Wanderlust along the Burma Road…
So I’m on the Burma Road with Kipling in one pocket and Orwell in the other, and already I know I’m fucked. Because I can’t un-read those guys, can’t unknow what they knew, what they got wrong, what they got right for all the wrong reasons.
Kipling saw empire and called it romance. Orwell saw empire and called it what it was: a boot, a lie, a slow rot. And here I am, a century later, trying to find something real in the space between their words and the actual red dust under my feet.
The thing is, I can’t not be a tourist. That’s the first myth I kill. I’m here, aren’t I? With my passport and my assumptions and my desperate need for this to mean something beyond the transaction. The local kid selling me warm Coke knows it. The woman making mohinga at dawn knows it. They’re kind enough not to say it.
What I can do, maybe, is shut up and pay attention. Eat what’s offered. Listen to the silence in the pagodas that isn’t really silence at all, just the absence of my own noise. Watch the light change over the Irrawaddy and understand that this river doesn’t give a damn about my literary references or my Instagram-worthy moment of clarity.
The Burma Road doesn’t care that I’ve read the right books. It just keeps going, like it always has, carrying the weight of things that happened here: the brutality, the beauty, the billion small human moments that never made it into anyone’s narrative.
I’m not Kipling. I’m not Orwell. I’m just here, trying not to be an asshole about it.
This is Burma and it is
unlike any land known about
Rudyard Kipling