563296589345

‘Kindly to sit down, madam! I am most honoured to make your acquaintance. Good evening, Mr
Flory, sir! A most unexpected pleasure. Had we known that you were to honour us with your
company, we would have provided whiskies and other European refreshments. Ha ha!’
He laughed, and his betel-reddened teeth gleamed in the lamplight like red tinfoil. He was so vast
and so hideous that Elizabeth could not help shrinking from him. A slender youth in a purple longyi
was bowing to her and holding out a tray with two glasses of yellow sherbet, iced. U Po Kyin
clapped his hands sharply, ‘Hey kaung galay!’ he called to a boy beside him. He gave some
instructions in Burmese, and the boy pushed his way to the edge of the stage.
‘He’s telling them to bring on their best dancer in our honour,’ Flory said. ‘Look, here she comes.’
A girl who had been squatting at the back of the stage, smoking, stepped forward into the lamplight.
She was very young, slim-shouldered, breasdess, dressed in a pale blue satin longyi that hid her feet.
The skirts of her ingyi curved outwards above her hips in little panniers, according to the ancient
Burmese fashion. They were like the petals of a downward-pointing flower. She threw her cigar
languidly to one of the men in the orchestra, and then, holding out one slender arm, writhed it as
though to shake the muscles loose.
The orchestra burst into a sudden loud squalling. There were pipes like bagpipes, a strange
instrument consisting of plaques of bamboo which a man struck with a little hammer, and in the
middle there was a man surrounded by twelve tall drums of different sizes. He reached rapidly from
one to another, thumping them with the heel of his hand. In a moment the girl began to dance. But at
first it was not a dance, it was a rhythmic nodding, posturing and twisting of the elbows, like the
movements of one of those jointed wooden figures on an old-fashioned roundabout. The way her neck
and elbows rotated was precisely like a jointed doll, and yet incredibly sinuous. Her hands, twisting
like snakeheads with the fingers close together, could lie back until they were almost along her
forearms. By degrees her movements quickened. She began to leap from side to side, flinging herself
down in a kind of curtsy and springing up again with extraordinary agility, in spite of the long longyi
that imprisoned her feet. Then she danced in a grotesque posture as though sitting down, knees bent,
body leaned forward, with her arms extended and writhing, her head also moving to the beat of the
drums. The music quickened to a climax. The girl rose upright and whirled round as swiftly as a top,
the panniers of her ingyi flying out about her like the petals of a snowdrop. Then the music stopped as
abruptly as it had begun, and the girl sank again into a curtsy, amid raucous shouting from the
authence.
Elizabeth watched the dance with a mixture of amazement, boredom and something approaching
horror. She had sipped her drink and found that it tasted like hair oil. On a mat by her feet three
Burmese girls lay fast asleep with their heads on the same pillow, their small oval faces side by side
like the faces of kittens. Under cover of the music Flory was speaking in a low voice into Elizabeth’s
ear, commenting on the dance.
‘I knew this would interest you; that’s why I brought you here. You’ve read books and been in
civilised places, you’re not like the rest of us miserable savages here. Don’t you think this is worth
watching, in its queer way? Just look at that girl’s movements–look at that strange, bent-forward pose
like a marionette, and the way her arms twist from the elbow like a cobra rising to strike. It’s