Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "Do you play table tennis? Table tennis is the one sport that I excel in. My greatest hobby, my only sport."

  "I'll play you anytime, but I'm sure I'd lose."

  "Look," he said. He had put the moon dust down and snatched up an old photograph. A woman with light hair and a pale dress, on a sunny day in a garden that was probably English, was surrounded by three androgynous children. "That's my mother. Which one is me?"

  I chose the wrong one. He was the more girlish and subdued child in the frilly outfit.

  "That was taken in Taunton or Minehead. I was about six." He smiled at this scene from the 1920s—the sunshine, the flowers, his beautiful mother.

  I said, "Is there a film of Day After Tomorrow?"

  "I think so. I think I walked out."

  "Childhood's End is one of my favorites."

  "'I Remember Babylon' is mine," he said. "Wonderful story. It won a prize in Best Ever. Where is it?" He fossicked in a stack of books and found a copy of his Collected Stories. "In here somewhere. 'Dog Star' is another one I like."

  "Childhood's End could be a good film," I said.

  "Should be a film, but it's too downbeat from the human point of view." He was trying to find "I Remember Babylon" in the thick book of stories. In front of him, in all the clutter, was a typed poem, Shelley's "Ozymandias."

  "I love this poem," I said.

  He put the Collected Stories down and picked up the poem. "I wanted to reread it." He looked closely and read, "'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Heh-heh."

  "Maybe the earth will end up like the scene in 'Ozymandias.'"

  "If you wait long enough, oh, yes," he said. Then he looked directly at me and said, "Did I mention how I saved the life of the man who made the atom bomb? I'm trying to remember the details. And then there's this other matter." He pulled the diary out of the clutter. "When did the Titanic sink? Was it today? I think I wrote something about it."

  We found a reference book and the facts: the Titanic hit the iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank early on the morning of the fifteenth.

  As I was noting this, Sir Arthur said, "The plane came low down the runway"—he was describing how he had saved the life of the man who invented the A-bomb. After this scattered recollection, which I found hard to visualize, he said, "It should be in my biography. It's somewhere in my writings. It's very spooky. And the other film I'd like to see again is The Lost World, about 1930. First film I ever saw."

  The hero of that Conan Doyle story and some others ("The Day the Earth Screamed") is Professor Challenger—bold scientist, man of action and adventure. It was easy to imagine an aged and infirm Professor Challenger as someone like Sir Arthur, surrounded by books and trophies, faltering and fugitive in his memories.

  "Conan Doyle, well, he went nutty," Sir Arthur said. "It was spiritualism."

  "Wasn't it the death of his wife that unhinged him?"

  Sir Arthur was frowning. He said, "I'm trying to remember the name of the astronomer who said, 'Flying is impossible. I've proved it beyond all argument.' And the Wright brothers had already taken off! Heh-heh."

  "What's the next big thing in science?"

  He didn't hesitate. He said, "Matter transfer."

  "'Travel by Wire' is one of your stories. That's matter transfer."

  "Did I write that? I can't recall." He thumped the desk and became stern. "What I need is to draw up a chronology! The main events. The books. The places. People. Friends. The scripts. See," and now he leaned over and faced me, "scriptwriting is not very inspirational. It's a hard slog." He began trawling at the side of his desk. In a stack of books he found the one he was looking for. "Here it is. The Ghost from the Grand Banks. Titanic—all of it."

  He turned the book over in his trembling hands.

  "If she could be raised, what a tourist attraction!" he said.

  I smiled at his sudden excitement. He was a scientist, but he was also a showman, and spectacle, the glamorous, the stupendous, the Professor Challenger exploits, were essential aspects of his literary imagination, and perhaps of his science too, wowing the reader, dreaming of the undreamed of, in the literature of astonishment.

  Still holding his book, he said sadly, "I'm spooked by the man in the lifeboat handing over his child. 'Goodbye, my little son.'" He paused. He was tearful. He said, "Died of exposure! Sister ship came along. Too late! Disaster!" After swallowing a little, he said tentatively, "You wrote some books."

  "Yes. In one of them, The Mosquito Coast, there's an unattributed quote from you about technology and magic."

