စိတ်ထဲရှိသမျှ

It was after six, late in the evening. I looked up at the sky and noticed a wisp of cloud drifting above. The sun had set, and the moon was already out, mingling with a ghostly wisp of cloud and slipping behind it. I walked wearily back home, feeling depressed, hopeless, and confused. As I walked, I couldn’t shake the weight of my thoughts. I had to make a change in my life. I had to leave this bloody country. There was no future here. This place could end up like Syria or any number of failed states. I was down, down to the bottom of the deepest ocean. I wanted a drink.

“We had livestock, a chicken farm,” she said. “We sold them one by one to stave off hunger. Now, we’re down to three chickens, two ducks, and this trishaw, which we’re trying to sell just to buy a bag of rice for the month.” The sun blazed like an angry god that day, sweating me like a pig. We walked across the parched paddy fields, now littered with waste. We were heading towards a cluster of huts. I found a woman there in her early thirties sitting on the doorstep, having her lunch. A few chickens and ducks were roaming near a battered trishaw in her

I heard this thought-provoking idea from a friend about a decade ago. I can’t recall the exact words now, but I believe it went something like, “As we focus on the days we assume we have left, we tend to forget the day we will inevitably leave this world.” I have been reflecting on this for the past few days; the more I think about it, the more I find myself realising, like many others, that I don’t think much about death in my everyday life. And like many others, I also take tomorrow for granted. This, of course, goes without saying how much I love to fill my days with endless plans—

Finding houses in Maungdaw has proven to be more difficult than I anticipated. Before my arrival, I had envisioned a simple elevated house with basic features such as bamboo walls, a thatched roof, a well, an outside toilet, and plenty of shady trees. I was hoping for a rural setting with a peaceful atmosphere. That envision of mine was wishful, unfortunately. Furthermore, things got even more difficult as I was unaware at the time but later found out that being an outsider posed an even greater challenge in finding a place to live, as I had to

သူ့နာမည်က တွတ်ပီတဲ့။ ပိန်ပိန် သေးသေးလေး။ ကျနော် ငယ်ငယ်က အတိုင်းပဲ။ နာမည်အရင်းတော့ မသိတော့ဘူး။ တစ်ခါတော့ ကျနော်ကို ပြောဖူးတယ်။ ဒါပေမဲ့ မေ့သွားပြီ။ ဆိုတော့ သူ့သူငယ်ချင်းတွေ ခေါ်သလို ကျနော်လည်း တွတ်ပီပဲ ခေါ်တော့တယ်။ တွတ်ပီနဲ့ စသိတာ august 2021။ နိုင်ငံရေးအခြေအနေကြောင့် ကျောင်းတွေပိတ်ထားတော့ တွတ်ပီတို့တွေ လမ်းပျော် ဖြစ်နေခဲ့တဲ့ အချိန်တွေပေါ့။ တစ်ရက် ကျနော် ရေဆင်းကူးတော့ သူကို ကမ်းစပ်မှာ ကျနော့် စိတ်အထင် အရှည်သုံးတောင်လောက်ရှိမဲ့ ဖေါ့ပြားနဲ့ တစ်ယောက်ထဲ လိူင်းစီးနေတာတွေ့တယ်။ မိုးတွင်းကလ ဆိုတော့ လိူင်းတွေက ရှယ်ကြီးတာ။

ကျနော်တို့ ပုံမှန် လှည်ပတ်နေတဲ့ နေ့ရက်တိုင်းဟာ အခြားသူတွေ့ရဲ့ ပုံမှန်မဟုတ်တဲ့ နေ့ရက်တွေ မဟုတ်ဘူးလား။ ကုန်လွန်ခဲ့တဲ့ သုံးလ ဒီနေ့ ၂၈ရက် ကျနော် မောင်တောမှာ ရှိနေခဲ့တယ်။ အင်အားပြင်းမုန်တိုင်း Mocha ဖြတ်သွားပြီးနောက် ဖယောင်းတိုင်မီးအလင်းရောင်နဲ့ ကျနော် တို့နေထိုင်ခဲ့တဲ့ အစောပိုင်းကာလတွေပေါ့ဗျာ။ ကျနော် အခန်းဖော် ညီညီ စစ်တွေကို မုန်တိုင်းပြီးနှစ်ရက် အကြာမှာ ပြန်သွားတော့ အိမ်မှာ ကျနော် တစ်ယောက်ထဲပဲ ကျန်ခဲ့တယ်။ အဲ့နေ့က တနင်္ဂနွေဗျ။ အလုပ်ပိတ်ရက် တနင်္ဂနွေနေ့

I did not get it. I did not get it.  I have been chanting that phrase like a mantra. Before yesterday, I lived by one hope. It was a kinda hope that made my days, painted my dreams, and whispered promises of a potential future. I clung to it, close to my chest, like my precious thing, for the past three full weeks.  Sadly, it has morphed into disappointment. The higher the expectations are, the bigger the disappointments turn out to be. I felt like the last light had dimmed. I was left with nothingness, and I found myself balancing

I do not recall whose idea it was, but a fishing trip to the reservoir was confirmed. Earlier that day, we met for breakfast at Toe Chan teashop, our weekly hangout place in Maungdaw.  At noon, we met again and purchased hooks and weights from the market. Ko Zaw Myint borrowed a fishing rod from Ko Aung Kyaw Than. We were – Ko Zaw Myint, Ko Tin Tun Khine, Nyi Nyi @Shwe Maung Thein, and myself. We set out without baits. It was still early in the day, and we could not get the shrimp. The sun blazed hot as we travelled to the

