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days. December, thought Mya Mya, is a hypocrite.
    She was sitting on a wooden stool in front of her house, looking out over the fields and the valley to the hilltops in the distance. The air was so clear that she felt she was looking through a spyglass to the ends of the earth. She did not trust the weather. Although she could not remember ever in her life having seen a cloud in a December sky, she would not rule out the possibility of a sudden downpour. Or of a typhoon, even if not a single one in living memory had found its way from the Bay of Bengal into the mountains around Kalaw. It was not impossible. As long as there were typhoons anywhere, one might well devastate Mya Mya’s native soil. Or the earth might quake. Even, or perhaps especially, on a day like today, when nothing foreshadowed catastrophe. Complacency was treacherous, confidence a luxury that Mya Mya could not afford. That much she knew at the bottom of her heart. For her there would be neither peace nor rest. Not in this world. Not in her life.
    She had learned her lesson seventeen years ago on that scorching hot day in August, playing down by the river, she and her twin brother, when he slipped on the slick stones. When he lost his balance and flailed his arms about, helpless, like a fly under an inverted glass. When he fell into the waters that swept him away. On his journey. The everlasting one. She had stood on the bank, unable to help. She hadwatched his face emerge from the waters once again, one last time.
    A priest would have called it God’s will, a test of faith that the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, had set for the family. The Lord moves in mysterious ways.
    The Buddhist monks made sense of the tragedy by referring to the boy’s previous lives. He must have done something dreadful in one of these lives for which his present death was the consequence.
    The day after the accident, the local astrologer offered his own explanation: The children had gone north to play, and they ought not to have done that, not with their birth date, not on that Saturday in August. It was no wonder they got into trouble. If only he, the astrologer, had been consulted earlier, he might have warned them. Life was that simple, that complicated.
    Some part of her had died with her brother, but there had been no funeral ceremony for it. Her family hadn’t even noticed it was gone. Her parents were farmers busy with the harvest, with sowing, and with four other children. It was difficult enough just putting rice and a few vegetables on the table every evening.
    Mya Mya, the half-dead, was alone. In the years that followed she worked hard to bring order into a world off-kilter. Every afternoon she went to the water to sit in the place where she had seen her brother for the last time, to wait for him to resurface. The river took his body as plunder and never returned it. At night before sleep she would tell himabout her day, knowing he could hear her. She slept on his side of their shared straw mat, under his blanket, and years later she still had the scent of him in her nose.
    She refused to help her mother with the washing down at the river. Indeed, she avoided water altogether and bathed only in the company of her parents. As if she could drown in a bucket. She wore certain clothes on certain days, refused until she was fifteen to speak on Saturdays, and always fasted on Sundays. She wove herself an intricate web of rituals and dwelt entirely therein.
    Rituals offered security. Since her brother’s death, the family was no longer consulting the astrologer just once a year. They saw him almost weekly. They crouched beside him. They hung on his every word. They followed his instructions, desperate to be protected from any of the world’s harm. Even more than her parents, Mya Mya took the astrologer’s words to heart. Having herself been born on a Thursday, she had to watch out especially for Saturdays, a day on which misfortune loomed, particularly in April, August,