  "Clarke's Third Law!" he said and rubbed his hands. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

  "What is Clarke's First Law?" I asked.

  "First Law," he said, hardly hesitating. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to go beyond the impossible."

  "Second Law?"

  "There is no Second Law, only first and third. Heh-heh" He became playful and animated. He began to recite a poem he said he'd written long ago. Perhaps his numbered laws put him in mind of it.

  The two-legged lama's a priest,

  The four-legged llama's a beast.

  Alas, for cosmic melodrama

  There isn't any three-legged lama.

  "I didn't realize you were a poet."

  "I write poetry occasionally," he said, and then an expression strained his features. I had seen this off and on during my visit, his trying to remember something. He said with difficulty, "Did I ever tell you the story of how I shared bed and breakfast with the czar of Russia?"

  He was addressing me as though speaking to an old and valued friend. I said, "No. I'd love to hear it."

  "Oh, yes." He smiled. "We were only a few weeks old! You see—" He gripped his head with his fingers like a soothsayer trying to force a vision, and then in a convulsive way said, "They were in exile in England in 1918. We had an English nanny, a Miss Hinckley, and she"—he paused and pressed his head again—"she'd been to Russia." His voice trailed off and he seemed out of breath. "Royal family, yes." He had lost the thread of the story and was murmuring Miss Hinckley's name. At last he said, "What stories she could tell."

  He went silent, drifting into a private reverie. I sat wondering if I should excuse myself and leave, but Sir Arthur seemed content. I covertly made notes, a sort of inventory of the framed pictures and what trophies I could read. There was a shelf of model planes—jet planes, and toy rockets.

  "You asked if I wrote poems," he said and brightened. "I wrote a poem when I was young. It ended, 'I rose and fled, afraid to be alone.'"

  He became sad, seeming to remember. I said, "What were the circumstances?"

  "I was being evacuated to America. Sent away." He was staring into space. With feeling, he quoted again, "I rose and fled, afraid to be alone."

  His secretary knocked and opened the study door. "It's time," she said. To me, she said, "Sir Arthur's tired. He needs his lunch and his nap."

  But Sir Arthur was still in his posture of recitation, his back straight, his head upright. I thought he was going to say some more lines of his poem. He said, "I dedicated it to the boy I was in love with."

  His secretary winced. She had started wheeling him out, but Sir Arthur was smiling wistfully, and I felt I'd had a glimpse of his passion and sadness.*

  * Sir Arthur died on March 22, 2008, as I was correcting these pages. He was buried in Colombo, his tombstone bearing an epitaph he wrote himself: "Here lies Arthur C. Clarke. He never grew up and never stop growing."

  ***

  THE NEXT MORNING I WENT to Fort Station in Colombo. The station had not changed, except that it was very crowded because of Avurudu, the Sinhalese New Year, the occasion of the full moon. Paul Bowles, who spent time on this coast, once wrote, "New Years here is not a day but a season." True—even a week later there were rituals and high jinks and reduced service on buses and trains, most people regarding the holiday as a reason to stay home, eating the spe
cified meals and obeying the astrological directives.

  This also happened to be an auspicious day to travel (once the head was "anointed by the juice of the nuga leaves at 7:39 A.M. while standing on karanda leaves"), and the ticket line was so long I simply pushed myself onto the train and got a seat. No one asked for my ticket. The train had not changed in all that time. It pulled out and rolled through the Colombo outskirts and down the coast to where the tsunami had hit.

  I remembered this as one of the most beautiful journeys I'd taken on the Railway Bazaar—one of the loveliest railway lines in the world, at sea level, right next to the beach, traveling along the glittering shore, the blue sea and the palm groves, all the windows open, the ocean breeze blowing through the coach. It could have been the same sunny day I spent on this train in October 1973: the same people, monks, nuns, families, children, old women in shawls, men in neckties, men in sarongs. "The recommended color of dress is blue," the Avurudu astrologers had announced.

  On a morning like this, on December 26, 2004, on this coast, the tide had ebbed dramatically. The tide went out to the horizon, Sri Lankans told me. All we saw was mud and sand and distant rocks—no water at all.

