Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

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SAVING FISH
FROM DROWNING
Crossing the border into Burma, one can spot the same pretty
flowers seen from the bus window in China: yellow daisies and
scarlet hibiscus, lantana growing as plentifully as weeds. Noth­
ing had changed from one country to the next, or so it appeared to
my friends.
But in fact all had suddenly become denser, wilder, devouring it­
self as nature does when it is neglected for a hundred years. That was
the sense I had in crossing that border, as if I, like H. G. Wells in
his time machine, possessed the same consciousness but had been
plopped in the past. Moff and Harry immediately took to calling
each other “Rudyard” and “George,” after Kipling and Orwell, the
chroniclers of old colonial Burmah. Like my friends, I, too, have
found the literature of yesteryear intoxicating, engorged with the per­