The Omen

I was born in Thakala, a small town located on the Pegu-Syrian highway, 27 miles from Pegu and some 50 miles from Rangoon. In the 70s and 80s, it still took about three hours to travel to Rangoon on two buses and a ferry.
 
Socialism, with its rigidity, decay and underdevelopment, did not offer much for youngsters like us.  Growing up on the outskirts of a small town offered even less.
 
In winter, we had soccer tournaments and a few festivities. Rainy season was the best for kids because we could swim in the river, play soccer in the mud or fish in the paddy fields.

In early summer, we enjoyed Indian vegetarian food and Indian films during the festivals at four Hindu temples in town. Even more exciting, I used to fight for a place in the crowd to see the fire-walking demonstrations, especially when my cousin participated.  He was sickly, and he and his family believed he would be unhealthy for the year if he failed to do the fire walk. 
 
But otherwise, life was tougher in summer. The heat was intense and food was scare.  Around April, after the water festival, the neighborhood reservoir dried up, which meant we had to walk one-half mile to get fresh water every day, sometimes twice a day.
 
Occasionally, we went to the town cinema. There was no TV. TV came to town in 1980, along with the first telephones, when I was in middle school.

I remember going with my friends to the town council office, where the only TV was kept, to watch the BBC English lessons. They taught us, “Yes, I did. No, I didn’t” in Queen’s English. We often went home imitating the presenter, “Yes, I did. No, I didn’t.”
 
Most of what we watched was news from the state-run media, but there were also regular US programs like the “Six Million Dollar Man,” “Bionic Woman,” “Fall Guy” and “Charlie’s Angels.” We didn’t have a clue what the characters were saying, but we liked the special effects, modern gadgets and scenes of the West in these shows.
 
On Saturday nights, the whole family listened to Burmese radio soap operas, our prime entertainment.

Otherwise, we had a lot of free time. And so it was that I became, like so many Burmese children, a hunter, stalking small creatures that I could shoot with a slingshot. Birds were the most challenging.
 
Every day from the age of about 8, I spent my free time walking under the huge rain trees around the reservoir ear my house and practiced shooting at all kinds of birds—sparrows, sunbirds, myna birds, crows and swallows.
 
Even when I went to the fields to glean leftover peanuts or sweet potatoes, I carried a bag with a slingshot and mud pellets, and shot at whatever birds were in sight.
 
I was not a good shot. I missed most of the time. But the unlucky ones were my victims. One time a sparrow perched on a dry twig at the top of a rain tree. It was windy, and the shot was difficult, but the way the little bird rested on the leafless twig offered me a perfect target.
 
I tried about seven times and missed each time. But the bird didn’t fly away. I almost gave up and went away, because I had only a few mud pellets left. But I decided to try for the eighth time. The bird was truly unlucky.
 
Hunting small birds was common among boys my age, but not all adults approved of it. Killing is prohibited in Buddhism. The first time my mother saw me kill a bird—I was about nine—, she was furious.
 
A devout Buddhist and a strong believer in karma, she was convinced that I would pay for my sin of separating innocent birds from their families.
 
Hence her dire warning each time she saw me shoot at the birds: “You will be separated from your own parents and siblings alive if not by death.” She would warn me angrily, sometimes wagging her index finger at me.
 
She was very strict with us, but she never punished me for killing the birds. Perhaps, she thought her dire warning was enough punishment. 
 
It was not only my mother who believed that shooting birds would bring bad karma. There was also a little rhyme that we children sang when we saw someone shooting at the sunbirds, to remind them of the enormous suffering that would result:
 
“The sunbird is worth only a morsel
Bu t [(if you kill it] you will pay for it
as much as a viss (worth) of hell.”
 
I even sang it to my friends who, like me, wanted to shoot every bird in sight, or when I saw them shoot at sunbirds playing in the bamboo groves. We thought that shooting the sunbirds was particularly bad because they were so small and totally innocent-looking.
 
Worse still, I never ate any of the birds I killed. We were poor but at least had enough rice to eat. And just one small dead bird could not make a meal.