Nomad Codes

Driver, inching our way past the wide fields of rice patties that lie north of Mandalay. We had left our grotty urban hotel mid-morning, as the touts for the taxi-vans filled the air with cries of “ Taungbyon! Taungbyon!” Vehicles piled with eager passengers were already pulling away, hoping to avoid the traffic that would later choke the route to the nearby town. Along the way, we found the road lined with beggars and cripples and clumps of people attempting, with widely varying degrees of conviction, to extract road tolls and donations, the latter elicited with heavily reverbed bullhorn entreaties and small children tossing “coins” (no longer part of the money system) inside silver bowls. Even before we reached town, with windows rolled up against the dust, we sensed the crackling, eternally returning energy of festival. A few dreamtime shivers struck my spine, and I recalled the pothead rush of anticipation I felt as a teenager arriving at Grateful Dead parking lots—that electric sense of a luminous collective secret about to open to all.
    J and I left Lion and the Driver in the parking lot, where they would wait like bored soldiers for half a day. We walked into a dusty, unkempt scene that resembled nothing so much as a South Asian county fair. The main streets—thankfully devoid of cars—were lined with stalls offering gelatinous sweets, flowers, cassettes, greasy treats, and shoddy goods. Kids ran around gobbling candy, and a manually-operated Ferris wheel loomed behind the village’s central paya, the attraction’s upper struts lined with young men prepared to generate momentum by hurling their bodies earthwards while holding on to the spokes. Inside a roomy nearby stall, behind a single rickety turnstile, a troop of large stick puppets fought out a gory domestic drama to a prerecorded soundtrack of spooky B-movie chords and heavily distorted Burmese piano doodles. Outside, the piles of coconut husks and banana leaves—the refuse of a brisk trade in offerings—reminded us that this low-key rural carnival was in some sense sacred. But there was no heaviness of purpose among the crowds, no gloomy pilgrim piety, no religious mania.
    The casual, boisterous atmosphere saturated Taungbyon’s central paya as well, where crowds decamped on the floors of open halls glittering with mosaics of silvered glass. The pagoda plays a crucial role in the story of the Taungbyon brothers, the two nats who lord over the town and its annual pwe. Shwepyingyi and his brother, possessed of the amazingly similar name of Shwepyinnge, were the sons of Byat-ta, a “mighty man of endeavor” employed by King Anawrahta. Byat-ta, along with his brother Byat-wi, had been discovered floating in a seaborne basket by a monk. While he was raising the orphan boys, who had Indian features and were considered Muslim, the monk chanced upon the corpse of one of Burma’s myriad alchemists, who spent their time concocting elixirs of immortality and fighting magical battles over the fruit maidens they liked to fuck. Knowing the extraordinary powers imparted by cooked alchemist flesh, the monk promptly roasted the dead body. He then commanded Byat-wi and Byat-ta to guard the corpse while he fetched the king. But the young brothers could not resist the aroma of the flesh, and so gobbled the entire alchemist, becoming superheroes in the process.
    Anawrahta grew to distrust both brothers and eventually killed them. But after murdering Byat-ta and his ogress wife, the king took pity on their two sons and raised them in the court. Because the boys had inherited some of their father’s superpowers, they were later ordered to lead the king’s army into China to seize the empire’s Buddha relics, which Anawrahta believed would help him banish the nats from Burma. Unfortunately, the lazy brothers brought back a jade replica of the Blessed Molar instead of the real deal. Later, when the king ordered the brothers to help construct the pagoda at Taungbyon, the two men decided to play marbles instead. This was too much for Anawrahta, who castrated the guys with a magic spear and let them bleed to death. From beyond the veil, the brothers, now nats, continued to hassle the sovereign, and the king eventually made them the spiritual lords of Taungbyon. The annual pwe held in their name grew and grew, and when a later sovereign, King Mindon, proclaimed that he would cancel the festival, the two nats made his balls swell until Mindon