I would not consider myself a foodie. Though, there are times when I do enjoy certain food. I enjoy pickled tea leave salad. I remembered asking Dada to bring some for me when I was in the UK. Aside from that, this became a newfound craving of mine. About a month after I arrived in Maungdaw, an uncontrollable craving for samosas hit me. Usually, I do not prefer oily foods, but it was so strong and I wanted to indulge in samosas.  I could not conceal this desire of mine that one day I asked Ko Tin Tun Khine if he knew of any teashop

This dates back to san chaung days of 2021, between late March and early April. Not long after we got defeated and lost our ground on kyun taw road, we moved to establish our new base in the lower part of san chaung. We stationed and made theyat taw st as our meet-up point to carry out daily activities. On one specific day, lily and I took on a scout role on za lun st. This turned out to be the day, we met and befriended our two sisters, Ma Cho & Ma Yu, as we would later address them.  Following the successful event, we got invited to lunch at

မောင်တော သူငယ်ချင်းများ အားလုံး ကို နှုတ်ဆက်ပါတယ်။ တရားနဲ့သာ ဖြေကြပါ။ “ဘာဖြစ်လာမလဲ” ဆိုတဲ့ မနက်ဖြန်များစွာနဲ့ ပြည့်နေတာကြောင့် “ပြန်ဆုံမယ်”လို့ ကျနော်မပြောတော့ပါဘူး။  Farewell to all Maungdaw friends. Seek your solace in Dhāma. Since tomorrow (s) are filled with uncertainties, I can’t say our paths will cross again. Today, I close Chapter 3.  Since shit hit the fan, the years 2020 and 2021, now regarded by the citizen of Bruma as a moment of monumental transformation in Burma’s history, I’ve been keeping a record of my life as I live through it. The first two chapters were about happiness

It has been pissing down for the past three days. I am getting sick of it. For many of us, rainy season often evokes a sense of nostalgia and romance. The cozy atmosphere created by the rains can be quite comforting and soothing. Given the chance, everyone wants to sit by a window, sipping something hot, listening to the rhythmic patter of the raindrops while indulging in their thoughts and memories. It’s a simple pleasure that many enjoy during the rainy days. However, for those who must make a living in rains would have a different story to tell. When I joined the organisation

A world-renowned author/playright, Oscar Wilde, said, "There are only two tragedies in life—one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." The latter is much worse; it is the real tragedy. The psychology of human desire is paradoxical. The failure to achieve a goal can lead to unhappiness and ever despair. Yet, attaining an objective can produce and aftermath of uncertainty and lassitude.  စာရေးဆရာ Oscar Wilde ကပြောခဲ့တယ် - ဘဝမှာ ကြေကွဲစရာ နှစ်ခုပဲရှိတယ်၊ တစ်ခုက လိုချင်တာကို မရတာ၊ နောက်တစ်ခုက

ဘာလိုလို့နဲ့ မောင်တောကို ရောက်တာ 29th March ဆိုရင် တစ်နှစ်ပြည့်တော့မယ်။ မောင်တော တစ်နှစ်ပြည့် အမှတ်တရ ရေးရင် ကောင်းမယ် လို့စဉ်းစားတော့ ကျနော် အတွေးမှတ်စု (journals) ကိုပြန်လှန်ရတယ်။ ရေးစရာတွေများတော့ ဘယ်က စရေးရမယ် မသိ။ မောင်တော ဆိုတဲ့ မြို့ကို စသိတာ 2017 ဖြစ်မယ်။ ဘိလပ် ရောက်နေခဲ့တဲ့ ကျနော်အတွက် မောင်တောမြို့ဟာ ethnic cleansing ဆိုတဲ့ international ခေါင်းကြီး သတင်းတွေအောက်မှာ မကြာခဏ ကျနော် ဖတ်ရခဲ့တဲ့ မြို့တစ်မြို့ထက်မပိုခဲ့ပါဘူး။ ပြီးတော့လဲ ဘိလပ် ရဲ့ ညတွေအောက်မှာ ကျနော် သူကိုမေ့သွားတယ်။ 2021 coup ဖြစ်တော့ မြတ်ကျော်သူ

Lately, I fell in love with a song: ရေစက် by ဖော်ကာ (wanted fokker) which I’ve been listening to on repeat.  It’s the word ရေစက် that fascinates me. I can’t find the exact word in English, however, the equivalent would be “destined” no less or “bound for”. In daily spoken Burmese, often hear oh you and I meet because we had ရေစက် in a past life and when we are about to be apart or comes a time we may never see each other again, say ရေစက်ကုန်ပြီ. 

မေယုမှာ မိုးရွာရင် တစ်ကိုယ်တည်းငေးမိရဲ့ အတွေးဟိုသည်ခုန်လို့ ရူးတော့မယ်။ Not my own lines, but hugely inspired by the work of ဆရာမ ကြည်အေး။ ဘာလိုလိုနဲ့ ဒီကို ရောက်နေတာ (၄) လရှိတော့မယ်။ ရာသီဥတု၊ အစားအစာ၊ စကားတွေကအစ တော်တော်လေးကွဲတယ်။ အထိကပြဿနာက ဘာသာစကားနဲ့ အစားအစာ ပဲ။ ရောက်စက အတော်တိုင်ပတ်တာ။ အခုလည်း တိုင်ပတ်စဲပဲ။ လက်ဖက်ရည်ဆိုင်တစ်ယောက်ထဲထိုင်နေရင် အရမ်းအထီးကျန်သ