  The weird sight of the water sucked off the ocean floor, the exposed sand gleaming in the bright sun, had attracted the villagers who lived by the shore. They had, many of them, run onto the sand and into this new land. Big fishing boats sat helpless in the middle of the strange waterless place.

  And then the tidal wave appeared as a high wall of foam rushing towards them, and soon it was on them, on everyone, crashing onto the land, crushing houses, sweeping huts away, drowning cattle and people, hitting a train just like this one and knocking it sideways off the rails, drowning 1,500 of the passengers, almost everyone in the coaches.

  The tracks had been hammered apart, even brick and cement houses tumbled and destroyed, foot-thick walls smashed to pieces. Yet, a kind of miracle, most trees—the palms, the bunches of pandanus with great stalking roots, the sweeps of mangroves—were left undisturbed by the same wave that swept away fortress-like walls and paved roads. Because of these tenacious trees the coast retained a look of serenity, not the knocked-flat aftermath I associated with a hurricane.

  Many houses had been rebuilt—bright bricks, fresh cement, newly woven thatch, and bamboo. There were new bridges and paved roads, and all along the rail line evidence of a massive rebuilding effort. The line itself had been repaired two months after the tsunami, but now, sixteen months later, I could see that many people still lived in emergency shelters, and here and there were signs with arrows saying Tsunami Camp. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their homes.

  The most poignant sight, very common, were the many grave markers along the shoreline, as though the people had drowned on that very spot—and perhaps they had—the gravestones in the shape of Buddhist stupas, big and small, clusters of them on the beach, under the palms, dozens in some places. I began to associate the big stupas with adults, the smaller ones with children, and even infant-sized stupas, as though these poor people had been turned to stone by the horror of the sudden slap of the wave, and remained there, petrified on the beach.

  My coach was crowded, people sitting and standing, swaying as the train rounded the curvy shore, but freshened by the sea breeze.

  "So glad to see you," said the man next to me. "Tourists are afraid to come here because of the troubles—the Tamil business, the tsunami, and what and what."

  "I was here a long time ago," I said.

  "It was different then," he said.

  "I think it was the same."

  "I mean, it was better."

  "Maybe."

  We were all headed to Galle this beautiful day, but all along the line was the evidence of tsunami damage. Where villages and houses had been rebuilt, roads repaved, bridges fixed, there were gravestones and stupas and plaques, with freshly chiseled inscriptions, commemorating the many thousands who had died.

  After the clusters of palm trees and mangroves, Galle appeared suddenly, a town on a big blue bay, an old Dutch fort, and just outside the station, the market square. There were more people now, but the rest was as I'd remembered it: the bazaar, the ramparts, the scooter rickshaws, the hawkers' stalls selling cloth and kitchenware. In 1973 I bought an old dagger from one of these market traders, a nine-inch blade and an Asiatic lion's head carved on the bone handle. I carried it in my bag for the next two months, through Southeast Asia and Japan and onward through the Soviet Union. No one questioned it. I still have it. Over the years it became rusty and dull, but while working on this book I bought a whetstone and sharpened it, cleaned it, restored it, until it has become once again a glittering thing, good as new, a souvenir of another time.

  "This was all underwater," one of the market women told me. I could see some damaged houses, but the seventeenth-century fort was untouched. Children were playing on the walls of the fort.

  I had been told the name of an inexpensive guesthouse in Galle. A man on a scooter rickshaw took me to the top of a winding road on the tallest hill in town.

  That evening I sat on the rooftop veranda of the small, quiet Lady Hill Hotel, writing about my visit with Sir Arthur, my melancholy at seeing him so frail, so vague, his mind drifting. The town's lights twinkled through the trees, the sky was full of stars; from this vantage I could see the lamps of the fishing boats in the harbor. The air was fragrant with night-blooming flowers.

  I considered this one of the best evenings of my trip: the muted buzz of the small seaside town at night, the soft air, the perfume of the blossoms. No event, no drama, just contentment, as though I had set off from London and traveled for months to be here, at this moment, sitting under the full moon of the Sinhalese lunar New Year.

