What was the real extent of Burma’s spell over Orwell’s mind? It was explored in depth by Emma Larkin in her book “Finding George Orwell in Burma,” in which she makes a sinisterly compelling argument. Orwell’s great trilogy of novels (“Burmese Days,” “Animal Farm” and “1984”), she contends, presciently track the development of Burma — a colonial society transformed, through independence and the socialist military coup in 1962, into a version of “Animal Farm,” and then “1984.” Fortunately, the evolution continues with recent reforms and the 2010 release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, the famous dissident and now opposition leader.

Orwell was posted to the Irrawaddy Delta in 1924 and spent his days doing crime-scene forensics and surveillance work, a job that gave him an invaluable insight into how police states work. But the monotonous, disorienting plains may also have shaped him in darker ways. Burma was one of the most violent parts of the British Raj. Dacoits, or armed gangs, roamed its waterways, visiting terror on the populace.

As I wandered every night through the heart of Burma’s old colonial city — known in Orwell’s day as Rangoon — down the length of Merchant Road and the wide avenues dripping with interwoven trees, I sensed how that long-dead society with its secret police and its neurotic surveillance bureaucracy had given rise directly both to the authoritarian government of today and Orwell’s masterpiece of yesterday.

But the verdant capital, to which officials like Orwell longed to return after lengthy stints in the jungle, remains alluring. “Oh, the joy of those Rangoon trips!” as Flory puts it in “Burmese Days.” “The rush to Smart and Mookerdum’s bookshop for the new novels out from England, the dinner at Anderson’s with beefsteaks and butter that had travelled eight thousand miles on ice, the glorious drinking-bout!”

I couldn’t find Anderson’s and its beefsteaks — it has long disappeared, or perhaps it has been renamed. Still, the British buildings remain, with their curious resemblance to the fictional London slums described in the opening pages of “1984,” “sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses” — except that they are also monumental, lovely and haunted. Often painted aquamarine and dark liver-red, garnished with creeping moss and ferns, and adorned with dripping laundry, they are the ruins of an older city that is still alive — accidentally beautiful things preserved by failure.

Around the corner from the Strand, I often passed a pale gray columned classical European building, flying a state flag out front and bearing the Orwellian label Bureau of Special Investigations. A man was asleep on the porch, his head resting on a tray of cauliflowers.

One night, I made a time-consuming trek to find a Muslim shrine I had always wanted to visit, the tomb of the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, which today lies on a deserted back street not far from the Shwedagon Pagoda. Zafar was exiled by the British to Rangoon in 1858 after the failed Sepoy Rebellion and died there four years later. The shrine that now houses his remains is spare and unvisited, and a lone guardian comes to the locked metal gates to admit the curious. Standing there in pouring rain, at the edge of an unlit alley, I wondered at the way my own people had busily gone about terminating dynasties — and histories — that might threaten their own new order. The guardian showed me around, and then we stood under the pasty portrait of Zafar himself pinned to the outside wall. “First visitor this month,” he said sadly, but with an ineffable defiance.