Inside the airport terminal, the atmosphere—still sinister to me after so many years away—proved similarly breathtaking, reminding me that nothing can be taken for granted in a police state, not even the simple act of breathing. "Things are different now," a family friend from the old days kept insisting as we drove around the city in a quest to track down every house I had ever lived in. She pointed to the high-rise buildings in a downtown sector that lent an air of dubious prosperity to that otherwise bankrupt capital. "So many changes, do you see?" But I didn't see. Just around the corner, on 40th Street, were the old offices of The Nation, the English-language daily my late father had founded in the 1940s and published until his arrest in the 1960s. Nothing seemed to have changed in the least: not the shop houses with their ragged laundry lines, not the flooding ditches, not the stray dogs snuffling in the gutters, not the rubbish heaps on the streets. Everything seemed shockingly true to my childhood memories—including the doorway to No. 290, behind which, for all I knew, still lay our old printing presses, shut down by government order three decades ago.

And when we drove past the entrance to Insein Prison, where my father had spent five years, locked up, along with thousands of others, without charges or trial—all the trappings of that infamous facility seemed grimly familiar as well. The entrance was manned by half a dozen guards who lounged in the shade of an old banyan tree, smug in their power over a cowed populace. The banyan tree housed its obligatory shrine, decorated with scraps of colored paper and withered blossoms left by the prisoners' families. The small watchtower looming above was almost hidden from view by greenery. All along the street were market stalls and crowds and lottery-ticket vendors. Repression had reached the level of domestic routine, as in all seasoned dictatorships.

"A different time now, isn't it?" my friend kept asking, perhaps sensing my observations to the contrary. "Time to forgive and forget, isn't it?" Here, it struck me, was a fundamental difference between those who stayed behind, like my friend, for whom the decision to forget is both a survival mechanism and a political act, and exiles like myself, for whom the same could be said about the decision not to forget.

Nostalgia distorts memory, it is true, but a past that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth tends to curb nostalgia and to cut one's recall down to size. Thus it surprised me to see that the houses I knew, the churches, schools, markets and streets I once frequented, instead of being smaller than I remembered (as often happens with childhood memories) were in fact considerably bigger than my grudging imagination had allowed them to be. Yet even with the past restored to size, when I left a month later to return to the U.S., I knew what I had known upon leaving more than 30 years ago: home—if I could still call this home—was the last place I wanted to live.

Buddhism is the official religion of Burma, and Buddhism, with its teachings on impermanence and the universality of human suffering, is thought to explain in large part the extraordinary tolerance of the Burmese. They have tolerated, above all, four decades of a government renowned for lying, cheating, stealing, torturing and murdering. Do the tenets of Buddhism explain too, I wonder, this particular version of hell before me in the British Library? Because a closer look at these old paintings brings yet another revelation: the fires of hell seem to me now like a picnic of bonfires. And although the stick figures are indeed busy kicking, punching and stabbing one another, their kicks look like dance, their punches like calisthenics, their stabs like harmless swordplay. The whole business of damnation appears to be make-believe.

Displayed against another wall of the same gallery is that rarest of manuscripts: the scroll of the Diamond Sutra, the oldest book in print. Published in 868, this Chinese translation of early Indian Buddhist texts derives from the Mahayana tradition and not from the Theravada Buddhism of the Burmese. Still, in describing the world as unreal—in telling us that there are no objects, no people, no other living beings—it seems to me a guiding spirit behind my Burmese artist's hell. For if all is unreal, suffering too is unreal. Thus, any representation of suffering can only be a parody of suffering.

Parody or not, the images draw me to the glass for one last look. This time I strain to read the blocks of handwritten script accompanying the images—letters in ancient Mon, modern Burmese and scriptural Pali. But the glass is too thick and the lighting too dim for me to decipher more than a dozen disjointed words. The exile's privilege of standing outside the glass looking in has its advantages, but the price of admission is a certain loss of vision. Exiles can press their noses to windows all they want, but they are never fully able to read the fine print.

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