Nomad Codes

vanquishing Burma’s vicious circle of rural poverty and ignorance.
    Later we were invited to a meal at Linn’s home. We expected to eat en famille , but instead found ourselves a twosome at a candlelit table on their dirt driveway. I was already feeling the first rumblings of the gastrointestinal bummer that would trouble me the following few days—the result, I expect, of the delicious pickled tea we had eaten for lunch at the mountain village. But I valiantly dug in, and enjoyed our best exposure yet to Burma’s hybrid and rather unspectacular cuisine: a pepper soup, sprightly greens, sweet-and-sour veggies, thickly curried prawns, and weird chunks of fried fish.
    Afterwards, we were taken inside and shown the family nat shrine, which prominently featured an altar for Maha Giri, the Lord of the Great Mountain. Shrines to Maha Giri appear in every Burmese home, or at least those that still traffic with the nats. A small curtain was drawn before the Lord, here embodied by a coconut tied with a red kerchief. The reason for the curtains is that, when Maha Giri was a mortal hero, the King of Tagaung ordered him tied to a champa tree and burned alive, and so he does not care to see light at night.
    I related this bit of lore to my hosts, having gleaned it from a grimy reprint of Maung Htin Aung’s Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism , which I had scored in a no-less grimy shop in Yangon. My datum made enough of an impression on Lion that he joined us at the table with a bottle of whiskey and talked about the nats. Lion estimated that only thirty percent of Burmese believe in the nats. He was brought up within the other seventy percent; though many Burmese worship the Buddha alongside the nats, Lion’s parents believed that the dharma was incompatible with such popular supernaturalism. The strain between the two faiths goes back a millennium, to the imposition of Theravada Buddhism by Pagan’s sanctimonious King Anawrahta in the eleventh century. Anawrahta disliked the nats, but was unable to suppress their worship; and so, like the Catholic church in the heathen colonies, he assimilated them. Against the riot of popular lore and orgiastic rites that preceded the dharma, he codified and established thirty-six nats, headed by Maha Giri, at his central paya in Pagan. Anawrahta then crowned the posse with a thirty-seventh nat—the deva Indra—and thereby symbolically placed the nats under the Buddhadharma.
    Lion explained that many Burmese worship the Buddha in order to guarantee a good future life, while they propitiate the nats in order to reap rewards and avoid calamity—much of it caused by the nats—in this world. Lion then admitted that he began serving the nats after he hooked up with his wife, whose mother was a strong devotee. Nats often communicate in dreams, so when Ko Myo Shin came to Lion one night while he slept and said, “I want to be in your home,” he went out the next day and bought a shrine. In exchange for taking on some of Ko Myo Shin’s restrictions—she does not care for either beef or pork and wants her devotees to abjure the same—Lion was eventually gifted with dream transmissions of some winning lottery numbers. But the nats can also be as petulant as children, and their propitiation is a two-edge sword. One day Lion fell off a low wall and inexplicably broke his leg, which healed badly and continues to cause him chronic pain. He blames the whole incident on the shirt he wore that day, a black rocker T with a buffalo head on it. Lion believes the garment offended a nat named Popa Medaw, who has a thing about buffaloes and the color black.
    As the cries of the crickets and bullfrogs rose to a deafening keen in the Inle air, Lion, now in his cups, revealed that he once lived with a ladyboy who had embarked on the path of the nat kadaw. Lion learned some of the ritual nat dances from his friend, and became quite proficient at a few of them. He insisted that lots of mediums were in the game just because they liked to dress up and dance (and, presumably, to make some decent money). Only a small number of nat kadaw, he claimed, were the real deal, capable of genuinely invoking and holding these powerful spirits in their bodies without going crazy or becoming sick. As the evening wound to a close, I could not resist asking what the deal was with all the crossdressing. Lion’s answer was crisp: “Nats prefer ladyboys!”
    A week later, J and I were packed in the car with Lion and the