44 . The singer goes back, before he met Thazin, years before he fought with Aung Min about the right way to win a revolution. He returns to an afternoon without cages, when he was still a boy and his father stood with a bag of oranges at the wooden threshold of the pongyi-kyaung, the monastery school. He bows to the abbot, the smiling Hsayadaw, raising his hands together to show his respect. Then he follows his father into the compound and watches him as he sets up a doctor’s office on the table of an open-air schoolroom. Stethoscope in hand, Dr. Kyaw Win Thu checks the boy with fever, the one with an eye infection, another with a lung ailment, the thin child who cannot gain weight. After his rounds, the doctor and the abbot sit under a scrawny tree and share a cheroot, laughing over things Teza cannot understand. He wanders off. In the room where the orphans eat together on the wooden floor, he begins chatting idly with a novice who’s doing school-work, his dark orange robe half unbound.
