Red River

By James Orr

The story of Sam. Born in Burma, he is desperate to escape the cruel Junta regime, knowing he can find love and happiness in Thailand. Trapped in the jungle, he is rescued by the Burmese Rangers. In Chiang Mai he is introduced to the gay world of the Bars and Nightclubs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781471075445

Book preview

Red River

ONE

Every time Sam came across an expanse of gleaming water, and boys bathing in it, and the colour of their skin radiant and lightening and skating under the play of the sun, he saw too, as if behind a cloud that was always in his mind hung solemnly in the sky, the recollection of another picture; the same sunlight played, no less intensely, no less lovingly, upon a small unclothed, floppy body being carried up into the town from the Rangoon waterfront.

Legs dangling lifeless down a man’s chest, ebony rounded head nodding behind the man’s back, and the small youthful buttocks curved over his shoulder; while a ramble of hushed boys followed, soundless with dread or trepidation or the need to gawk, some of them naked and still sodden from the river.

Where many boys bathed, and several of them could hardly swim, the thing he marvelled at was the small number who even got into difficulties and had to be fished out by their mates; he also marvelled at the number of people who, the newspapers reported, drowned at bathing establishments and pools where the public was protected by lifeguards, safety zones, danger flags and notices that told the customers what they shouldn’t do.

But such appraisals weren’t much comfort when among a group of sad-eyed Burmese boys, behind a heart-rending and floppy dead body.

All his life Sam needed the nearness of water, as a dog needed the convenience of open land he liked to live on the water’s edge, and to hear waves, or on little islands, so as to be closely surrounded by the sea.

If he had to live inland, away from a shore, he’d always felt uneasy and bereft, unless at least a lake or a large river was within handy reach.

And all of his life, given sunshine and warmth, he’d been the happiest when bathing and stretched out, for the sake, partly, of the sensuous indulgences of sun and water, and partly for the sake of the sexual trappings of bathing which, to him who was predisposed to them, were the principal of its attractions, the delightful emotions which youthful and innocent nudity inevitably gave him, the joyful indulgence of studying naked forms.

So when he moved to Rangoon, he made for the busy waterfront, the sandy-brown quays, sparkled like gold dust, above the smoky port where the big ships lay, against a kaleidoscope huddle of small river and coastal crafts that had brought a mixed bag of cargoes from all around the Bay of Bengal, birds’ nests from the Thailand coast for Chinese soup, colourful cottons from Calcutta, spices from Penang, sandals from Hong Kong and Singapore.

Rangoon was a former capital of Burma and the capital of Yangon Region. Although the military government had officially relocated the capital to Naypyidaw since March 2006, Rangoon, with a population of over four million, continued to be the country's largest city and the most important commercial centre.

He loved living in the city amid all the hustle and bustle.

The infrastructure was undeveloped compared to those of other major cities in Southeast Asia; he knew that, compared to cities like Singapore and Bangkok.

Rangoon had the largest number of old colonial buildings in Asia and with its spacious parks and lakes and mix of modern buildings and traditional wooden architecture, was known as ‘The garden city of the East.’

While many high-rise residential and commercial buildings had been constructed or renovated throughout downtown and Greater Rangoon in the past two decades, most satellite towns that ringed the city continued to be deeply impoverished. That was where Sam lived.

Downtown Rangoon was known for its leafy avenues and fin-de-siècle architecture. It was mainly made up of decaying regal buildings. The former High Court, the former Secretariat buildings, the former St. Paul's English High School and the Strand Hotel were excellent examples of the bygone era. Most downtown buildings from this era were four-story residential and commercial buildings with 14 feet ceilings, allowing for the construction of mezzanines. Despite their less-than-perfect conditions, the buildings remained highly sought after and the most expensive in the city's property market.

On the flight to Rangoon the same thoughts kept turning in Simon’s mind. The red orb of a full moon appeared, casting streaks of gold across the placid water of the Irrawaddy River. The Irrawaddy valley was more or less Burma proper. The great River flowed through three different climatic region of Burma. The Burma dry belt started at Mandalay down to the ancient Pyu capital Pyi and emptied the brown waters through the flat river delta around the former capital Rangoon into the Andaman Sea.

But even the beauty failed to displace the questions that haunted his trip.

Why was he in Burma? Was his trip giving comfort to the country's military dictatorship, by common consent one of the world's worst regimes?

Once he was in Burma, he was impressed by the number of people who eagerly approached him to practise their English and, after a tentative start, wanted to say what they thought of their rulers.

They're mad, the driver told him as he steered his creaking banger past a crush of Chinese bicycles and motorbikes, the commonest form of transport on Burma's many rutted roads.

The driver was making political comments within five minutes of Simon hiring him from Rangoon airport into town.

Asked if it was his first trip to Burma, Simon said, Yes, and then added, I see you call it Burma. Burma good name, Myanmar new name, he replied mischievously.

When Simon inquired what the attractive gardens were behind locked gates on the left, That was the university. Now closed, he commented. "Because of the demonstrations, when we had demonstrations. They moved all the universities out of Rangoon.

Now it's quiet, he added, before smiling sarcastically. Good idea."

