Letter from Burma: An Old Friend (Written by Aung San Suu Kyi)

Letter from Burma: An Old Friend

August 27, 2012(Mainichi Japan)

One of the greatest joys of my recent travels abroad was the opportunity to meet old friends again, particularly friends of my student days with whom I could pick up where we left off decades ago. The old friend about whom I am now about to write is not, however, one of them. In fact he is not a real person but a fictional character: Commissaire Maigret, whom I have already mentioned in a previous Letter from Burma, many years ago. 

When I visited France last June, President Holland presented me with a 27 volume set of the complete works of George Simenon. These were among the first books I packed to bring with me to Naypyidaw. The first hour of leisure I had after we (my dog Taichito and I) had settled into our new, temporary abode, I looked through the volumes to see how many Maigret stories there might be that I had not yet read. I was pleased to find there were several; not many, but enough to fill me with happy anticipation. The security personnel I came to know during my trips to Thailand and Europe were so very likeable I have developed a soft spot for the police and I thought that reading about my favorite policeman would be a most pleasant way to end each long working day. Moreover, as it would help me to improve my French, I could feel virtuous as well. Therefore I placed Volume 1 of the Simenon collection at my bedside with extreme satisfaction. (Of course, I felt a little guilty about skipping the non-Maigret parts of the collection but I could always go back to those later.)
Many of my colleagues in the National Assembly agree with me that attending the daily sessions feel a little like going back to school. It has been years and years since we had obediently filed into a room at the summons of a bell and taken up our places at assigned seats. The sessions usually begin at ten o'clock in the morning and there are two short breaks and an hour long lunch break during the course of the day. The delight with which we welcome these breaks brings back memories of distant schooldays when we could barely wait for the teacher to exit the classroom before we rushed out to play games and to enjoy the company of friends. And the eagerness with which members of parliament look forward to four o'clock, when the working day comes to an end, reminds me of a song that was very well known in the 1950s. Entitled simply "Four O'clock," it was sung in a popular film (a Burmese version of the Victorian melodrama East Lynn) by the heroine who awaits with longing her husband's return home at that hour.
Four o'clock may be welcome to me as the end of the working day at the National Assembly but it is also the beginning of the working evening, when I have to tend to all the business that could be roughly termed "extra-parliamentary." Meetings, papers, consultations, all these, with "Taichito time" tucked in here and there, take me up to about ten o'clock at night. By then only Commissaire Maigret can induce me to keep my eyes open. But not for too long; as my personal assistant Dr. Tin Mar Aung says often, the heaviest things in the world to hold up are eyelids that want to shut close.
In spite of the fact that I manage only a very short period of bedtime reading, seldom more than about 45 minutes, I am already on my second volume of Simenon because in the first there were only two Maigrets that I had not previously read. At present I am reading "Maigret et son mort" and I have discovered that the doughty "commissaire" sometimes takes to his bed when an investigation is not going well. He is then pampered by Madame Maigret and he plunges himself in a book by Alexandre Dumas pere. To learn that he possessed a complete collection of Dumas and that the mere smell of the old books was enough to make him recall all his little illnesses is like talking to an old friend about parts of his life that we had never touched on before. It also makes me wonder whether it might not be possible for me to make myself catch a heavy cold so I too could take to my bed and work my way through my Simenon collection. Somehow I do not think I would be able to swing it. This morning on the way to the National Assembly, my throat felt a bit sore and I speculated on the possibility of developing it into influenza but the prospect was not exciting enough to retain my attention for long.
As I follow, every night, my stolid, homely commissaire going about his work, it occurs to me that Cleopatra's infinite variety, which age can neither dim, nor custom stale, is really nothing to make a song and dance, let alone a play, about. After all, many of my friends possess that quality. Or perhaps it is friendship that possesses the qualities of perpetual freshness and auto-rejuvenation. It is because I am able to keep seeing them in a new light and because they help me to keep seeing myself in a new light throughout the long years of our relationship that my friends, however far away they may be, have remained a vital part of my life. Maigret has retained for me his fascination, a fascination that is unique because it emanates from what seems most ordinary and humdrum. He will remain an old and valued friend. (By Aung San Suu Kyi)

August 27, 2012(Mainichi Japan)