Ba Pe
Ko S'la's younger brother, a servant in Flory's household since he was a boy — and, secretly, Ma Hla May's lover. He walks her home from the bazaar with a lantern, and helps carry his master to bed.
The book
At a glance
- Junior servant in Flory's household, and Ko S'la's brother
- Since he was a young boy
- He is Ma Hla May's lover while she is Flory's mistress
- Chapters 4, 5, 6, 9 and 19, and the last two chapters
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeBa Pe is the younger brother of Ko S'la, the Burmese servant who has looked after John Flory, the English timber merchant at the centre of the novel, for fifteen years. Both brothers work in Flory's bungalow in Kyauktada, and Ba Pe has been in the household since he was a boy. When Flory came back from home leave, Ba Pe, then a child, was one of the servants who met him at the landing stage with a present. His was a squirrel in a wicker cage.
He is a junior servant and the book uses him for the small jobs: carrying the paddy out to feed the birds, walking down to the bazaar at night with a lantern to bring somebody home, taking the feet when a drunk man has to be lifted.
The one thing he does on his own account is kept to a single clause. Ma Hla May, the young Burmese woman Flory keeps as his mistress, is having an affair with Ba Pe, and neither Flory nor anyone else in the book finds out. Orwell drops it into a scene where Flory is in bed with her, and never returns to it.
Ba Pe asks the questions in the servants' quarters that nobody else says out loud. When the household is worrying that their employer is about to marry an Englishwoman, it is Ba Pe who asks whether he is really going to. His brother answers that heaven knows, that she is the young police officer's mistress at the moment, and that their ways are not our ways.
How the book draws them
- How the book places himKo S'la's younger brother and a servant in the same house. Orwell gives no physical description of him at all.
- The squirrelFlory came back to Kyauktada from leave to find the servants crowding round him with presents: a sambhur skin from Ko S'la, sweetmeats and a garland of marigolds from the Indians, and from Ba Pe, a young boy at the time, a squirrel in a wicker cage.
- The lanternWhen Ma Hla May goes down to the bazaar in the evening to gamble away the five rupees she has got out of Flory, Ba Pe walks down with a lantern to see her home.
- Her loverMa Hla May's affair with Ba Pe is stated once, in a bracket, while she lies passively in Flory's bed thinking about something else. Flory never learns of it.
- Feeding the birdsIn the morning he comes out with a bowl of paddy for the pigeons and for Nero, the household's tame fighting cock.
- Carrying his master to bedFlory is found unconscious in a long chair having drunk three-quarters of a bottle of whisky. Ko S'la calls for Ba Pe, tells him to take the heels while he takes the head, and the two of them carry him through and lay him gently on the bed.
Ba Pe is one of the servants who runs into the bedroom after the shot that kills Flory. In the last chapter Ko S'la inherits four hundred rupees under the will and the family opens a tea-shop in the bazaar. It fails because Ko S'la's two wives fight in it all day. Both brothers go back into service, are sacked from one job after another, and have a year of poverty in which Ko S'la's youngest child dies of a cough. Ba Pe ends the novel as a water-carrier in a Rangoon household at sixteen rupees a month.