The Lady by the Lake

After the trial of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi began, I visited Rangoon. The road barriers and heavy security outside her home, which I'd seen on a previous trip, were gone. "She doesn't live there anymore," my taxi driver told me as we drove past her compound gate. What was once a tightly controlled thoroughfare was now just like any other potholed road in Rangoon, Burma's biggest city and former capital (which the regime calls Yangon). A very bored-looking policeman sat outside the residence. After he ordered me to walk on the opposite side of the road, I gave him a thumbs-up in response—and got a toothy smile and a wave. Two blue police trucks were parked by the house with riot shields fastened to the sides. But the place seemed almost deserted, as if nobody expected Suu Kyi back any time soon.

What a contrast compared with the tight security I encountered in March, when Suu Kyi was still under house arrest. Back then she was due to be released on May 27, having spent 14 of the past two decades in detention, ever since her return from Britain in 1988. I took a local taxi—a beaten-up old wreck of a thing, as are most of the other cars and trucks on Rangoon's roads—and simply asked the driver to take me near "the Lady's house." It wasn't an enormously long distance to the far end of University Avenue, but the driver's silence and my own apprehension made it seem longer.

As we drew close to barricades and security personnel, with several military-transport vehicles not far away, the driver slowed down and then stopped. "Go past the barricades—if you can—and it's up on your left," the driver muttered. I got out and, heart pounding, walked up to the barbed-wire fencing and barrier gates that blocked the entire road.

A policeman came up and asked, "Can I help you?" I blurted, "I'd like to see Aung San Suu Kyi's house." After some perfunctory questions (designed to determine I wasn't a journalist) and perusal of my passport, he said, "OK, follow me."

The policeman walked beside me and launched into some surreal, mundane questions in broken English. Did I like Arsenal or Manchester United football teams? What did I think of David Beckham? Will I be here for the Water Splashing Festival national holiday? I should stay because it is good fun. Will I go to Bagan, the ancient capital, with its ruined temples and pagodas? I should go, because it is very beautiful there. He kept up this banter the whole way, watching me carefully, actively distracting me.

Coming to a nondescript, closed compound gate, I had to stop and ask, "So this is her house?" He answered, "Yes, yes. Come, it's getting late"—and then pointedly laid his palm on my left elbow. I wasn't going to push my luck; I allowed him to escort me away from the gate to the barricades at the far end of the road. There the policeman said goodbye. Some soldiers leaning against a truck stopped chatting as I walked past, then guffawed loudly at my back.

Her residence has been a longtime rallying point for the nation's democracy activists. A year after the military's bloody suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in August 1988, Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest for the first time. From the gates of her compound she's addressed thousands of supporters over the years. It was from this vantage point, in September 2007, that she greeted hundreds of assembled Buddhist monks during the biggest antigovernment protests since 1988.

Sparked by the junta's decision to allow fuel prices to rise almost 60 percent, the monk-led demonstrations were joined by thousands of locals voicing dissatisfaction with the military government. Protest marches sprang up in other cities, but they ended in bloodshed. The regime's official death toll was 13; the real figure is believed to be much higher.

After my close encounter with Suu Kyi's closed gate, I wound up in a noisy restaurant in Rangoon's Chinatown, where I met Mo. His full name cannot be printed for fear of recrimination. Mo came from Kachin, a state in the northeast of the country, and was visiting family in Rangoon. We chatted over cold Myanmar beers and a feast of fried peanuts, shrimp and pickled tea leaves. I asked him what it meant to be Burmese and where he thought Burma was heading. "I am a person first, Burmese second and a Muslim last," he said, looking at the Buddhist rosary beads wrapped around my wrist, which I'd picked up at the Shwedagon Pagoda. His burly body shook in merriment at the thought of a white-skinned Buddhist.