---
title: "Burmese Days"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 25 of 25
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-burmese-days-fp20180520/25/
cite: "George Orwell, Burmese Days, section 25. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-burmese-days-fp20180520/25/"
---

# Burmese Days

*George Orwell*

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> _Title:_ Burmese Days
_Date of first publication:_ 1934
_Author:_ Eric Blair (as George Orwell) (1903-1950)
_Date first posted:_ May 21, 2018
_Date last updated:_ May 21, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180520

> This ebook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Cindy Beyer & the online
Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> [Cover Illustration]

> GEORGE  ORWELL

> Burmese  Days

> This desert inaccessible
               Under the shade of melancholy boughs.

> _As You Like It_

> First published in the USA by Harper & Brothers, New York 1934
           Published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1935

> Copyright 1934 by Eric Blair

> [Illustration: Map of Kyauktada]

> TRANSCRIBER NOTES

> Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

> Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.

> [The end of _Burmese Days_ by Eric Blair (as George Orwell)]

## 25. XXV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-burmese-days-fp20180520/25/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-burmese-days-fp20180520/25/#p-N

[¶0] It was lucky that the padre should have been at Kyauktada, for he was
able, before catching the train on the following evening, to read the
burial service in due form and even to deliver a short address on the
virtues of the dead man. All Englishmen are virtuous when they are dead.
‘Accidental death’ was the official verdict (Dr Veraswami had proved
with all his medico-legal skill that the circumstances pointed to
accident) and it was duly inscribed upon the tombstone. Not that anyone
believed it, of course. Flory’s real epitaph was the remark, very
occasionally uttered—for an Englishman who dies in Burma is so soon
forgotten—‘Flory? Oh yes, he was a dark chap, with a birthmark. He shot
himself in Kyauktada in 1926. Over a girl, people said. Bloody fool.’
Probably no one, except Elizabeth, was much surprised at what had
happened. There is a rather large number of suicides among the Europeans
in Burma, and they occasion very little surprise.

[¶1] Flory’s death had several results. The first and most important of them
was that Dr Veraswami was ruined, even as he had foreseen. The glory of
being a white man’s friend—the one thing that had saved him before—had
vanished. Flory’s standing with the other Europeans had never been good,
it is true; but he was after all a white man, and his friendship
conferred a certain prestige. Once he was dead, the doctor’s ruin was
assured. U Po Kyin waited the necessary time, and then struck again,
harder than ever. It was barely three months before he had fixed it in
the head of every European in Kyauktada that the doctor was an
unmitigated scoundrel. No public accusation was ever made against him—U
Po Kyin was most careful of that. Even Ellis would have been puzzled to
say just what scoundrelism the doctor had been guilty of; but still, it
was agreed that he was a scoundrel. By degrees the general suspicion of
him crystallised in a single Burmese phrase—_shok de_. Veraswami, it
was said, was quite a clever little chap in his way—quite a good doctor
for a native—but he was _thoroughly shok de_. _Shok de_ means,
approximately, untrustworthy, and when a ‘native’ official comes to be
known as _shok de_, there is an end of him.

[¶2] The dreaded nod and wink passed somewhere in high places, and the doctor
was reverted to the rank of Assistant Surgeon and transferred to
Mandalay General Hospital. He is still there, and is likely to remain.
Mandalay is rather a disagreeable town—it is dusty and intolerably hot,
and it is said to have five main products all beginning with P, namely,
pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes—and the routine-work at
the hospital is a dreary business. The doctor lives just outside the
hospital grounds in a little bakehouse of a bungalow with a corrugated
iron fence round its tiny compound, and in the evenings he runs a
private clinic to supplement his reduced pay. He has joined a
second-rate club frequented by Indian pleaders. Its chief glory is a
single European member—a Glasgow electrician named Macdougall, sacked
from the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company for drunkenness, and now making a
precarious living out of a garage. Macdougall is a dull lout, only
interested in whisky and magnetos. The doctor, who will never believe
that a white man can be a fool, tries almost every night to engage him
in what he still calls ‘cultured conversation’; but the results are very
unsatisfying.

[¶3] Ko S’la inherited four hundred rupees under Flory’s will, and with his
family he set up a tea-shop in the bazaar. But the shop failed, as it
was bound to do with the two women fighting in it at all hours, and Ko
S’la and Ba Pe were obliged to go back to service. Ko S’la was an
accomplished servant. Besides the useful arts of pimping, dealing with
moneylenders, carrying master to bed when drunk and making pick-me-ups
known as prairie oysters on the following morning, he could sew, darn,
refill cartridges, attend to a horse, press a suit, and decorate a
dinner-table with wonderful, intricate patterns of chopped leaves and
dyed rice-grains. He was worth fifty rupees a month. But he and Ba Pe
had fallen into lazy ways in Flory’s service, and they were sacked from
one job after another. They had a bad year of poverty, and little Ba
Shin developed a cough, and finally coughed himself to death one
stifling hot-weather night. Ko S’la is now a second boy to a Rangoon
rice-broker with a neurotic wife who makes unending _kit-kit_, and Ba Pe
is _pani_-wallah in the same house at sixteen rupees a month. Ma Hla May
is in a brothel in Mandalay. Her good looks are all but gone, and her
clients pay her only four annas and sometimes kick her and beat her.
Perhaps more bitterly than any of the others, she regrets the good time
when Flory was alive, and when she had not the wisdom to put aside any
of the money she extracted from him.

