Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  I walked to the vestibule of the train, for the exercise, and talked awhile with an old toothless man going to Taungoo. When I asked him about the past, he seemed a little vague.

  "I'm fifty-two," he said, and I was reminded how poverty aged people prematurely.

  When I went back to the compartment, Tapa Snim was rummaging in his bag. I watched him take out an envelope, and then he began knotting the two strands that made this simple square of cotton cloth into a sack.

  "Do you have another bag?" I asked, because this one seemed improbably small for a long-distance traveler.

  "No. These are all my possessions."

  Everything not just for a year of travel, but everything he owned in the world, in a bag he easily slung under one arm. True, this was a warm climate, but the sack was smaller than a supermarket bag.

  "May I ask you what's inside?"

  Tapa Snim, tugging the knot loose, gladly showed me the entire contents.

  "My bowl, very important," he said, taking out the first item. It was a small black plastic soup bowl with a close-fitting lid. He used it for begging alms, but he also used it for rice.

  In a small bag: a piece of soap in a container, sunglasses, a flashlight, a tube of mosquito repellent, a tin of aspirin.

  In a small plastic box: a spool of gray thread, a pair of scissors, nail clippers, Q-Tips, a thimble, needles, rubber bands, a two-inch mirror, a tube of cream to treat foot fungus, a stick of lip balm, nasal spray, and razor blades.

  "Also very important," he said, showing me the razor blades. "I shave my head every fifteen days."

  Neatly folded, one thin wool sweater, a shawl he called a kasaya, a change of clothes. In a document pouch he had a notebook and some papers, a photograph showing him posed with a dozen other monks ("to introduce myself"), and a large document in Chinese characters he called his bhikkhu certificate, the official proof he was a monk, with signatures and seals and brushwork. He also had a Sharp electronic dictionary, which allowed him to translate from many languages, and a string of beads—108 beads, the spiritual number.

  As I was writing down the list, he said, "And this"—his straw hat— "and this"—his fan.

  "Nothing else?"

  "Nothing."

  "What about money?"

  "That's my secret."

  And then carefully he placed the objects on the opened cloth and drew the cloth together into a sack, everything he owned on earth.

  "Tell me how you meditate."

  "You know the Japanese word koan" he said. It wasn't a question. "For example, in ancient China, a student asked an important Zen monk, 'What is Buddha?' The monk answered, 'One pinecone tree in front of a garden.'"

  Out the train window I could see a village set in a bower of dense trees, offering shade, scattered groves of banana and coconut, more lotus ponds, people on bikes. And here before me the shaven-headed and gently smiling Tapa Snim.

  "I meditate on that. 'One pinecone tree in front of a garden.' It is a particular tree."

  "How long have you been using this koan?"

  "Years. Years. Years." He smiled again. "Twelve hours a day."

  "Is it working?"

  "I will understand eventually. Everyone has Buddha-spirit in their mind. By reason of sufferings and desires and anger we can't find it." He rocked a little on the seat and went on. "If we get rid of suffering and desire and anger, we can become a Buddha."

  "How do I get rid of them?"

  "Meditate. Empty your mind—your mind must be vacant. Non-mind is the deepest stage of the deep stage." He asked to borrow my pen and the little notebook I'd been using. He said, "Every night I have a serious question in my head—every day and night. Look."

  He set down six Chinese characters, inscribing them slowly, each slash and dot. Then he poked at each of them, translating.

  "Sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha," he said. "For twenty-six years I have thought about this. If I solve this, I will know truth. It is my destination, my whole life, to solve this problem."

  "But how did you happen to choose these images?"

  "One day, a famous monk, Ma Tsou, was asked, 'How are you?' This was his reply."

  "Why did you come here to meditate? You could have stayed in Korea."

  He said, "Buddha traveled! So I travel. I am looking for enlightenment."

  "What do you think about Burma?"

  He laughed and told me that on the day of his arrival he had gone to the railway station but the ticket window was closed. So he waited on a bench and, waiting there, had fallen asleep. When he woke up he discovered that the pouch at his waist had been razored open—literally, by a cutpurse—and some of his money stolen.

  "But small money! Big money is in a secret place."

