A Dark Memory Once Shared on a Night in Burma
It was monsoon season in Burma, and when the rain started the electricity always went off. The rain was banging against his windows and the daunting wind was wandering between palm trees. We were lost in time. It wasn’t late but it was already pitch dark outside as if it were midnight. We were in the 21st century but Burma was constantly travelling between the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in monsoon season.
We were lying in his bed in the total darkness and shared secrets.
“Once I was accused of murder”, he began.
The night was muddy and sticky but his words chilled me to the bone. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know more. But his strong arm around me was too comfortable to leave and I was recklessly curious.
He was travelling through Africa. He had just checked-in to a hotel in the centre of dusty Khartoum. The person at the reception wasn’t particularly friendly. With an annoyed face, the manager filled out the relevant forms and silently handed the keys with the room number attached to the keychain ring. As he walked through the dim and quiet corridor, he passed a room with a door slightly ajar. He noticed a young woman on the top of the bed facing the opposite wall, hugging her small daughter.
“What a lovely scene, I thought. I remembered them because they looked so homey: the mother was cuddling her daughter to a daytime sleep. It seemed wrong to see them in that dark dirty hotel. It was a cozy scene but something was off.”
He fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. A few hours later through the mist of an afternoon nap, he could hear shouting and someone was banging the door furiously.
It was the manager.
“Open the door! The Police want to talk to you”, he shouted. “You must go with us! There has been a murder in the hotel.”
Still tired from the journey, lost in time and space, not really realizing where he was at that moment, he followed them obediently.
In the car, they told him that in the room next to his the hotel housekeeper had found the body of a 10-year-old girl. She was raped and left in the room.
“Everything started spinning around me, I couldn’t feel the seat under me. At this moment I realized that I had made a mistake following them, that I should have called the embassy first or at least informed someone about my whereabouts. They were looking for a scapegoat as they knew exactly what had happened in that room and who to blame, and a random white guy travelling alone without any alibi was a perfect target.”
It was suddenly quiet in the room in Burma. The rain stopped and the mosquitos hadn’t started their annoying buzzing yet. I couldn’t see his face while he was talking. He was like a shadow revealing its dark story.
They took him to the police station where he demanded his right to call the embassy.
“Blood test first, the call after.” Their determination was unshakable. They had all the time in the world. They had already solved that crime in their minds.
There was no escape, there was no way out. He had to agree to the blood test. And he himself already knew the outcome. He was in Northeast Africa; justice was lost in these lands.
After the test was done and the questions were answered, they let him go but told him not to leave the hotel for the next few days as they needed to ask more questions and they wanted to find the person who did these horrible things to that poor girl and they relied on his help.
He called the embassy.
It took at least 15 minutes before someone picked up the phone and a lazy, sleepy voice with a Sudanese accent answered.
He was about to start his story but at the last moment realized it would be a waste of precious time he didn’t have. He needed to talk to someone from Britain and not a hired local employee.
“You know what, never mind”, he hung up.
Next was his distant acquaintance, who had been living in Africa for some time and could give him some real tangible advice, which indeed was forthcoming: “Get out of Sudan! Do it today! Don’t spend the night in that hotel. Take only the necessities, leave as much as you can behind – pretend you are still staying there and have just decided to visit a friend. The mother of the girl probably just pimped her daughter to get some cash and things didn’t go as they planned. The scene you witnessed was just the goodbye to her daughter. They were poor and desperate. Don’t rely on justice or the embassy. You have to leave.”
He paused. I didn’t interrupt his silence. I was just thinking about that little girl, about the horror she experienced during the last minutes of her life, with the blessing of her own mother - her pimp. Silent tears ran down my cheeks, mixing with the Burmese sweat. He continued.
He did as his friend advised him. He left his clothes behind and took just his valuable possessions. When he left the doorsteps of the hotel, he saw a police car nearby, possibly waiting for him to come back. He caught a taxi for the long trip to the border with Ethiopia.
He called his mum which he had never done while travelling. Her phone had just started to ring and she already knew that there was bad news on the opposite end of the receiver.
The whole night he played different scenarios in his head. He planned his strategy of prison behaviour. His mum prayed to God.
In the morning, he reached the Ethiopian border.
The grumpy customs officer took his passport, looked at him, and left somewhere with his passport.
“It was so difficult to stay calm and composed. I didn’t want to raise any suspicion.”
He crossed the border; he was safe.
The electricity was still off and the night was getting colder and unfriendlier. We were in the safety of our embrace, in the safety of the Burmese night. His dark Sudan was far away. My disturbed past seemed a small dot on the horizon of my life. He hugged me tighter, and we fell asleep. It was the first night we shared our secrets.
