Daw Ohnma found her grandson's green jacket among the rubble of the Hsi Hseng warehouse at eleven in the morning on the second of June, two and a half days after the explosion, and she found it in a precise spot, she told me afterward when I asked her to tell me, about forty paces from the main crater, in an area she calls in her head "the bend of the three trees" because at that bend, before the warehouse, before the crater, before the smoke, there had been three tamarind trees that she herself had watched grow from saplings alongside her own children and that today are two and a half trees because the third was snapped a metre and twenty from the ground by the blast of the thirty-first of May, and yet the jacket lay just beneath the stump of the third, folded in three, with the two cobalt-blue plastic buttons holding the noon light in a way that seemed to her, she told me, a message from the monks, although U Pandita, the monk of the small monastery she has attended for forty-seven years, has always told her that the messages of the monks are otherwise.

Daw Ohnma's walk from that spot back home, a walk of about eighteen minutes for a young woman and which she does in thirty because she is sixty-seven and because her right knee was ruined after the birth of her first son (a son who, she went on, lives in Australia today and does not yet know about the explosion because she does not call him so as not to disturb him and because he does not call so as not to disturb her, a mode of mutual reticence that has been characteristic of their family for three generations), is the walk all the old women of the village adopt when they carry something that cannot be seen; it is a walk slightly bent forward, the apron held in one hand only, and this walk, she told me, had been taught to her by her mother when she went to the monastery of Indaung, which was the village monastery before it was rebuilt higher up the hill in two thousand thirteen at the will of a certain Aung Min, geomancer of the district, who had maintained that it was the hill, and not the valley, the place where the ancestors would receive the offerings; that same hill, today, houses the explosives warehouse of the Mansam mining district, and it is the hill that exploded two and a half days ago.

Once home, Daw Ohnma laid the jacket on the kitchen table, the one of teak her husband had built her in two thousand five and which has a small crack on the north-west corner that she cleans with coconut oil every Tuesday, and she poured the green tea the way she always pours it, first into the small cup for the ancestors, then into her own, and she sat down. Her daughter Ma Khin, who sells vegetables at the Taunggyi market and who is the boy's mother, came in through the back door, saw the jacket, and did not ask, because Ma Khin is a woman of thirty-two who already knows that there are jackets one does not ask about. Daw Ohnma, she told me afterward, thought in that moment of the monk U Pandita, because two weeks before the explosion she had brought him a plate of curry and the monk had told her that the smoke of the joss-sticks in his temple smelled of petrol, and she had answered "it is the season, monk" because in that season the wind carries from the lake the smell of the petrol of the tractors that dredge the bottom for minerals, but it was a false answer because in truth the smoke of the joss-sticks smelled of petrol because some of the village boys, six and seven and eight years old, worked at the warehouse on the hill and carried on themselves, even after washing, the smell of what they handled, and that morning Daw Ohnma had thought for the first time that U Pandita knew, and that he did not say it so as not to force her to say it, in a chain of things unsaid that held together three generations of village women and two generations of monks.

When Ma Khin bent to kiss her forehead before going out, Daw Ohnma laid her hand on the jacket; she was about to say "this is Min Thu's"; she did not say it. The daughter went out. The grandmother took the jacket, put it back in her apron, and returned to the hill, again for the thirty-minute walk, under the noon sun, and set the jacket on a clearly visible stone, with the two cobalt-blue plastic buttons turned to the sky, because there the Buddhist rite for the grandson would take place on her own account and on the boy's account, and she would accompany it without witnesses, and no one would know that the jacket came from Min Thu, and no one would know that Min Thu was six years old, and no one — this was, she told me, the most important part — no one would know that she had already known, for months, that the grandson worked at the warehouse, and that she had never spoken.

In the evening Ma Khin asked, drying her hands on her apron, "mama, have you seen Min Thu's green jacket? I can't find it anywhere." Daw Ohnma answered, softly, "I don't know, my daughter," and she said it looking at the crack on the north-west corner of the teak table her husband had built her in two thousand five.