  "You've been to India?"

  "India can be dangerous," he said. "But I have a theory about India." He sat forward, eager to explain. "I see many poor people there, and I think, What is their karma? They are the poorest people in the world. Why do they receive this big suffering? Eh?"

  I said I had no idea, and that the people here—right out the window—seemed miserably poor, living in bamboo huts and steadying wooden plows pulled by oxen, and laboring under the load of heavy bales.

  "India is worse," he said. "This is my ridiculous thought. I know it is silly, but..."By"but"he implied that it was not ridiculous at all and that I should not be too quick to judge him. "Indian people have many bad karmas. In their history, they created violence; they destroyed Buddhist stupas and persecuted monks. They all the time blame Muslims, but Hindus have been just as bad. In my Indian travel I think this is the deep reason for the suffering there."

  "What about Korea—any suffering?"

  "Suffering everywhere! In Korea we have mad crazy Christians, because we are under the influence of the United States."

  "Reverend Moon?"

  "Many people like him!" Tapa Snim said. "I am glad to be here."

  In the setting sun, the muted pinks and browns, the subdued light, the long shadows of the laboring bent-over harvesters. And in the dusk, the unmistakable sign of rural poverty: no lights in the villages, only the lamp-glow in small huts or the small flare of cooking fires at ground level, the smell of woodsmoke. All the train windows were open to insects and smoke and, passing a swamp or a pond, a dampness in the air, the malodorous uprush of the hum of stagnant water.

  The last discernible station before darkness fell was Taungoo, a kind of boundary—it was all Upper Burma after this. While I'd been talking to Tapa Snim, the young Frenchman and his girlfriend had crept out. I asked Tapa Snim to watch my bag and walked through three or four carriages to the dining car.

  Sitting there, drinking a tall bottle of Myanmar beer, I felt the kind of wordless bliss I'd experienced in Sri Lanka, at the little guesthouse in Galle, as though I'd come all this way to be uplifted by the night air, the breeze rushing through the train windows, tearing at the grubby curtains, the slopped and food-splashed tables where Burmese, propped on their elbows, were slurping fried rice and noodles, laughing and drinking, the darkness outside broken only by the occasional lantern or burst of fire or candle flame, illuminating nothing but itself, but "a candle is enough to light the world." Apart from that, nothing to report. I felt lucky to have met Tapa Snim, and I was thinking, Glad I came.

  "May I sit here?"

  I said yes, of course, there were very few empty seats in the car. He was a smiling man of forty or so, Oo Mindon. He said he was a merchant.

  "I sell biscuits, noodles, cigarettes," he said. "Children's clothes."

  He owned a stall in the Myoma bazaar in Ye-u, a town northwest of Mandalay. It was a 150-mile journey, six hours by bus from there on bad roads, he said. All overland travel in Myanmar was slow and dirty, but though he did not complain about the difficulty, he clucked as he described the distances and the road conditions.

  After the usual questions—country? wife? children? job?—he laughed and said, "I like democracy."

  He was a st
allholder in a small bazaar in a benighted corner of the country, north-central Myanmar, and he launched into a long denunciation of the government, the generals, the roads, the disrepair of the trains and the buildings. He traveled quite a lot, supplying outlying towns with biscuits and noodles, and he said the situation was terrible. He used all the old names: Burma, Rangoon instead of Yangon, Maymyo instead of Pyin-Oo-Lwin.

  "The army is no good. They make trouble."

  "What's the answer?"

  "We want elections," he said.

  "Didn't Aung San Suu Kyi win the last one?"

  "Yes. She is good. She should be in the government. We like her."

  To bait him I said, "Why do you want democracy?"

  "Because life will be better. We will have development—not this, what you see, rich soldiers and poor people."

  A big boy joined us at the table, Oo Mindon's son, who was sixteen. He did not speak a word of English, though he was in high school. This was the next generation, the one that the generals had intimidated and shortchanged by limiting their education. Oo Mindon himself had studied English and had a high school education.

  "What does he do?" I asked Oo Mindon, of his son.

  "He likes to play video games," he said, and furiously manipulated his thumbs to illustrate the obsession.

