Wai Yan Hpone

WITHIN one or two blinks I realised I had lost my parents. I was alone, among many, many people I didn’t know on the platform of Shwedagon Pagoda – the place Rudyard Kipling described as “a beautiful, winking wonder that blazed in the sun” in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches – Letters of Travel (1899). Shwedagon’s beauty was lost on me this time, however. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I began to cry out loud. The strangers around me appeared to get even bigger. I could hardly see anything through my tears but felt a man catch hold of me with his giant hands. I struggled to escape but so forceful were his squeezes that all my efforts to escape were in vain. “Hey... don’t be afraid. Where’re your parents?” More people crowded around us and everyone comforted me. The man took me, the child who uttered no word but only cried, to the pagoda trustees office. In front of the office was a pandal being used as a donation counter, inside the office was a lady with glasses inviting well-wishe...

  WEARY of study, I returned to my hotel room, ready for my nap. Then my eye chanced upon a book, lying unopened since friends had pressed it upon me, urging me to read. Idly, I picked it up. At 150 pages it didn’t seem much of a challenge. It said on the back cover that the book had received literary awards. So I opened it. And then I was hooked.   Smaller and Smaller Circles , by Filipino author FH Batacan, is about two Jesuit priests-cum-detectives, who investigate a series of murders of undersized, undernourished teenage boys in a slum suburb of Quezon, the Philippines’ largest city.   The story opens with the discovery of the dead body of a boy dumped in the Payatas area of the city. The body has been mutilated and eviscerated. The two priests, Father Gus and Father Jerome, set about their investigation as the number of the victims rises, eventually to six.    All the victims are killed and mutilated in the same way. I shift my weight on the chair a...

  IN an apartment located in one of Yangon’s quiet suburbs, Prophet Myat Thit – one of the city’s most well-known astrologers – welcomes his customers with a benevolent smile before he begins his duty of giving astrological advice. Next to the office where Prophet Myat Thit hosts his customers is a shrine room set aside for the performance of religious rituals such as chanting prayers and meditating. This is where the astrologer also hones his concentration skills, which he said is one of the most important factors in determining the accuracy of a forecast. “Astrology is a very ancient subject that dates back to an unknown period in human history,” he said. “Because it is, to a certain extent, a reliable technique for the good of humanity, it has survived into the 21 st century.” In the past 40 years Prophet Myat Thit has met countless people from different walks of life who have turned up on his doorstep, many of whom have expected him to save them from...

  AUTHOR Nu Nu Yi Inwa’s book Smile as They Bow was short-listed earlier this year for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, for unpublished English-language works by Asian writers. She attended the awards ceremony in Hong Kong on November 10, where the prize was given to China’s Jiang Rong for his novel Wolf Totem . Meanwhile, Hyperion publishing house in New York has agreed to publish Nu Nu Yi Inwa’s book at a later date. The Myanmar Times met with her in Yangon following her return from Hong Kong.   MT: What inspired you to write Smile as They Bow ? NNY: Although I had watched nat [spirit] dances many times in my childhood, I became especially interested in nat beliefs only after I went to a nat propitiating ceremony organised by a family in Yangon in 1990. A late nat medium named U Soe Kyi, who became the basis for the main character in my novel, Daisy James, took me to the ceremony where he danced. I was very fond of listening to nat...

WITHOUT the use of surnames to help people trace their family histories, it would have been quite difficult for Mrs Lynne Cheney to discover, as she did last month, that her husband and vice president of the US, Mr Dick Cheney, was an eighth cousin to senator and Democratic presidential Barack Obama. Traditionally, people in Myanmar do not have surnames. Each child is given an individual name – varying in length from one word to three, four or even more words – whose elements are completely independent from his or her parents’ names. So the children of U (Mr) Aung Kyaw and Daw (Ms/Mrs) May Thu might have names as diverse as San Aung, Kyaw Myo or Wai Yi. However, during the colonial era some parents and institutions started adopting an informal surname system, which had been imported from Britain. Those who learned at missionary schools were usually given a Christian first name followed by their fathers’ names – the daughter of Aung Gyi might be named Rosie Aung Gyi, for example. ...

  The bus breaks down over Ponnya [Pic: Wai Yan Hpone] My muscles ached in protest as I squeezed-in between luggage and other passengers during my bus ride from Mandalay to Hakha, capital of Chin State. We were only a few hours into the drive and it already felt like an ordeal. The bus was driving along the road to Monywa, a town on the east bank of Chindwin River and I tried to keep myself alert by looking through the window at the desert-like scenes on either side of the road. And all of us were unimpressed by the tortoise-like pace of our bus.    The driver seemed like he knew the road well but the speed at which he was driving was embarrassing; everybody guessed they would miss the scheduled arrival in Hakha the next day. After a long, boring day’s driving, the bus turned into Chaung Oo-Pakokku, a small road that runs leads off from the main highway. Soon we crossed over the Hsinbyushin Bridge that spans the Chindwin River and entered Magwe divisi...