Simon pulled out a notebook and flipped it open. He studied it for a moment.

He thought hard. That information was certainly hard to take in.

His driver had trained as a computer engineer before serving in a Burmese embassy in a western country. Life is not improving here, he said. Most people don't like the government. We have no legislative body. We have no democracy.

The one good thing he found to say of the regime was that it had allowed English to be taught again in primary schools. For a time they stopped it. The army doesn't like English but now it's okay again. That certainly seemed to be true.

Back then to that nagging question, should he be touring a country with so bad a regime and such little prospect of improvement? The taxi driver had no doubt.

Bring in tourists who can spread the word from the outside world and also tell people in their own countries about Burma, he said.

In Britain, the Burma Campaign UK criticised tourism and investment and published a ‘dirty list’ of firms that did business with Burma. This included travel companies as well as the Lonely Planet guidebooks.

The campaign's website contained a December 2002 quote from Aung San Suu Kyi, We have not yet come to the point where we encourage people to come to Burma as tourists.

Two other exile lobbies, Voices for Burma and Free Burma Coalition, which used to support a tourism boycott changed to take the opposite view.

Voices for Burma also enlisted Aung San Suu Kyi, though its sourcing was flimsy. Its website said, ‘According to a close acquaintance, not yet identified but reportedly from her party, the National League of Democracy, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has been quoted as saying that travel to her country can now be encouraged, provided arrangements are made through private organisations.

She believed that tourism might be beneficial, should the result of the visit draw attention to the oppression of the people by the military junta. While favouring engagement, Voices for Burma and the Free Burma Coalition urged tourists to do as much as possible to help private Burmese citizens and not put money in the government's pocket, and in fact it was possible to do so as a tourist.

Some fees, such as the entrance ticket for the ruined city of Bagan, the visa charge and airport departure tax could not be escaped.

But in 2003 the government dropped the requirement that every tourist change $200 at an official exchange place.

Instead of going on a package or using a UK or Bangkok-based tour company that inevitably had contacts with the Burmese government, visitors could travel on their own by picking one of the many family-owned Burmese travel agents that worked from tiny, cramped offices in Rangoon. You could make your arrangements either on the spot or by email in advance.

There were also numerous family-owned guesthouses and restaurants and thousands of private souvenir makers and sellers. Thanks to the web, details of how to plan your trip were readily available.

On the day that Simon met Sam the scorching blue of the sky seemed filtered by a thin vapour, as if a slightly smouldered film had been laid over it, a crown of dark haze hung over the docks where the larger boats lay. Among them were a couple of ships of the Far Eastern Line, with their sheer black hulls and black funnels, so familiar to the residents of Rangoon.

A string of native vessels lay moored alongside, small sailing sampans and a variety of craft converted from sail to power, and beyond them a second line and then a third.

Boys could jump from deck to deck and dive into the brown stream of the Rangoon River from the outermost crafts. There were dozens of the boys, dancing and darting, yelling and laughing, dipping and glimmering in the glassy light.

They came and went, crossed and intermingled, golden and gleaming in a constant kind of choreographic stampede, each in the gorgeous liberty of their nudity.

Aged everything between seven and seventeen, bathing and romping naked, utterly unashamed.

Simon got his chicken strips, then stepped a short distance, leaned against a wall and watched the boys in the water, still jostling and yelling each other. But in particular he watched one youth, that prick of lust growing inside him, thinking again and again of the flash of buttocks he had seen.

He had finished his chicken and lit another cigarette by the time the boys had got all their clothes and had fumbled around trying to get dressed. Then they set off for the pier, the pretty one trailing behind them. He was hurrying to catch up but struggled on his bare feet.

Simon looked away and when he turned back the lad was gone.

Suddenly, where Simon sat on the quayside, he found himself looking into two of the blackest eyes he’d ever seen and a grinning face, it was more of a smile than a grin, which had popped up at his feet, with cascading wet hair like spouts of black water, from between the quay and the smooth wooden planks of a barge.

Sam climbed up ashore; his grin still in place stood for a moment lemon-coloured in the sunlight, quite naked, shook the wet off with a flutter of his arms like a bird in a bath, and took a running header over the bow of the barge. Simon had time to engrave on his mind the image of the featherweight body, yet compact and proportioned like the scale model of a man.

It wasn’t true to say that Simon thought no more about him, he thought a great deal about him, as he did about anything he’d see that seemed startlingly out of the ordinary, anything of unusual beauty or unusually arousing.

He resisted the temptations of the shoe-shine boys who flocked like sparrows in the main street. He could have picked any one of them; there was one attractive lad who fought the others off to try it on with the foreigner.

They were delightful lads, engaging and good-natured and full of fun. All of them, Simon didn’t doubt, were proficient in the tricks of extortion and adept in every category of sin.

But he didn’t expect to see the swimmer again, among the seething and stunning colourful masses that thronged the Rangoon streets. He thought of the sweet nature that was plainly visible behind the mischievousness of the grin of the solid, without any blemish or imperfection, moulded smoothness of that flesh.

