When Tin Win meets Mi Mi, a kind, crippled creature, she acts as his eyes as he carries her upon his back. A stranger named U Ba soon helps Julia unravel the mystery of her father, from his astrologically inauspicious birth and abandonment by a superstitious mother to his ensuing blindness and delivery to Buddhist monks who teach him to use his other senses keenly. She arrives in the village of Kalaw by virtue of a beautiful 1955 love letter from her father to a woman named Mi Mi and immediately bristles at the pace and privation of village life.
Julia, born to Win and his American wife in 1968, is a New Yorker used to metropolitan conveniences. Sendker employs an elaborate secondhand flashback device to send Julia, an American lawyer, to Burma on a hunch that she might find clues to the whereabouts of her Burmese father, Tin Win, a prominent New York celebrity lawyer who was blind as a child and vanished four years ago, apparently of his own volition. OctoThis tearful, circuitous German bestseller traces the lost romance between a blind young monk and a poor crippled girl in pre-WWII Burma. For her there would be neither peace nor rest. That much she knew at the bottom of her heart. Complacency was treacherous, confidence a luxury that Mya Mya could not afford. Even, or perhaps especially, on a day like today, when nothing foreshadowed catastrophe. As long as there were typhoons anywhere, one might well devastate Mya Mya's native soil. Or of a typhoon even if not a single one in living memory had found its way from the Bay of Bengal into the mountains around Kalaw. Although she could not remember ever in her life having seen a cloud in a December sky, she would not rule out the possibility of a sudden downpour.
The air was so clear that she felt she was looking through a spyglass to the ends of the earth. She was sitting on a wooden stool in front of her house looking out over the fields and the valley to the hilltops in the distance. December, thought Mya Mya, is a hypocrite. December promises cold nights and mercifully cool days. Innocent rills turn to rushing torrents that devour careless piglets, lambs, or children, only to disgorge them, lifeless, in the valley below.īut December promises the people of Kalaw a respite from all of this.
Worms and insects crawl out of its pores. The market reeks of rotting meat, while heavy black flies settle on the entrails and skulls of sheep and cattle. The air is clear and fresh, and only the most sensitive people can still detect any trace of the heavy, sweet scent of the tropical rainy season, when the clouds hang low over the village and the valley, and the water falls unchecked from the skies as if to slake a parched world's thirst. The sun wanders from one side of the horizon to the other, but no longer climbs high enough to generate any real warmth.
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