In our days it was known as the Rangoon University. Our freshman year as science students was at Yankin College, miles away from the main campus. Art students did their freshman classes at Htee-dan College in the west of Rangoon. It was June 1958, if I remember it right.
Like most of the science students, we’d done Physics, Chemistry, and mathematics at high school and therefore except for the labs and English classes we found it quite convenient to skip classes at will. Those days the two colleges had to share academic staff and they provided one or two buses to shuttle between the two places. We were not allow to board the buses. But never mind. We waited at the road junction and jumped them when they slow down or momentarily stopped there. This year-long adventure in the “island of beauties”, as we called Htee-dan, produced nothing for me, except one.
Our sophomore year was at the main campus of the Rangoon University. We met again.
Then there was this ugly incident of July 1962. That certainly needs stronger words than “ugly” and “incident”. Looking for records, I found only this remark at the margin of one of my notebooks:
That reads: “July 7, 1962: Don’t want to write anything– bad men”.
I vaguely remember that our university closed after that. I couldn’t remember for how long, but I’d read somewhere that it was for four months. Then reopened, and closed again. This note was from November 28, 1963. It said that on the late evening of that day the government declare closed the Science, Social Science, and Arts Faculties of the Rangoon University.
I couldn’t recall when and where we took our final exam in 1963. It could have been off-campus, as the University Council Office declared on the morning of December 11, 1963. But that must be for the academic year 1963-64, or was it? Now I am confused. Then I remember that I started working with SAMB (State Agricultural Marketing Board) by December 1963, so that I must have taken my final exam on March 1963 or thereabouts.
On the other hand, the declaration said that the exams for Rangoon and other universities would be held in March 1964 at specified regional centers and students need to apply for permission to sit for the exams at District Security Council Offices.
Those were the beginning of the tumultuous days. …
A decade later I was transferred to a provincial town and was accompanied by my family. Coincidentally, she happened to be with her family in a peaceful and misty town across the hills some twenty miles away. But we never met. That’s the way it was.
I passed a good part of my life like all ordinary people with nothing much to say or no stories to tell. Then there’s a few things in my life that I can’t physically collect to call my own, yet it’s my own and of others at the same time. I think that’s one way to define what love is, and its free.
The great Thitpok Pin is the one of those little things we hold dear, and I would say it belongs to all of us that way. I believe this heritage tree still symbolizes all the strength, righteousness, and the steadfastness the sacred campus and the institutions on it and their histories, we dreamed, would be bestowing on us, when we saw the majestic tree for the first time. Then it’s no harm when time passes, we failed to realize our dreams, and there is this nostalgic, sweet sadness for the tree and the campus.
In June of this year my son took me to visit this campus again after an interval of so many years! All the familiar places seems still there, with a few additions. I noticed the additional library building and the building for Information Technology. But I felt a bit suffocated. My gazes seem to be obstructed by some fencing in every direction. Anyway, we had tea in a tea shop in the same place that was known as the “Science Canteen” in our days. Tea is still good, but the place has swollen and the shops appeared to be a lot more crowded.
Approaching the old Thitpok from south from the tip of the Math wing, I saw it neatly fenced.
I would label this picture as “An old man, an umbrella, and one Thitpok tree”. At the back and on the fencing the nameplate looked strange.
Since when did they change the spelling of the name of the tree to “သစ်ပုတ်”? We had always known that the correct spelling is “သစ်ပုပ်”, and that its another name is “ဘိုင်”.
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