Unblinking, rather like a great porcelain idol, u po kyin gazed out into the fierce sunlight. He was a man of fifty, so fat that for years he had not risen from his chair without help, and yet shapely and even beautiful in his grossness; for the Burmese do not sag and bulge like white men, but grow fat symmetrically, like fruits swelling. His face was vast, yellow and quite unwrinkled, and his eyes were tawny. His feet--squat, high-arched feet with the toes all the samelength--were bare, and so was his copped head, and he wore one of those vivid Arakanese longyis with green and magenta check which the Burmese wear on informal occasion. He was chewing betel from a lacquered box on the table, and thinking about his past life.
It had been a brilliantly successful life. u po kyin's earliest memory, back in the eighties, was of standing, a naked pot-bellied child, watching the British troops march