#three iron

10 Films That I Want to Watch or Re-Watch (2004):

This is the story of the time I ground three iron mirrors to dust. We had stopped for peanut butter ice cream and were sitting on top of a picnic table, neon plastic spoons in hand – mine was pink and shaped like a flamingo.

I was in Rangoon – as it was called then. In colonial Burma, it was a place of two halves: one half was a city of walls, the other a city of people; one half was English, the other Burmese; one half didn’t belong with the jungle creeping up on its cool, white houses that had to be scrubbed down every three days.

I had wandered into the British quarter, and there I met a girl in a starched peach dress. Her name was Jemima Grey and she was sitting by an ornamental pond filled with water lilies trying to keep a duck from wriggling off her lap. She told me that there had been more ducks but they had died, and one had been eaten by a panther, so now Puddleduck was lonely. If she didn’t hold on to him he would go and huddle with his reflection in one of the three iron mirrors that her father had left out on the veranda. There are times for pretences to make yourself feel better, Jemima told me, but times when you had to understand that your mother is dead now. Reflections in mirrors aren’t people.

I reached into my bag and pulled out my third pair of iron shoes, and gave them to Jemima. We dragged the iron mirrors to the ground in a circle in the middle of the veranda, and danced upon them to the music of a woman repeating the same four-note phrase to call supplicants to prayer at a Buddhist shrine, of insects in the bushes and skating along the top of the pond, of the servants preparing dinner, of old men muttering over chess games around the cheroots hanging from the corner of their mouths.