In the postponed 1990 election, with Suu Kyi still under house arrest, her NLD party won eighty per cent of the seats. As we know, the military refused to hand over power and she was detained under house arrest in her family home on Inya Lake, Yangon, for nearly fifteen of the following twenty-one years.
I still have the short-wave radio we were unable to deliver; it’s our kitchen radio, we listen to it every day and I often think of Tun Gyaw. I wrote a number of times to the address we had in Rangoon; I have tried to trace him or his family through various channels, but have never received a reply. I have asked
Robert Taylor to enquire of news of him on his trips to Rangoon, but he has had no success. The closest I have come is an email from Suu Kyi’s personal assistant, Dr Tin Mar Aung, acknowledging my letter, but nothing came of it.
Dad stuck Tun Gyaw’s photograph to the back of a cornflakes packet; beneath it he wrote: When I arrived back with Tun Gyaw off the plane they insisted on separating us even when I explained we had been the closest of colleagues in continued danger and that he had supported me throughout. We could not eat together – because he was Burmese and I was British, unbelievable these days but was imperative in those days … I could not stand it. He and I did brilliantly TOGETHER. Forty years later I received a letter saying ‘I hope we can meet before we die.’ I cried helplessly.
Dad cries a lot. He collapses into his tears. Tears for the loss of a past that cannot be revisited. Tears for the loss of people he will never see again. And he is experiencing another bereavement, tears for the loss of him.
Tears of sadness foment into tears of frustration. Things won’t work. People won’t come. Water won’t boil. And there’s nothing for him to do!
‘I just want to help someone,’ he says, ‘all my life I’ve helped someone.’ His voice the merest whisper, dry leaves scraping in the wind.
