking about him, I could not sleep. I had visions of him in his battered pith helmet of sun-darkened bamboo, pedaling his rickshaw along the ruts of Mandalay's back streets. The little skinny man with his rusted bike and his rented rickshaw and his notebook. Like me, he too was a ghost—invisible, aging, just looking on, a kind of helpless haunter.
People gave money to children in the Third World, to orphanages, to empower women, to clinics, to schools, to governments, but they never gave money to people who were simply old so they could live a little longer and die in dignity. Oo Nawng wasn't old—he was my age—but in Burma this counted as elderly.
The day before I was to leave for a trip to the north, a sentimental journey to Pyin-Oo-Lwin, I looked for him on his usual street corner, under the big shade tree. No sign of him.
I took the trip to Pyin-Oo-Lwin. On my return, I looked for Oo Nawng again on his street corner. The other rickshaw drivers said they hadn't seen him. I thought I might find him in the market, where a trader might know where he was—Oo Nawng had brought me here to look at tribal tattoo implements, little stilettos the Karen people used as finials for their tattooing needles. I asked Soe Moe, the Muslim trader I'd met earlier (his real name was Hajji Ali; the Burmese name was fanciful),whether he'd seen Oo Nawng.
"That old man who brought you here? No." Then, without any prompting from me, he said, "He is so poor."
"I've been thinking about him."
"He's a good man," Soe Moe said. "He has a good heart. He brings people here. I give him a little."
Soe Moe meant that if a person bought something, he'd give him a tip.
That night I thought of Oo Nawng again, as a superior ghost, a
I went away, fearing that he was dead. Later in the morning I looked again—no Oo Nawng. I walked down a side street where men were selling oranges out of wheelbarrows, and others hawking onions and bananas. I kept walking in the noon heat, the sun beating on my head, thinking of Oo Nawng's battered pith helmet.
After forty-five minutes of useless kicking through the sand piles and gravel of these streets, I turned and—as in my dreams—saw Oo Nawng pedaling towards me, smiling.
"Get on, sir."
I got onto the seat of the rickshaw.
"Where to today?"
"Take me to a quiet place where no one can see us."
He pedaled awhile, then stopped in the shade of a banyan tree at the opening to an alley.
"Quiet enough?"
"Perfect." I then gave him an unsealed envelope.
He looked in. He did not seem surprised, though he touched the contents to his forehead. Then he frowned and said, "We must go change it. You change it. They won't believe me—they'll say I stole it."
So we went to a moneychanger, and the fat envelope of dollars was swapped for a big dirty brick of Myanmar kyats, secured by rubber bands.
"Let's get a drink."
We drank lemonade, and he told me his full name, Oo Ng Nawng. He wrote his address, and after that,
"Good."
"I'm happy," he said. His smile, too, was almost unearthly, beatific, a ghost smile of reassurance. "Now where do you want to go, Mister Baw?"
THE TRAIN TO PYIN-OO-LWIN
IN THE DARKNESS of early morning in the train's ordinary class, all the windows open, nothing was visible except the blurred outlines of the low buildings. Mandalay, like a city sketched in charcoal, was little more than these soft tracings and its complex smell, of wood fires and dust, dog hair and blossoms, crumbled brick and incense, diesel fumes, stagnant water, and the aroma of small fried cakes that the other passengers were wolfing out of fat-soaked wrappings of newspaper.
