Uncle Tar in the Spinning Society

‘My poor brother! He had a good brain, but it malfunctioned,’ said my mum. ‘He was very bright,’ she continued, ‘but crazy from birth.’

Annoyed, I defended my uncle, ‘No, he wasn’t crazy. He was just different.’

I knew that fell on stony ground. She grunted some sort of agreement with my statement, but she still believed him to be crazy and will forever remember him as ‘my poor crazy brother, A Tar.’

I thought back to the last conversation I had with my Uncle Tar. We were sitting on a bench in the back garden of my grandparents’ house in Mandalay.

The things he said had long faded into the abyss of my memory. But I remembered that he was very upset. His lanky figure hunched together, he looked ahead and down at the ground with tears in his eyes. I consoled him as well as any 12- or 13-year-old girl could. There was one thing he asked that managed to stay in my mind.

‘Would you help your little cousin if ever she needed help?’

‘Of course I would.’ I said, hoping that would relieve his pain somehow.

His marriage had recently broken down because he was ‘mentally unstable.’ His wife had taken their little daughter with her and gone back to her father. Her formidable father had banned my uncle from coming anywhere near them. There was some drama and exploded fuses and my uncle ended up back in his mother’s house.

My ‘crazy’ uncle was missing his daughter and worrying about her future without him. Even though I was close to him, I also subscribed to the notion that he was hopelessly crazy. I just wished that I could cure his ‘mental illness.’

‘There is something wrong with his brain,’ they said.

While everyone around him accepted Buddhism as their religion the way they had unquestioningly accepted that they are human, my Uncle Tar questioned this ‘truth.’ He explored Christianity and became a Christian for a while before becoming an atheist. He must have been crazy as nobody else in that society questioned the religion they were born into. A huge tick for the insanity checklist.

When he was working as a police officer, he once disguised himself as a roadside vendor and watched the suspect for days, acquired strong evidence and captured him. Why did he do such a thing when he could have just grabbed a random roadside vendor or rickshaw driver off the street, beat him until he confessed to whatever crime he was supposed to have done and declared that he had captured the criminal? He didn’t do what other police officers did. Another tick for the mental malfunction.

When he was little, why did he constantly keep asking why his mother didn’t love him like she did his other siblings? Questioning and noticing things like that openly? He must have been crazy.

His parents and his siblings believed him to be crazy and treated him as such. It seemed he also subscribed to that belief and lived up to that expectation when he suddenly quit his high paying job working in the biggest international hotel in Mandalay. He picked himself up, went into the police force and then, when he was climbing up the ranks, he quit again.

Was he sabotaging himself so that he could live up to the signs of madness? Or was he trying to find meaning in life when there was none? Even if there was such a thing as meaning in life, it seemed he was in the wrong place to find it. In the world he was in, everyone looked to everyone else to see how to behave, what to want and what it means to have a successful life. Everyone is so busy looking at other people to see how they are supposed to feel and live that they never think to look at themselves. They spend most of their life looking sideways and turning around full circle to take in everyone else who is doing the same. At some point in their life, while they are looking around and around, they bump into someone else who is doing the same. If they happen to be an attractive person in an appropriate age range and social status, they stop turning around briefly to join their lives together before continuing to spin around, this time joined at the hip. As the spin gathers more momentum, maybe they raise some children who will become the new generation of spinners.

While Uncle Tar realized he wanted something more than the spinning community could comprehend, he wasn’t sure what it was. There wasn’t any guide or another human being to understand him and give him an explanation other than ‘You think too much. Your brain is just abnormal.’

While my mum was recounting some incidents that proved Uncle Tar was crazy, I wondered if she would think the same about me too if she could hear my thoughts, if she could hear the way I talk to myself and if she had a level of English fluent enough to understand what I’m writing.

I doubt if she could cope with another weird person in the family, the one who is slowly moving away from the Spinning Society.