The Jewel Trader Of Pegu by Jeffrey Hantover Page A

against whom to rail, to beat one’s chest? What use is sackcloth and ash, if there is no god to take pity on us, to forgive us, to allow us to redeem ourselves through study and good deeds?
    On this morning’s walk, Win dropped coins in the begging bowls of two monks but left empty the outstretched palm of a thin, wretched beggar standing on the corner of the main thoroughfare to the market. When we passed an especially hollow-eyed stick of a man, I asked politely, as one who wished to understand the ways of his people, what marked this man and the other man left empty-handed so unworthy. Win motioned toward him with a turn of his head. —
He was a merchant in a prior life who so loved money that he
cheated even his own kin, and so he earned this life as a beggar.
    I wanted to ask if all the beggars crowding the edges of the market had so earned their misfortune but held my tongue. The business of the day turned us from further talk on this matter, but later this afternoon while we drank tea on the porch of Win’s home, he returned to this subject, which is clearly a constant concern. He asked me if I remembered a friend, a perfume maker for the king and his many wives, whom I had met briefly at his home soon after my arrival. He is a small, pockmarked fellow with an equally unattractive wife, who showed her scorn for him with dismissive looks and harsh words that needed no translation. —
Poor man, he has the perfumer’s
power to mix scents and potions that could lure any beauty to his bed
but,
Win lowered his voice, his face scrunched with seriousness,
his
noble organ is small as a baby’s thumb—cruel punishment for his wanton
adultery in a prior life.
    Was this just a tale to scare Win’s sons to marital fidelity? I was trying to make sense of this primitive notion of divine retribution, when Win told me a longer tale. His grandfather’s cousin had been a wealthy man who prized his material possessions with overween-ing desire. One day, fire burst out in his house just as he was approaching his gate on his way back from the market. Without paus-ing to listen for the cries of his wife and young son, he rushed into the house to save precious double ikats stored in a camphor chest in his sleeping room. He ran out through the flames, cradling the folded silk like a child. Safe outside, he found his wife, who was visiting a neighbor and, seeing the flames, had rushed back. She screamed that their son, barely three, was asleep in the house. The man rushed back into the burning building and found the boy cow-ering in a corner. He saved his son, but not before the flames had blistered the boy’s tender skin and the foul smoke had weakened his young lungs. A sickly child, he died before he could marry and bear his father a grandson. With a somber voice that matched the dim-ming light of day, Win said this avaricious man was reborn a louse that lived upon the silk he so blindly loved.
    —
Ab… ra… ham,
when Win wishes to say something of importance, he speaks my name very slowly.
We all will be punished or
rewarded in our next life for the life we lead now.
He rattled off a chorus of punishments that a man might suffer in his next life for evils done in this one. I cannot remember them all, but a discontented man might be reborn a monkey, a man who in anger hurt others with his words would be reborn a ghost with a mouth burning like a furnace, those full of pride in their own beauty and contemptuous of others would find themselves hunchbacks or dwarves in their next lives, and a lecher who took pleasure in adulterous love affairs would be reborn a woman.

    Perhaps his tale of retribution might scare into goodness a child who had not yet attained the natural reason to know the wisdom and righteousness of the mitzvoth. But no man old enough to make a minyan would be frightened by this primitive reckoning of consequences. What a dark faith that denies the soul’s rebirth in this life. Cannot we change and make up for