Smita Pani: [World Malayali Club] Reality Bytes : Aung San Suu Kyi- The Lady

Aung San Suu Kyi- The Lady

Aung San Suu Kyi, whose story is told in a new film, The Lady, went from devoted Oxford housewife to champion of Burmese democracy - but not without great personal sacrifice.

When I began to research a screenplay about Aung San Suu Kyi
four years ago, I wasn't expecting to uncover one of the
great love stories of our time. Yet what emerged was a tale
so romantic – and yet so heartbreaking – it sounded more
like a pitch for a Hollywood

weepie: an exquisitely beautiful but reserved girl from the

East meets a handsome and passionate young man from the
West.

For Michael Aris the

story is a coup de foudre, and he eventually proposes to Suu

amid the snow-capped mountains of Bhutan, where he has been
employed as tutor to its

royal family. For the next 16 years, she becomes his
devoted wife and a mother-of-two, until quite by chance she
gets caught up in politics on a short trip to Burma, and
never comes home. Tragically, after 10 years of campaigning
to try to keep his wife safe,
Michael dies of cancer without ever being allowed to say
goodbye.

I also discovered that

the reason no one was aware of this story was because Dr
Michael Aris had gone to great lengths to keep Suu's
family out of the public eye. It
is only because their sons are now adults – and Michael
is dead – that their friends and family feel the time has
come to speak openly, and with great pride, about the unsung
role he played.

The daughter of a great

Burmese hero, General Aung San, who was assassinated when

she was only two, Suu was raised with a strong sense of her
father's unfinished legacy.

In 1964 she was sent by her diplomat mother to study

Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, where her
guardian, Lord Gore-Booth, introduced her to Michael. He was
studying history at Durham but had always had a passion for
Bhutan – and in Suu he found

the romantic embodiment of his great love for the East. But

when she accepted his proposal, she struck a deal: if her
country should ever need her, she would have to go. And

Michael readily agreed.

For the next 16 years,

Suu Kyi was to sublimate her extraordinary strength of
character and become the perfect housewife. When their two
sons, Alexander and Kim, were

born she became a doting mother too, noted for he
r
punctiliously well-organised children's parties and
exquisite cooking. Much to the despair of her more feminist
friends, she even insisted on ironing her husband's socks
and cleaning the house herself.

Then one quiet evening

in 1988, when her sons were 12 and 14, as she and Michael

sat reading in Oxford, they were interrupted by a phone call
to say Suu's mother had

had a stroke.

She at once flew to

Rangoon for what she thought would be a matter of weeks,
only to find a city in turmoil. A series of violent

confrontations with the military had

brought the country to a standstill, and when she moved
into Rangoon Hospital to care for her mother, she found the
wards crowded with injured and dying students. Since public
meetings were forbidden, the hospital had become the
centre-point of a leaderless

revolution, and word that the great General's daughter

had arrived spread like

wildfire.

When a delegation of

academics asked Suu to head a movement for democracy, she

tentatively agreed, thinking that once an election had been
held she would be free to

return to Oxford again. Only two months earlier she had

been a devoted housewife; now she found herself spearheading
a mass uprising against a barbaric

regime.

In England, Michael

could only anxiously monitor the news as Suu toured Burma,

her popularity soaring, while the military harassed her
every step and arrested and tortured

many of her party members. He was haunted by the fear that

she might be assassinated like her father. And when in 1989

she was placed under house arrest, his only comfort was that
it at least might help keep her

safe.

Michael now reciprocated

all those years Suu had devoted to him with a remarkable

selflessness of his own, embarking on a high-level campaign
to establish her as an

international icon that the military would never dare harm
.
But he was careful to keep his work inconspicuous, because
once she emerged as the leader of a new democracy movement,
the military seized upon the fact that she was married to a
foreigner as a basis

for a series of savage – and often sexually crude –
slanders in the Burmese press.

For the next five years,

as her boys were growing into young men, Suu was to remain

under house arrest and kept in isolation. She sustained
herself by learning how

to meditate, reading widely on Buddhism and studying the

writings of Mandela and Gandhi. Michael was allowed only two
visits during that period. Yet this was a very particular

kind of imprisonment, since at any time Suu could have asked

to be driven to the

airport and flown back to her

family.

But neither of them ever

contemplated her doing such a thing. In fact, as a
historian, even as Michael agonised and continued to
pressurise politicians behind the scenes,

he was aware she was part of history in the making. He kept

on display the book she had been reading when she received

the phone call summoning her to Burma. He decorated the
walls with the certificates of the many prizes she had by
now won, including the

1991 Nobel Peace Prize. And above his bed he hung a huge

photograph of her.

Inevitably, during the

ong periods when no communication was possible, he would

fear Suu might be dead, and it was only the odd report from
passers-by who heard the

sound of her piano-playing drifting from the house that

brought him peace of mind. But when the south-east Asian
humidity eventually destroyed the piano, even this fragile
reassurance was lost to him.

Then, in 1995, Michael

quite unexpectedly received a phone call from Suu. She was

ringing from the British embassy, she said. She was free
again! Michael and the boys were granted visas and flew to Burma. When Suu saw Kim, her

younger son, she was astonished to see he had grown into a
young man. She admitted she might have passed him in the
street. But Suu had become a fully politicised woman whose
years of isolation had

given her a hardened resolve, and she was determined to
remain in her country, even if the cost was further

separation from her family.

The journalist Fergal

Keane, who has met Suu several times, describes her as
having a core of steel. It was the sheer resilience of her
moral courage that filled me

with awe as I wrote my screenplay for The Lady. The first

question many women ask when they hear Suu's story is how
she could have left her children. Kim has said simply:
"She did what she had to do." Suu Kyi herself refuses to

be drawn on the subject, though

she has conceded that her darkest hours were when "I
feared the boys might be needing

me".

That 1995 visit was the

last time Michael and Suu were ever allowed to see one
another. Three years later, he learnt he had terminal

cancer. He called Suu to break

the bad news and immediately applied for a visa so that he
could say goodbye in person. When his application was

rejected, he made over 30 more as his strength rapidly

dwindled. A number of eminent figures – among them the

Pope and President Clinton – wrote

letters of appeal, but all in vain. Finally, a military

official came to see Suu. Of course she could say goodbye,
he said, but to do so she would have to return to

Oxford.

The implicit choice that

had haunted her throughout those 10 years of marital
separation had now become an explicit ultimatum: your

country or your family. She was

distraught. If she left Burma, they both knew it would mean
permanent exile – that everything they had jointly fought

for would have been for nothing. Suu would call Michael from

the British embassy when she could, and he was adamant that

she was not even to consider it.

When I met Michael's
t
win brother, Anthony, he told me something he said he had

never told anyone before. He said that once Suu realised she
would never see Michael again, she put on a dress of his favourite colour, tied a
rose in her hair, and went to the British embassy, where she

recorded a farewell film for him in which she told him that

his love for her had been her mainstay. The film was

smuggled out, only to arrive

two days after Michael died.

For many years, as

Burma's human rights record deteriorated, it seemed the
Aris family's great self-sacrifice might have been in

vain. Yet in recent weeks the military

have finally announced their desire for political change.
And Suu's 22-year vigil means she is uniquely positioned

to facilitate such a transition – if and when it comes –

exactly as Mandela did so successfully for South

Africa.

Postscript: Aung Sang Suu Kyi's party has won the elections in Burma by a huge majority and now has finally come to power. She is not eligible to hold any government post as she was married to a foreigner. But the powers to usher in a new dawn in Myanmar's people now rests with her.