[¶4] U Po Kyin realised all his dreams, except one. After the doctor’s
disgrace, it was inevitable that U Po Kyin should be elected to the
Club, and elected he was, in spite of bitter protests from Ellis. In the
end the other Europeans came to be rather glad that they had elected
him, for he was a bearable addition to the Club. He did not come too
often, was ingratiating in his manner, stood drinks freely, and
developed almost at once into a brilliant bridge-player. A few months
later he was transferred from Kyauktada and promoted. For a whole year,
before his retirement, he officiated as Deputy Commissioner, and during
that year alone he made twenty thousand rupees in bribes. A month after
his retirement he was summoned to a durbar in Rangoon, to receive the
decoration that had been awarded to him by the Indian Government.

[¶5] It was an impressive scene, that durbar. On the platform, hung with
flags and flowers, sat the Governor, frock-coated, upon a species of
throne, with a bevy of aides-de-camp and secretaries behind him. All
round the hall, like glittering waxworks, stood the tall, bearded
_sowars_ of the Governor’s bodyguard, with pennoned lances in their
hands. Outside, a band was blaring at intervals. The gallery was gay
with the white _ingyis_ and pink scarves of Burmese ladies, and in the
body of the hall a hundred men or more were waiting to receive their
decorations. There were Burmese officials in blazing Mandalay _pasos_,
and Indians in cloth-of-gold _pagris_, and British officers in
full-dress uniform with clanking sword-scabbards, and old _thugyis_ with
their grey hair knotted behind their heads and silver-hilted _dahs_
slung from their shoulders. In a high, clear voice a secretary was
reading out the list of awards, which varied from the CIE to
certificates of honour in embossed silver cases. Presently U Po Kyin’s
turn came and the secretary read from his scroll:

[¶6] ‘To U Po Kyin, Deputy Assistant Commissioner, retired, for long and
loyal service and especially for his timely aid in crushing a most
dangerous rebellion in Kyauktada district’—and so on and so on.

[¶7] Then two henchmen placed there for the purpose hoisted U Po Kyin
upright, and he waddled to the platform, bowed as low as his belly would
permit, and was duly decorated and felicitated, while Ma Kin and other
supporters clapped wildly and fluttered their scarves from the gallery.

[¶8] U Po Kyin had done all that mortal man could do. It was time now to be
making ready for the next world—in short, to begin building pagodas.
But unfortunately, this was the very point at which his plans went
wrong. Only three days after the Governor’s durbar, before so much as a
brick of those atoning pagodas had been laid, U Po Kyin was stricken
with apoplexy and died without speaking again. There is no armour
against fate. Ma Kin was heartbroken at the disaster. Even if she had
built the pagodas herself, it would have availed U Po Kyin nothing; no
merit can be acquired save by one’s own act. She suffers greatly to
think of U Po Kyin where he must be now—wandering in God knows what
dreadful subterranean hell of fire, and darkness, and serpents, and
genii. Or even if he has escaped the worst, his other fear has been
realised, and he has returned to the earth in the shape of a rat or a
frog. Perhaps at this very moment a snake is devouring him.

[¶9] As to Elizabeth, things fell out better than she had expected. After
Flory’s death Mrs Lackersteen, dropping all pretences for once, said
openly that there were no men in this dreadful place and the only hope
was to go and stay several months in Rangoon or Maymyo. But she could
not very well send Elizabeth to Rangoon or Maymyo alone, and to go with
her practically meant condemning Mr Lackersteen to death from delirium
tremens. Months passed, and the rains reached their climax, and
Elizabeth had just made up her mind that she must go Home after all,
penniless and unmarried, when—Mr Macgregor proposed to her. He had had
it in mind for a long time; indeed, he had only been waiting for a
decent interval to elapse after Flory’s death.

[¶10] Elizabeth accepted him gladly. He was rather old, perhaps, but a Deputy
Commissioner is not to be despised—certainly he was a far better match
than Flory. They are very happy. Mr Macgregor was always a good-hearted
man, but he has grown more human and likeable since his marriage. His
voice booms less, and he has given up his morning exercises. Elizabeth
has grown mature surprisingly quickly, and a certain hardness of manner
that always belonged to her has become accentuated. Her servants live in
terror of her, though she speaks no Burmese. She has an exhaustive
knowledge of the Civil List, gives charming little dinner-parties and
knows how to put the wives of subordinate officials in their places—in
short, she fills with complete success the position for which Nature had
designed her from the first, that of a _burra_ memsahib.

[¶11] THE END