Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
white sackcloth—loose jackets, pants, and caps, costumes left over
from the previous year’s spring pageant. They fell in behind the
band. Two sturdy boys on stilts held up a poster-mounted photo of
me in my Himalayan hairdo. A wreath of flowers framed my blown-
up face and its too-broad smile. Dear me, it looked as if I were cam­
paigning to become Mayor of the Underworld!
In a short while, the mourners, as well as a dozen or so tourists on
rented Rollerblades and a few dozen more who had been expelled
from the gates of the Japanese Tea Garden, gathered behind the
band, following the busy hand signals of the museum staff. The
flutes trilled, the cymbals tinkled, the drums rumbled, and a flock of
fat pigeons flew up with a windy flapping of wings, and that was
how we began our walk to pay tribute to “a great lady lost.”
Though it was December, the weather was sunny and without
wind, which made everyone feel enlivened, unable to grieve with true
despair. Those who had signed up for the ill-fated Burma Road trip
were ambling in a cluster toward the rear. They were the ones I de­
cided to join, listening at the back of their minds. As we were circling
the concourse, Harry Bailley brought up the subject of canceling.
“What fun would it be without our Bibi?” he said in that rich bari­
tone that I have always loved listening to on his television show.
“Who would tell us what to savor, what to see?” All very touching
questions.
Marlena Chu was quick to agree. “It just wouldn’t be the same,”
she said in an elegant voice, tinged with an accent shaped by her
Shanghainese birth, her childhood in São Paulo, her British teachers,
and her studies at the Sorbonne. She came from a family of former
vast wealth and power, who were reduced on their exodus to South
America to becoming merely comfortably well-off. Marlena bought
fine art as a professional curator for private collections and com­
missioned sculptural installations for corporations setting up their
international headquarters in far-flung places. I also happened to
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