  I'd had no lunch, yet, hungry as I was, I did not want to risk the fried rice being jogged and swilled in a blackened wok by the churning wooden paddle of the chef in his sweat-soaked undershirt, a cigarette dangling from his lips—or was it the sight of the plates being dunked in the sludgy water of the washbasin?

  Back in the compartment, seeing me hunched over my notebook, the Frenchman said again, "You must be a writer"—the only words he spoke to me in fifteen hours.

  Tapa Snim, the Zen Buddhist, was quietly sleeping in a small compact way, wrapped in his robes and pillowing his head on his bundle of possessions. I dozed but could not stay asleep. The problem was the over-bright fluorescent lights on the compartment ceiling that could not be turned off, which kept waking me from hectic dreams of persecution.

  ***

  TOWARDS FOUR IN THE MORNING, lights flashed outside the train, the marshaling yards of Mandalay. My memory of the city was of air so dense that at twilight it resembled the fog of a London particular: furious dust clouding orangy bulbs, dimming them; air that had made me gag; a nebulous nightmare of swirling murk.

  The air was just as thick with choking dust as I lingered on the station platform to say goodbye to Tapa Snim. And then I hurried out to the street, hounded by rickshaw drivers. I had the name of an inexpensive hotel. I singled out an elderly driver with a weary face and got in the back of his scooter rickshaw, and he drove me into the darkness.

  The back streets of Mandalay were unpaved, rutted, and irregular. There were no streetlights, the shops were shut, though some houses had glaring spotlights for security purposes. The air was foul, the night hot, the darkness oppressive. The invisible city stank, and even after fifteen or twenty minutes the old man was still jogging along, humping and bumping on the bad surface. It was four in the morning.

  This knowledge that I was completely in the hands of a stranger was not something new. It had happened many times on my trip. A man representing himself as a driver offered me a ride in his jalopy several times in Turkey; again in Georgia; memorably, on the border of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan I'd had to crawl through the passengerside window before I was bounced to Bokhara; in India a number of times, by rickshaw wallahs. And there was my humbling hitchhiking experience in Sri Lanka, the rattletraps of Yangon, and now this, the scooter rickshaw in Mandalay darkness, no one awake. All these modes of transport counted as the Orient Express.

  But this was the ghostliest experience I'd yet seen. The night-black streets of risen thickened dust, the dim lights, the smell of dead fires and cooling embers, the chatter and flap of the scooter, the stranger riding with his back turned to me—all of this filled me with the same surrealistic sense of being borne into the darkness by a skinny old man in rags, spirited into his world. I thought: I don't know who he is. I don't know where I am or where I'm going. I could not read a single sign, and there wasn't a soul around.

  I was alone and apprehensive, with the traveler's awareness of having made a leap in the dark. This heightened my senses and gave a sharpness to every moment that passed, every smell, every flash of light. Afterwards, when I thought about my traveling in Upper Burma, my first memory was of this night ride in the darkness, the heat in my face. The reason is probably simple: I was alone, I was with a stranger, I had no idea where I was going, I was moving through inspissated blackness. It summed up what was most vivid in my traveling life, but especially on this ghostly revisit—rattling into the night in this phantom rickshaw.

  The slowness of the scooter rickshaw exaggerated the distance, but even half an hour in the darkness of such a place was suspenseful.

  I was surprised when I saw the hotel ahead, just off the road, the driver having kept his word. Before I paid him, I made sure a room was available. The building was locked, the door chained, but I woke the night watchman, and he unchained the door and brought me to a desk. A man lying supine on a blanket behind the desk had heard the knock and was waking and yawning.

  ***

  ON THE SUNNY DAYS that followed—only the nights were befogged—I saw that Mandalay hadn't changed much either. It had more hotels, in cluding a luxurious one, Singapore-owned, within walking distance of mine, that seemed empty. But there was no other prosperity or newness in the great flat city on its grid of streets. One of the blessings of such poverty was the absence of traffic. Just a few cars, many motorbikes and scooters, lots of bicycles, and that relic of the old Burma, the bicycle rickshaw, or pedicab.

