I thought Ma Hninzi was just wonderful even though
the age of a grown-up. She was like the two
comedians, U Pallata (paratha flat bread) and U Nanpya (naan flat
bread).
Paratha was
a golden, crusted luxury bread held together by ghee or clarified butter, spread between parchment-thin layers of
dough before baking. Naan was a butter-less bread baked on the
inside walls of a mud-earth-molded oven.
But to compensate or overcompensate for the lack of butter, naan had big airy holes like blisters
four inches in diameter.
Both were delicious.
I was very fond of them, but they were
luxuries. We weren’t an Indian family,
though I was once asked when I was on the run if I was a Mus or Muslim (maybe due to my White-Moghul facial features). I had run into a house in Rangoon near the Sulé
Pagoda, where a group of Muslims were holding a funeral wake.
We did not know how to make these breads at
home. General Ne Win always boasted how
Socialist he was, he ate simple food like naan
and pèbyoke (boiled beans)[i] every
morning, but apparently in his exaggerated Burmese-ness, he forgot naan is an Indian food.
Ko Ko said this was all bullshit. He’d heard from his classmates that after dinner,
the First Family led by the Westernized Kitty, all ate chocolate and Western-style
desserts.
Maybe Ne Win forgot or didn’t know how much we had
gained from India to our west in terms of art and culture, even our Theravada
Buddhism[ii].
*
At fifteen, I knew more than Ne Win because I had
read a book called What the Buddha Taught, by the Buddhist writer from
Ceylon, Walpola Rahula, in its Burmese translation.
Copyright - Kyi May Kaung (K.M.Kaung)
