“Khin Myat?” she asked with a kernel of doubt in her voice.
Hearing her call his name, he jumped as if he’d been tasered. He knew that voice from the past. He stepped closer and stared at the woman’s face. She saw his puzzled expression.
“It’s me. Su Su.”
And so it was. Su Su had been in his class twenty years before. She continued to nurse her baby, waving to Khin Myat.
“Khin Myat. Everyone in the market is talking about you.”
He frowned.
“What are they saying?”
“They want to know why your uncle’s business is so bad that he sent you to walk up and down the market all morning and selling only two tickets.”
“I sold three.”
“Three months ago, Khin Myat, I had a dream that you had come back from America.”
“I’m back.”
“With your wife?”
“That’s finished.”
“Sorry,” she said, shifting the weight of her baby, moving her from one nipple to the other. “At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I saw you wandering around the market like you were lost. And I said that’s Khin Myat selling lottery tickets.”
He clenched his jaw. It was very difficult to bear this humiliation. He swallowed hard.
“Things are not always what they appear to be.”
She shook her head.
“You were always a mysterious boy,” she said. “And if they survive, boys like that grow into mysterious men. That’s what my father always said. Come and sit with me and I’ll tell you what I dreamt last night. It may have meaning. Perhaps I should buy a lottery ticket.”
He decided to accept her invitation for two reasons. First, she was someone from his old school, and he hadn’t seen her in twenty years. And second, her stall was directly across from the one that Calvino was seeking information about. He climbed over the counter and sat on a stool beside her.
She explained that she had named her daughter after an angel, the same name as a dove—mair jopew, a female dove. As she rocked her baby, she told Khin Myat of her dream.
“Two nights ago a mair jopew had flown down from heaven, and not just any heaven, but the highest of all the heavens. The dove took me and my baby on its back and flew to the north, toward a temple in the remote mountains. I wasn’t afraid even as I looked down at a huge forest around the temple. On the ground I found myself surrounded by many kinds of animals: peacocks, monkeys, snakes, hippos, goats, deer and many kinds of nesting birds, all mingled. I saw a python over thirty feet long, a snake that could talk to other animals. The python rose up as I came near, but when it saw that I held my baby, it said that I could pass. Dogs ran up and greeted my daughter with a low-pitched cry of joy, but I saw they paid no attention to the other children who came behind us. A monk came down the path toward us, and when he reached me, said I’d been expected. He said that the temple I was about to enter was more than two thousand years old. Centuries before, the pagoda had been abandoned, but a waysar, a monk possessing supernatural powers—mind reading, flying, dream channeling—had cleaned it up, repaired it, and brought it back from the dead.”
She adjusted the position of her baby, wiped its mouth with a cloth and sipped tea, pouring a cup for Khin Myat.
“That’s it?” he asked.
She had more and had waited for him to show interest in hearing the rest.
“The waysar had enlisted local villagers to help him rebuild the high wall surrounding the grounds and paint it red, and the stones were placed one by one by hand and painted as he had said to do. Soon another monk joined us and gave me coconut juice. The two monks led us inside a sala where the waysar waited in front of an enormous Buddha. This monk, who knelt on the floor, stood up and faced me. I looked at his face. It was you, Khin Myat, and you said that you had come from America, that your journey had led you to meet me at the temple, and that we would meet again. Do you have a ticket ending in 945?”
Many people wanted that number. He checked the lottery tickets.
“I have one with 379.”
“Not so lucky,” she said. “But for old times’ sake, I will buy it.”
Khin Myat thought his first private investigation job was going quite well. Though the people working in the market might not be fully understood by someone like Vincent Calvino, Khin Myat could see right through them. He was one of them. Su Su had been a classmate. Not only had she bought a lottery ticket, but she was giving him a platform from which to do his surveillance. He decided to press his luck with Su Su.
“That stall over there,” he said, nodding in the direction of the target stall, “it doesn’t do much business. They must be unlucky.”