  ***

  ALL THE TALK THE NEXT morning was of five more casualties of Tamil Tiger ambushes, and another land mine, and an assault on a Sri Lankan army position. For the previous three years, there had been a cease-fire, negotiated by the Norwegian government, but this agreement was clearly falling apart, as Tigers claimed more lives. The deaths were shocking, violent, and unnecessary. It was obvious that the Tamils would eventually possess part of the north of Sri Lanka. Already they had a de facto state, with their own Tamil schools and hospitals. And their army was notoriously full of child soldiers, kids between the ages of thirteen and seventeen (UNICEF put the figure at almost sixteen thousand), who had been forcibly recruited or abducted from Tamil villages. After the tsunami hit, many children, orphans of the storm, were given guns and press-ganged into the Tamil Tigers.

  There had been a famine in Sri Lanka when I'd last been in Galle. The harvest had been disappointing, and food was scarce. I wrote then: "They had driven out the Tamils, who had done all the planting." I had also written: "But Galle was a beautiful place, garlanded with red hibiscus and smelling of the palm-scented ocean, possessing cool Dutch interiors and ringed by forests of bamboo. The sunset's luminous curtains patterned the sky in rufous gold for an hour and a half every evening, and all night the waves crashed on the ramparts of the fort." That part was still true.

  Walking around Galle in the morning sunshine, I remembered that, when I was last here, I had wanted to go to Hambantota. I hadn't done it, but I could do it now.

  Most of the fighting was in northern and north-central Sri Lanka and along the upper part of the east coast. I was on the southwestern coast; Hambantota was in a safe place, at the southern tip of the island. It was the last post of Leonard Woolf, who was a British colonial agent in the town and who was the subject of an unusual in-the-footsteps-of book, Woolf in Ceylon (2005), by Christopher Ondaatje. On my first trip I had read Woolf's somber masterpiece, The Village in the Jungle, and assuming it had been set somewhere down there, I had wanted to see that part of the island. Ondaatje, also an admirer of Woolf's, had the same idea. But he had better credentials. The older brother of the novelist Michael Ondaatje, he'd been born in Ceylon of a burgher family. His ancestors were among the ear
liest settlers of the island, many of them eminent. His father was a tea planter, and like many men isolated on tea estates, peculiar and bibulous. In his footsteps book, Ondaatje revisited the scenes of his own early life as well as the key places in Woolf's colonial career. Along the way he answered all the questions that had arisen in my mind about Woolf's knowledge of Sinhalese life, his seven years as an officer, and the background of his writing. The book is a leisurely ramble around Sri Lanka, literary, archeological, political, and autobiographical. He spared me from having to find the settings of Woolf's underrated novel and of many of the short stories.

  Heading to Hambantota, I took the train from Galle to Matara, another line along the coast, so close to the shoreline that the spray flung by the heavy rollers from Africa reached the broken windows of the battered carriages. The tsunami aftermath, large-scale destruction and small-scale rebuilding, was visible all the way. The footprints of houses, the cement slab or a row of boulders, were all that remained of many buildings on the shore—nothing else left except the coconut palms that had fed the vanished family.

  We came to Weligama, a cove with—just offshore—a small green island piled with sculpted rocks and feathery trees and an alluring villa with a white plaster veranda. I first heard the name Weligama from Paul Bowles, who told me that in the 1950s he had sailed from Tangier to Colombo, to live on that offshore island, named Taprobane.

  "Taprobane was the ancient Greek and Roman name for Ceylon, but this modern Taprobane is an island once owned by Count de Mauny, a somewhat louche Frenchman who claimed that he had inherited his title from his grandmother, though many thought it bogus." This is from Ondaatje, who described the fraudulent count as a scandal-plagued pederast who'd found a happy refuge here in the 1920s.

  But who wouldn't want to stay? The bay at Weligama is as lovely as any in the South Pacific and has the same limpid beauty, the blue sea and a white sand beach enclosed by groves of palms, clusters of bamboo huts, and a sense that the world is elsewhere. "The opportunities for happy living are greater in Ceylon than anywhere else I've been so far," Bowles wrote in a letter to Gore Vidal in 1950. And a month later he pronounced it "the best country to settle in, from all points of view." He praised the courtesy of the people, their cleanliness, their hospitality, and their skill as servants. He loved "the ever present triumphant vegetation of the coast." And he was bewitched by the notion of living on an island.