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Sitting on the wooden stools of the Honey Tea House we had breakfast - some very greasy fritters, which a young man deftly plucked with bare hands from a cauldron of boiling oil. We dunked them in condensed milk. Among the soldiers and traders at the other tables on the pavement, Andrew saw a friend of his, the son of a local lording of the Lua’ tribe, and invited him to join us.
People continued to file past on their way to the market. We saw some men dressed entirely in black, each with a big machete in a bamboo sheath at his side. ‘Those are the Wa, the wild Wa’, Andrew’s friend informed us with a certain disgust. ‘They never part from their big knives’.
He told us that since he was small his father had taught him to be extremely careful of these Wa. Unlike the ‘civilized’ Wa, these had remained true to their traditions, and they still really cut people’s heads off. Shortly before the harvest, when their fields are full of ripe rice, the wild Wa make forays into their neighbor’s lands, capture someone - preferably a child - and with the same sycthe that they later use for the harvest, cut off his head.
‘They bury it in their fields as an offering to the rice goddess. It’s their way of auguring a good harvest’, said the young man. ‘They’re dangerous only when they go outside their own territory. At home they don’t harm anyone. If you go and visit them they are very kind and hospitable. You only have to be careful of what you they give you to eat!’
At times, he said, someone invited to dinner by the Wa finds a piece of tattooed meat on his plate. In a word, it would seem that the Wa are also cannibals - at least if you take the word of their neighbors, the Lua’.
I asked Andrew and his friend to help me find a fortune-teller. Divination is a widely practiced art in Burma. It is said that the Burmese, geographically placed between China and India - the two great sources of this tradition - have been especially skilled in combining the occult wisdom of their two neighbors, and that their practitioners possess great powers. Superstition has played an enormous role in the history of the whole region.
After three days in Kengtung, Andrew and his friend had not yet found me a fortune teller. Perhaps Andrew’s Protestant upbringing made him reluctant, or perhaps it was true that the two most famous fortune tellers were out of town ‘for consultations’.
Finally, on our last evening, we found one playing badminton with his children in the garden of his house. But with great kindness, he excused himself: he received only from 9:30 to 11:30 in the morning, after meditating. I tried to persuade him to make an exception, but he was adamant. He had made a vow imposing that limit ‘to avoid falling victim to the lust of gain’. If he broke that commitment he would lose all his powers, he said. His resistance impressed me more than anything he might have told me.
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