The Myanmar Diaries

Both my parents spent a small part of their childhood in Burma, n.k.a Myanmar. I was there in January 2016 to take a walk through their lives and I did it with a sense of trying to fit myself into what their lives may have been like. As I strolled past the general post office of Rangoon n.k.a Yangon where my grandfather had worked as a postmaster I could almost feel its rush and busy-ness.

Then there was Scott Bazar with its amazing cacophony of sights and sounds. I could almost feel the excitement which my grandmothers had felt while strolling through the shops and checking out the rubies and emeralds and jade. The rubies smiled and twinkled back seductively asking to be picked up! I remember my paternal grandmother’s warm rememberance of her jewellery box which was full of such fascinating baubles.

Today’s Rangoon (seriously, I can’t stop calling it that) is a city that has just woken up from a long slumber. If Rip Van Winkle had been a city this is what he would’ve looked like. But there was also a sense of going home. As I wandered through the outer verandah of my father’s school my movements being followed by curious eyes I felt like I had a right to be there. And then standing outside his home where he had lived before he and the family escaped the country to a new life in India, I felt that I had completed a circle.