Back then, I suppose, on empty Sule Pagoda Road next to the park, gangs of boys did not play soccer under streetlamps, their naked backs glistening with sweat. It is strange to think of a young and unknown Orwell, who was born in India to a father who worked as an overseer of the colonial opium business, perhaps pacing around the ghostly Sule Pagoda 90 years ago and taking in this same view that I often enjoy when walking around the Maha Bandula park late at night. Times, though, have changed: at the first Irrawaddy Literary Festival earlier this year, copies of Orwell books were handed out to participants, and the organizers of Britain’s Orwell Prize came to the country to celebrate their man’s Burmese past.
Seen after midnight, they recall the state prisons and labyrinths of “ 1984,” a novel that, like many of the works by a onetime Burma resident then known as Eric Blair, was once nominally banned here. They rise up under a monsoon moon, massive and darkened and ill placed - the High Court a Queen Anne-style brick castle with a gloomy clock tower, like a London railway station reproduced here by some demented committee. Yangon’s old British buildings have the look of Gothic ruins gone astray in a tropical forest that cannot accommodate their scale. Wandering around Yangon, the former capital city of Myanmar, always makes me think of George Orwell.
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