Tin Tut’s wife must have told Aung San’s wife, Daw Khin Kyi, about the visit of their husbands to the palace when Tin Tut returned to Rangoon. Perhaps there is a [lost] photograph of that lunch? The wedding date for Philip Mountbatten and Princess Elizabeth had just been announced in early July, and undoubtedly Aung San and/or his wife Khin Kyi heard it on the radio or read it in the newspaper. Was Aung San channelling her desire to go to the wedding, as well as his? For him, it would demonstrate that he had not given up on the Commonwealth [or Britain], although he had already sworn to his communist allies that Burma would not join it. He had just learned how desperate Burma’s financial predicament actually was (owing large sums to India for war services), therefore such a visit to London for the wedding before independence just might pay off. But I also sense Aung San’s intrigue to see royal pomp and circumstance up close and to engage in some diplomacy on the side.

I used to visit Bogyoke Aung San’s residence in Bahan when I stayed nearby; as a museum, it was sometimes open and sometimes closed, depending on the rise and fall of his state reputation. I rode in taxis with his face hanging from the mirror on an early currency note, and in taxis without that note, depending on their risk-taking; it was an offence to display that piece of currency because of the face. I attended (invited by word of mouth only) the first excited public display of paintings inspired by the Bogyoke himself, at an upstairs gallery on Pansodan Street, perhaps about 2007 or 2008. Censors did not approve of paintings, photos, or images of him or his daughter. Aung San’s lovely residence had been the house of one of the early mayors of Rangoon. I took morning jogs down the long winding road which reached it from Kandawgyi lake. I now realize that it was from here where he drove (or was driven) to the office at the Secretariat on 19 July 1947 and that those few books I noted on the bookshelf in the spartan sitting room were his last books, perhaps where he sat sipping morning tea while his two-year-old daughter Suu Kyi played around on the floor that fateful day. That living room had been restored like a tomb.

Having long known about the assassination, I only recently started learning about the ways he lived by reading the obscure footnotes to documents in Tinker’s massive volumes and previously secret files in London. I learned that Nehru thought Aung San was too ill-dressed to negotiate with the British PM in London and dispatched him to his own tailor in Delhi to be re-suited before his departure. I learned the house produced two family tragedies, the deaths of Aung San and five years later of their young son Aung San Lin who accidentally drowned in an ornamental pool in the garden. The result was that Daw Khin Kyi opted to leave the house in 1953.

I too had previously accepted the common image of Aung San: austere, awkward, and humourless. In 1947, he had only recently and reluctantly admitted to his 1942 bayonetting of an uncooperative resisting village headman (as he was trained to do by his Japanese officers on Hainan Island): he had thus already proved his ruthless side. Moreover, as a former self-declared communist, he had other leaders closely watching him, ready to pounce on any pro-imperialist, pro-British, pro-monarchist, pro-business tendencies. To most of those self-proclaimed leftist men, a royal wedding would be, in theory, the height of bourgeois decadence. Aung San’s uninhibited and extremely private performance that night at the Governor’s residence was a surprising dimension of his personality, a startling revelation. Cracking his fingers on the Governor’s wife’s bedside, telling jokes, then asking for an invitation to a royal wedding 9000 kms away? He remains an enigma, like the face on the currency.