Zo Zo, my Burmese cab driver, snapped his head around in shock.
``He's dead? No!''
``Yes, I heard it on the BBC yesterday.''
A quick conference with a friend in Burmese confirmed the truth of what I'd said. Ne Win, the paranoid, astrologer-consulting tyrant who closed off the nation of Burma -- now called Myanmar -- from the world and presided over its ruin, had died the day before at age 91 in Rangoon, where he had lived under house arrest since March.
Ironically, Ne Win's neighbor was the Burmese pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, also held under house arrest until this year.
What happens when an ex-dictator who ruled with a combination of personal fancy and iron fist for 26 years dies?
In Myanmar, the surprising answer is: nothing.
News travels slowly in this Southeast Asian nation where unauthorized possession of fax machines and other communications devices can bring several years in the hoosegow. And citizens are very wary of talking politics with foreigners.
Since the Internet has been banned in Myanmar, the only indication of General Ne Win's passing other than whispers was a news release that mentioned neither his military rank nor the fact that he ruled the country for decades. It was a strange end to a strange era.
Myanmar doesn't like visitors. It likes journalists even less. Hedging my bets, I entered this isolated country as a tourist. Call it journalist's curiosity, but I wanted to see what life was like in what has been termed ``the world's most politically incorrect destination.''.
What I got was a firsthand view of an Orwellian country controlled by a pariah regime that has razed villages, forcibly relocated its citizens, and press-ganged them to work on government projects in the twisted hopes of attracting tourists' hard currency. Myanmar is also rife with ethnic insurgencies.
It is a nation of 42 million people amazingly untouched by the West. Men still wear traditional skirts called longyis. Burmese ``wheels'' aren't Toyotas; they're horse and oxen carts. Few vestiges of Myanmar's British-ruled past survive.
Little did I expect that ``the Old Man'' would die during my visit. Suddenly, I was one of the few Western journalists inside Myanmar to record reactions, which weremuted out of fear and ignorance. But the paucity of response spoke volumes.
The Burmese can thank Ne Win for their present predicament: poverty and isolation, which has helped turn Myanmar into the world's second-largest producer of heroin, much of which is destined for Americans' veins. His despotic rule is a lesson in the damage one man's whims can do to millions of lives. He will be best remembered for transforming what should have been the richest nation in Southeast Asia into one of the poorest.
Dissatisfied with the slow pace of democracy, Ne Win, Burma's prime minister in 1962, decided alone could do better. He suspended the constitution, dismissed parliament and kicked Westerners out of Burma. Dancing, gambling and high-rise buildings were forbidden. But, setting a standard for future weird tyrants, Ne Win began to rule by superstition. A wizard convinced him that 9 was his lucky number. So Ne Win scrapped Burma'sordinary denominations of money and introduced 45- and 90-kyat notes because they were divisible by 9. He had his pilots circle 9 times before landing his plane, and he reportedly married 9 times. And 99 Buddhist monks were on hand for Ne Win's last public appearance.
Other oddities abounded. Ne Win washed himself with the blood of dolphins to ensure youth and vigor. And one morning, he suddenly decreed that cars in Burma would drive on the right-hand side of roads instead of the left. The Old Man's death is likely to herald change. The current military junta, which seized power from Ne Win in 1988, is making a show of getting tough on drugs. An estimated billion amphetamine tablets are expected to flow this year out of Myanmar, which is desperate to be taken off America's drug- friendly-nations list.
But the most lasting legacy of Ne Win's death may finally be the emergence of democracy, suspended by his successors after Aung San Suu Kyi's party swept elections held in 1990.
As repressed as they are, even the Burmese sense a coming change. Zo Zo, the cab driver, put it best: ``I think we are going to see a big difference from now on.''