In the utter darkness of the night, we were driving on the highway from Mandalay to Yangon. There were my mum and dad, my uncle and his fiancée, and me. Because of the heat, my family decided to make the journey at night. We had set off from Mandalay about 11 o’clock the night before. We reckoned we would get back to Yangon about 7 o’clock in the morning.
My uncle and my father took turns to drive. It was my uncle’s turn. As the other passengers dozed off, I stayed awake worried that my uncle might become sleepy and we might have a fatal accident. The highway was notorious for accounts of drivers falling asleep at the wheel. To make sure my uncle was wide awake, I kept talking to him, asking him questions about his life in Singapore mainly so that I could check his speech was clear and not slurring with sleepiness. Much of the road was pitch dark with no street lights. Although there were a few towns and numerous villages along the road, many areas had no shops and no human inhabitants nearby. At about 3 o’clock in the morning we were at the most deserted part of the route. It was still too early for any market buses to come out. And for the last half an hour, we hadn’t even come across any occasional vehicles that were also making their night journeys like us. We were all alone and the air felt eerie.
Suddenly, in the full beam of the car headlight, we both saw a saffron robe gently flapping in the wind. In an instant, the robe lengthened into an extraordinarily tall figure of a monk at the side of the road travelling in the same direction as us. Somehow he seemed to be levitating above the ground as he didn’t seem to be moving his legs. My hair pricked up on the back of my neck and goosebumps swept across my body towards my fingertips.
‘Don’t stop, Uncle Min! Please drive on!!’ I shrieked in my uncle’s ears as he was about to stomp on the brake.
To my relief, my uncle drove on. I looked back into the darkness behind us. In the dim rear light of the car, I could just make out the flapping saffron robe for a second until it disappeared in the distance.
My alarm woke the rest of the passengers in the car.
‘Wh … What happened??’ My mum asked in her half-dazed state.
‘I saw a monk at the side of the road.’
My mum immediately sat bolt upright. ‘Was he unusually tall, probably more than 6 feet?’
‘Y … Yes’
‘Eh, that must be the same one we saw on the way to Mandalay.’
On the way to Mandalay, my dad had been driving. Apparently, he, my mum and my uncle’s lady saw the monk at that same place at around the same time while my uncle and I were both asleep. They thought about stopping the car, but as it was in the middle of nowhere they were too frightened to do it and drove on.
My parents concluded that it must have been a monk who had become enlightened through his very rigid practice of Buddhism. After all, that area was very near to some deserted hills where some very strict monks were believed to be practising their true and extreme Buddhist existence away from the general population. Buddhists believe that some of these monks gained power unknown to humans, including being able to levitate above the ground.
My parents assumed that the figure we saw was one of those extraordinary monks. They felt that seeing him was an omen that would bring them good luck. If they had had enough courage to stop the car and pay respect to the monk, they would have gained even more good luck.
My young mind was too scared to care about any good luck. All I was concerned about was that I didn’t want to be standing in the darkness in the dead of night to worship this figure who may or may not have turned out to be what they believed.
My sceptic mind didn’t dare refute their notion though, as that would mean offending the sacred beliefs of many Buddhists including my parents. I was afraid that if I dared to doubt it, some spirits might be angry with me and punish me. So, I was stuck somewhere in the grey area between the land of faith and the land of scepticism.
One thing I am sure is that I wasn’t dreaming. I definitely saw the extraordinarily tall figure floating at the side of the road, his saffron robe fluttering in the wind in the darkness in the middle of nowhere.