The Lady and the Peacock by Peter Popham

in by riot police with rifles and batons and by soldiers with machine guns. Remembering the massacre in March, when the students had been trapped and shot dead by troops, the demonstrators scattered into the lanes and nearby houses before the soldiers could open fire. Most of them survived—but on the same day elsewhere in the city many died.
    Word of the new clashes flashed across the city. Down at the Institute of Medicine the student meeting was still in progress, and a witness of the violence further north burst in with the news. Suspected spies inside the hall were pointed out by angry students, and grabbed and hauled to the front of the meeting for summary justice; one of them narrowly escaped being lynched. A hundred or more people died in the clashes that day, according to diplomats’ estimates, and many dozens were wounded, and now they streamed into the hospital in ambulances and cars and rickshaws and carried on the shoulders of friends. These were the first protests to erupt since Suu’s arrival in the country at the beginning of April, and at the hospital she found herself with a ringside seat. Burma’s bloody tragedy was unfolding before her eyes.
    The regime acted fast to end the protests, shutting the medical and dental campuses, making hundreds more arrests, and for the first time clamping a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the city. This brought mayhem to markets whose stallholders were accustomed to setting up their stalls and laying out their wares in the early hours of the morning. Forced to start work later, they raised their prices to make up for the loss of trade, adding another new element to the cocktail of misery and fury that was steadily rendering Burma ungovernable.
    *
    And then the rains came, and Suu and her mother went home.
    The month of July has a special meaning in Suu’s story, and that of her family: It is the month when her father was killed, the event commemorated every year on Burma’s Martyrs’ Day. It is when the monsoon, which normally starts in June, increases to its greatest intensity, coinciding with the Burmese lunar months of Wahso and Wagaung. “The word ‘monsoon’has always sounded beautiful to me,” she wrote eight years later, “possibly because we Burmese, who are rather inclined to indulge in nostalgia, think of the rainy season as most romantic. As a child I would stand on the veranda of the house where I was born and watch the sky darken and listen to the grown-ups wax sentimental over smoky banks of massed rain clouds . . . When bathing in the rain was no longer one of the great pleasures of my existence, I knew I had left my childhood behind me. . . .” 11
    It is the season when Burma is most quintessentially Burmese—hot and sultry and shriekingly green and fertile, when the rain comes down like a waterfall every morning and evening, and sometimes in the middle of the day as well. It is the season in which ecstasy, melancholy and tragedy seem inextricably mixed—for her nation as a whole, and for Suu and her family in particular.
    At Rangoon General Hospital, her doctors discharged Daw Khin Kyi: There was nothing more they could do for her. Suu converted one of the large downstairs rooms at 54 University Avenue into a sickbay and on July 8th, she took her home. Mother and daughter were back together in the villa on the shore of Inya Lake, in the north of Rangoon, where they had moved with Suu’s brother Aung San Oo when she was eight.

    54 University Avenue, Rangoon, the family home where Suu was detained for more than fifteen years.
    However gloomy the prognosis, it must have been a relief to be back in familiar surroundings. And on July 22nd, to Suu’s joy, the family was reunited when Michael, Alexander and Kim flew out to join them. In a letter to her parents-in-law in June, she had revealed how much she missed them. 12 Prior to this, her longest separation from all of them had been a month, and she was