He thought of the surprising development of the figure, and yet the outright youthfulness of it and of the outstanding dark pools of those eyes, in whose transparent depth seemed to lie awaiting such funds of young emotion, of fondness, perhaps, of burning longing or desire, or seclusion or necessity.

And he thought of that body, of the sexual ripeness that it touchingly displayed. And as he walked back to the hotel through the simmering heat and the spicy air, his imagination played with the absurd notion of having the youth as a companion during the month or so he was going to stay in Burma.

Absurd, of course, the notion was, and when, in the hotel room, pleasantly spacious, neutral like any hotel room, he settled down to do some work, he put it right out of his mind and tucked the lad’s image away somewhere out of thought.

Tourists came mainly from Europe, usually from France and Germany, making Burma the country least visited by British people anywhere in Asia with the exception of North Korea.

As a tourist, he was allowed to spend a day in Twante, one cyclone affected area about 20 miles out of Rangoon. His driver whom he had found independently invited him home to lunch where his wife and other women relatives were feeding two dozen monks, a gesture the family made about twice a year.

Almost at once, when he next turned out of the hotel door, he met him again. He didn’t know that Sam had gone there on purpose; guessing that the Englishman he had seen on the quayside would be staying at the Strand Hotel.

Sam hadn’t obviously stationed himself outside the hotel entrance, he was a little way along the river embankment and how could he know Simon wouldn’t walk in the opposite direction?

He could have stationed himself outside on purpose, why not?

Simon had noticed before, native boys hanging around, just to see what they could get. And he didn’t like to think what they were willing to do. But wasn’t that what most people did anyway most of their lives? To see what they can get, sexual or financial, or even to be a social climber - one of the three.

For most people in Burma, life under the military government was far from easy.

Sam was sitting on his heels by the edge of the pavement, with his sarong tucked up from behind between his thighs and his calves, and in front pulled down over his knees; he was doodling in the dirt with a stick.

He wore nothing but the sarong, bare footed and bare bodied down to his waist. His tiny nipples like peppercorns poised on the golden paleness of his breast. He appeared to be distant in thought.

When he saw Simon he gave him the same smiling grin as before, a smile of sharing, as if there were something they both understood, it was a smile of recollection, containing neither amazement nor anticipation, his look expected nothing.

Then he turned his head again to the road, and went on drawing on the dust. Sam secretly hoped the foreigner would come over and speak to him.

Burma never had been a popular destination, and after the bloody suppression of the monks' protests in September 2007 and the government's delay in helping hundreds of thousands who lost everything in Cyclone Nargis the following May, the tourist trickle almost dried up.

The junta's initial reaction to the cyclone was to refuse international help. It carried on with a referendum on the new constitution, as though Nargis had not happened. This further blackened its image. Yet another example of the Burmese Government’s reckless approach to human life and suffering. The cyclone tore through the Irrawaddy Delta region and Rangoon, leaving 84,000 dead and 53,000 missing. The SPDC, Burmese Government, actively resisted international aid, refusing to grant relief teams’ visas to travel to many of the areas worst hit for the crucial first few days following the disaster. More than two million people were waiting for weeks before relief teams reached them. But under pressure from governments in the Association of South-Eastern Asian Nations, the junta changed its line and international aid agency officials said the regime had been working well with the UN and ASEAN in agreeing programmes, priorities and relief projects, and allowing donor money to reach people. Foreign aid workers got permits to enter the affected areas in the Irrawaddy delta.

Big western Non-Governmental Organisations such as Oxfam and Save the Children were well-established in Burma, with a network of local staff.

After the disaster, Burmese students and other young people poured into the area to help. Some were so moved that they later set up aid projects and small NGOs without government obstruction, he was told. As a result, according to a western aid worker who travelled regularly to Burma, Cyclone Nargis had resulted in a broadening of independent civil society activity.

Simon’s heart was thumping. He was walking with perspiration.  He needed a cigarette. Needed to think very, very calmly. He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, thinking. Thinking. He was shaking.

Sam’s heart quickened. The foreigner was coming closer.

He watched him walk in that familiar way, his head pointed slightly up, his polished leather shoes flicking ahead with every step, hoping he would call his name, wave his hand, snap his fingers. When he was right there, close enough that if he extended his arm he could touch him.

Do you want a cigarette? Simon asked, holding out a packet almost against Sam’s nose, so that he would be in no doubt as to what Simon was up to.

Sam helped himself, delicately, at once, with the same frank smile, as if he was saying he wasn’t asking for a cigarette, it was understood between them that he was his if he wanted it.

Do you have light? Sam said.

Then after some exchange of proposal and consent he was walking alongside Simon, his bare feet moving silently and insensibly. His toes were stubby with broad squat nails, and the skin of his feet, browned by lifelong bareness, was rough and crumbled like a tortoise underbelly.

He walked lightly and yet with an athlete’s stride and his square shoulders held back, he walked with the air of an aristocrat.

Simon felt that if he turned to look at his face it would appear that he was staring at him.

As they went along, vaguely towards the main street, Simon had no idea where they were headed or what he was going to do. He tried to ask Sam questions about himself. He knew no Burmese and Sam, had scarcely any English and yet they managed to get most of each other’s meaning.

They walked on, past various shops and restaurants, tearooms