  The beauty of the bicycle rickshaw is the breeze in your face, fresh air and a placid journey, traveling at almost a walking pace through the deep sand of the back lanes of Mandalay. I found a man to take me to Maha Muni Temple, less for the temple experience than to travel from the southeast corner of the fort, through the populous part of the city, to the complex of temples and the monasteries of the southwest.

  The driver, a slender but sturdy older man, spoke English well. He said life was awful, and like many other Burmese who told me this, he spoke in a whisper and often looked around.

  "I look back," he said, turning his head, "because someone might be listening."

  At Maha Muni a group of pretty girls beckoned me over to where they crouched in the temple garden under a tree. One of them held on her knees a basket of shivering sparrows.

  "Good luck. You let one go. Five hundred kyat."

  For twenty-five cents I could give a bird its freedom. I gave her a dollar and she handed me one stupefied bird at a time, and off each one went, chirping as they soared away.

  The sights of Mandalay—the gold temples, the multilevel Zegyo bazaar, the carved teak of Shwe Nandaw Palace, the busy monasteries, the fort with its ramparts and its moat filled with lilies, the hill to the north with more temples—none of these held my attention as strongly as the driver.

  His name was Oo Nawng, and he had the broad, kindly-seeming Polynesian face of many Burmese. He was exactly my age. He had spent his working life, almost forty years, as a primary school teacher in a small town outside Mandalay, and had retired at the age of sixty-two. He had two daughters; one of them, married to a carpenter, had five children and lived in a village on the road to Pyin-Oo-Lwin. The other daughter was a tailor, a seamstress, who was in her late thirties. Oo Nawng had urged her to get married, but (although some men had expressed a romantic interest) she refused, saying, "I can't get married. I have to look after my poor father and mother."

  In ragged shorts, a faded shirt, and a woven bamboo pith helmet, Oo Nawng was poor in a vivid and easily explainable way. After he had retired from teaching, he lost the hut that went with the job. His pension was the equivalent of $2 a month. He had found a hut to rent on Mandalay's outskirts, "a small bamboo h
ouse." The rent was $4 a month. One of the reasons for his retirement was his kidney ailment, which required hospitalization. The cost of his medicine had emptied his savings, and though his daughter's sewing helped, he was struggling to get by.

  The bicycle rickshaw on which he sat with dignity was the last resort. He was too old to get any other kind of job. He owned the bike, but the rickshaw itself, the seat, the wheel, the footrest, which was fastened to the bike by a clamp, was rented, 25 cents a day.

  I found out all this, and more, by traipsing around Mandalay with him, because he knew the sights, he knew where good food could be found, he was openhearted and candid. I wanted to find the fish soup I remembered from long ago, spiced and creamy, with noodles. It was called mohingas, he reminded me, and took me to a place that served it. He had some too. He took me to a Muslim trader named Soe Moe, to a trader who sold old opium weights, to a Burmese man who made long trips into Nagaland—not the Naga Christians who were numerous on the Indian side, but animists, monkey worshipers and fetishists, living traditional lives in jungle clearings. The Burmese man had piles of weird artifacts: necklaces of monkey skulls and bison teeth and hornbill casques, antlers, masks, bone armlets, knives, swords, spears, and textiles. In trade, the man gave medicines to the Naga people, because no government agencies ever went up the rivers and into the jungles that bordered India.

  When I talked to Oo Nawng about the future, he laughed and said, "What future? I'm old!"

  "You're my age."

  Oo Nawng wrinkled his nose and said, "I don't want to live a long time."

  "Because of your kidney problem?"

  "No. Because I have no money. How long can I pedal a bike? Maybe two years more. If I get some money, I'd like to live a long time. But if not, I would prefer to die."

  All his years of studying, homework, and teaching had allowed him to make this fatalistic statement in perfect English. That's what it came to: his intelligence and fluency gave him the ability to pronounce his own mournful epitaph.

  He was one of the millions who didn't matter. He was old, he couldn't fight, couldn't work, wasn't important to the economy—a drain on available resources. The military men who ran Myanmar would have said that Oo Nawng was better off dead. Oo Nawng himself agreed. After a working life of educating children, he was a pauper.