Playing Lady Gaga, Being Nan Pau. Steve Tolbert

and drinks balanced on their heads – roamed from window to cracked window calling out items for sale.

      ‘Disappear into yourself.’ Abbot-advice about as useful as a pocket on her underwear. Just how was she supposed to do that? Roll up into a ball, close her eyes and cover her ears, like in a game of hide and seek – her robe providing her hiding place? Of course not, but through deep concentration and meditation that she knew absolutely nothing about. Not something she and her girlfriends practised in between gossip and Facebook sessions, perfect boyfriend appraisals, and listen­ing to their MP3 players.

      So here she was trying to impersonate a novice nun and she couldn’t even do the most basic Buddhist things. Though she did get past Mister MI on Sule Pagoda Road, didn’t she? Maybe, just maybe, without realising it, she was doing some novice things right.

      That last thought bolstered her and she glanced around again at the people nearby: backs of heads, conversations half heard. Just fam­i­lies: fathers already curling into sleeping positions, mothers looking after the children. She could be in far worse places. At least no one in the carriage was likely to attract informers.

      The train jerked forward finally, slowly picking up speed and rolling side to side.

      Outside three boys raced the train, shouting, laughing and waving their arms about before they tired and slowed. Mya sensed the fire in their lungs, their leaden legs, and envied them their silliness and laughter, doing fun things together, being able to stay in Yangon.

      She thought how quickly lives could change, be lost; that she was leaving behind everything she’d ever known, her routine, the certainty of it all. She had no idea what was to come, or even what she’d see out the window in the morning. Though one thing was certain: nothing, no one, would be familiar to her, until finally she found her mother – and she would, surely she would.

      Mya leaned her head against the half-closed window and continued to look out at Yangon slipping past, buildings getting further and further apart, night coming on. As a distraction, to keep up her English writing even as her life was collapsing, she took out her English diction­ary, pen and pad as though her English teacher – a former monk and lover of haikus, tankas and short poetry – had just assigned her a writing task. She listened to the train noise, wrote, deleted and wrote more:

      Vibrating metal,

      Thumping of wheels on the track.

      Darkness thickening.

      She liked words, especially English ones. Liked filling up writing pads and diaries with them. She thought of writing about the massacre, but how ridiculous was that? There weren’t the words available – in Burmese, in English – to convey what had happened. Never would be. Her mind skipped to the abbot – what he said, how he was arrested. ‘Feel yourself grow invisible in your stillness.’ She shook her head: incomprehensible. Yet over the next few hours, it surprised Mya how still she could sit just thinking, and how upright she could sleep; how coughing, snoring and a mother’s head dropping on her shoulder didn’t upset her, or at least not as much as they would have in the past. Now, strangely, she welcomed the sounds, closeness and touch.

      Mya slept; woke to a baby crying. Outside, a wall of blackness until a light or two showed, and passed.

      An idea came. Maybe, out of habit and yearning, an imposter could absorb the person they were pretending to be. Start by acting, end up becoming. From the Tripitaka: ‘What we think, we become.’ Hard to explain exactly, especially with how muddled her brain felt. But all she knew was that in the time it had taken to get from the Sule Pagoda Road to the Chinese Market and onto this train, she’d become aware of the people who nodded, smiled and pressed their palms together to greet her. And what surprised her most was how easy it was for Nan Pau to return those greetings. She’d like to talk to somebody: an abbot, abbess, a teacher maybe; someone with ideas who might be around for her in the morning. She scanned the carriage.

      Stupid girl, dreaming with her eyes open. No one was around for her: zero. Just poor families challenged enough by trying to get to their destinations. She was on her own. Maybe forever. So get used to it, Mya Paw Wah, fugitive from the law.

      Her quick mood swings, feeling hope one minute, devastation the next, were not helped by stomach cramps signalling the onset of her period. As Nan Pau, or any other celibate novice or nun married to the Buddha, what purpose did periods serve?

      Absolutely none: zero. That word again: the one that best summed up her prospects for the future. She’d give up ever being able to have children right now, this very instant, if she could just stop having useless, maddening periods.

      No sobs like before; just silent tears. She pressed her fists into her cheeks, knuckle-dried her eyes, as those train wheels thump-thump-thumped a rhythmic chant. She put words to the rhythm – I’ll be with you soon. I’ll be with you soon. I’ll be with you soon – imagining she was capable of sending brainwaves to her mother.

      The train rocked and rattled, the wheels thumped on and on.

      At some point she slept again and woke to a brand new landscape. To her Yangon eyes it was a different country out there. Stilted huts perched like giant crabs. Groves of bamboo, mango trees and sugar palms, and vines and rice paddies, their shoots poking out of brown water. Beyond the villages hills rose up, their brows and ridges capped in stupas and golden spires shaped like the fingers of classical dancers. A dirt road came into view, running parallel with the track. Ox carts moved over it and work gangs of women and children with baskets of stones and dirt on their heads walked along its edges in trance-like slowness.

      The carriage lurched, tossing sleepers sideways, and soon they started to stir and stretch and greet one another.

      To avoid conversation, Mya pretended to read, keeping her Tripitaka close to her face until the carriage lurched again, veering left then slowing. Up ahead, above a wide, brown river that emptied into the sea, stretched a massive bridge, dark against a cloudless sky.

      ‘The longest bridge in all of Myanmar,’ a voice croaked next to her ear.

      She swung around.

      An ancient nun stood gripping Mya’s seat, her hands claw-like, her face a dried-up mango. ‘Myanmar is beautiful this time of year,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

      ***

      The motorbike taxi slowed as it neared the end of a bustling alleyway full of conjoined double-storey houses, a tea shack and street dogs stretched out in the shade. The old nun muttered, ‘You wear a mask and your face changes to fit it.’

      It was as though she’d read Mya’s thoughts. ‘Or wear a novice nun’s robe?’ she asked.

      ‘Or wear a novice nun’s robe.’

      ‘Does your brain change too?’

      ‘If it must, daughter. If it must.’

      The taxi stopped. Mya got out.

      ‘Take this,’ the old nun said, handing Mya a key. She nodded at the tea shack. ‘You’ll find the owner behind the counter. He knows a novice nun is coming. Register your name with him then use the pathway at the side. Your room is at the back with a postcard of the Shwedagon Pagoda on the door. Remember to keep the door locked. Don’t go far. You will be contacted.’

      ‘When?’

      ‘Soon … Be patient.’

      Mya reached into her bag for money.

      The old nun touched Mya’s shoulder, shook her head. The motorbike taxi turned around.

      ‘And I will light a candle for you tonight,’ the nun said, going past.

      A second motorbike taxi pulled out heading in the same direction.

      ***

      Small room. White tiled floor. Wooden bed with a sleeping mat. A ceiling fan and a light bulb hanging from a cord.

      Mya dropped her shoulder