Ngarlinsayt  

Kyae Mone Aye
Translated by Thett Su San

First published in Burmese at MoeMaKa, 20 September 2022.

Before Myitnar bamboo meshes and corrugated iron sheets became popular, people from my hometown used Ngarlinsayt for roofing. The bamboo roofing material was named after a village called Ngarlinsayt in Maying Township in the heartland of Myanmar.

The lovely Ngarlinsayt meshes were light yellow in colour, about an inch wide and a foot long. Except for a handful of brick houses, almost every house in my town featured Ngarlinsayt. The well-heeled preferred corrugated iron sheets over their heads.

In the rainy season, at the break of dawn, cattle carts in droves overladen with Ngarlinsayt would arrive in our town. Anyone who needed to fix their leaking roofs, or wanted to replace their worn-out roofs, looked out to the cattle carts.

The carts would first stop at the local market and set up shop. Once the market became less crowded and deserted around noon, they moved around town to sell the rest of the mesh. The arrival of Ngarlinsayt villagers carting around, hawking their ware, marked the start of the monsoon in our town.

Though I had always been fascinated with Ngarlinsayt, I was already a forty-year-old wedding makeup artist when I got a chance to visit the village for the first time. As soon as I set foot in Ngarlinsayt, I inspected the roof of every house. All the roofs I saw were metal sheets. Not a single house with the bamboo mesh roofing in sight.

The village had changed with time. Once upon a time, the only livelihood of the village was weaving bamboo meshes and selling them. Today most of the village youths no longer lived in the remote village, where the only form of transport used to be cattle carts. Ngarlinsayt must have seemed like stale water to them.

— —

The son of the landlady who hosted me overnight was an immigrant worker in Thailand. The husband-to-be of the groom, whose facelift I was in charge of, came back from Hpakant, a town in Kachin state, known for jade mines in the northernmost part of Myanmar.

The brother and sister next door were working in Laukkai, near China. Two brothers from the house across the street now lived in Muse, on the bank of the Shweli river, connected by a bridge to Yunnan Province, China. Right now they were all reunited in Ngarlinsayt over the Myanmar Thingyan New Year. The village became lively during the holiday seasons when immigrant workers came back for festivities. It would usually be soulless, I learned.

Remittances by the immigrant workers from Ngarlinsayt meant that almost every house there today gleamed with shiny metal roofs, and were neatly built with wood and brick. There were cars in front of some houses. Some other houses boasted tractors, harvesters, threshing machines, lively water pumps and noisy generators in operation, and an array of solar power panels.

‘What a great leap forward for a small village!’ I thought to myself.

There was a flip side to the material development of Ngarlinsayt. Every villager who was young and fit as a fiddle seemed to have abandoned their village. Only elderly people, fathers, mothers, uncles, aunties, and children of school age remained. Anyone who would be able to care for the elderly in an emergency was gone. In their place, there was a shower of cash. 

My landlady, the groom’s aunt, was nearly seventy, and living all by herself. Puffing on a giant corn-leaf cheroot, she was picking out damaged beans that pests had fed on from a woven bamboo tray full of red beans. Her beloved son had been in Thailand for three years, she said.

‘What if you were unwell?’

‘We have a junior nurse in the village. If I still didn’t feel better after seeing her, I would hire a car from next door to a clinic in Mintaingpin, the nearest town.’

‘Then who cooked for you when you were poorly, special meals such as porridge or noodles? Is there anyone who could help out at all?’

‘I will have to reach out to my niece. She lives in the same neighbourhood. She helps me with chores too.'

‘Good to hear that.’

‘It’s alright to live this way. I am used to it now. My son sends me money every now and then.’

‘What if he gets married there?’

‘I will leave that to my fate.’

The word ‘fate’ reverberated in my ears.

‘The niece I mentioned earlier is also going along with her elder brother after the beans harvesting season. Her brother is in Shweli.’

‘Hmmm!’ I couldn’t help but let out an interjection. I did not want to enquire any further.

What of the future of those children playing on the dirt road right in front of me? When they grow up, will they inevitably follow in the footsteps of their big brothers and sisters to the border towns of Muse, Shweli, Hpakant or neighbouring countries like Thailand and China?

As I left the village with shining metal roofs, I saw a convoy of cattle carts full of Ngarlinsayt in my mind’s eye. I whispered to myself, ‘Ngarlinsayt, should I be glad or sad for you?’