A vision of hell that induces homesickness is something of a curiosity, especially when that vision is encountered in the John Ritblat Gallery of London's British Library. Some of the library's greatest treasures are on display there: the Magna Carta, ancient Bibles and Korans, medieval mappa mundi. Among these priceless objects, taking up an entire wall of the gallery, is a series of watercolors by an unknown Burmese artist. Probably commissioned in the mid-1800s, at the beginning of a century of British rule over Burma, the paintings are meant to illustrate aspects of Buddhist cosmology: hell, heaven, the world, a pantheon of spirits and deities, a fortune-telling manual. Whimsy and insouciance are at the heart of these illustrations. The world is egg shaped. Heaven is a diagram, abstract and dull, of seven concentric circles. And hell? Hell is a field of open fires, encircled by a ring of flames, on which stick figures are busily kicking and punching, beating and beheading one another with long sticks and long swords while others are being impaled, hung upside down over spits, boiled in cauldrons, dismembered and devoured by wild beasts.

As I lean forward for a closer look, it occurs to me, as it must to anyone familiar with Burma's recent history of oppression and violence, that here in fact is an eerily prophetic hell.

Along with this message in the paintings, I see a metaphor in the very glass enclosing them. Exiles are beings with their noses forever pressed to the windows of the past, fogging up the panes with sighs of inchoate nostalgia and guilt. Yet the sigh I breathe as I step back from the glass is mostly one of relief. Exile, I am reminded, can be an escape from hell, a form of salvation, and not necessarily the state of privation and alienation it is often cracked up to be. With half the world in a state of dislocation, with not just intellectuals and revolutionaries but whole populations in search of such salvation, exile nowadays suggests quite other states of being. Freedom, for instance. Or privilege. Or even prestige.

Never was this paradox brought home to me more forcefully than on my return to Burma some three years ago, after half a lifetime of so-called exile in the U.S. Everywhere, my status as a Burmese-born visitor free to come and go about the world was greeted with a kind of wistful awe. Relatives I hadn't seen or heard from in three decades, old friends whose names or faces I had almost forgotten, office workers, taxi drivers, boatmen, Buddhist monks in remote monasteries—almost all of them made me feel that exile was more a badge of honor than a state of banishment.

My freedom from Burma had come in 1967, in the xenophobic days when few foreigners were let into the country and fewer nationals let out. An earlier attempt to escape to Thailand through backdoor routes had landed me in jail, where military-intelligence officials subjected me to a 10-day marathon of interrogation before releasing me as arbitrarily, it seemed, as they had arrested me.

The military junta had recently declared martial law in Rangoon, a citywide curfew was in effect, and I drove to Mingaladon Airport in the spooky atmosphere of a wartime blackout. Spookier still was the discovery that I was the sole passenger on Thai Airways International Flight 304 to Bangkok. I held my breath, from a combination of elation, fear and disbelief, throughout the one-hour flight. Now, 33 years later, I was returning on another Thai flight, this one filled nearly to capacity. As the plane sank lower and lower toward Rangoon, I looked through scudding clouds at the cultivated fields below and once again found myself struggling to breathe.

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