Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  At a fruit juice stand he said, "Eighty-five percent of people are against the government." He sipped his juice. He said, "The other fifteen percent are government relatives. And Chinese."

  I had come across this hatred for the Chinese on my first trip. I heard much more of it this time, because the local Chinese were now able to make deals with the bureaucrats and traders in the People's Republic. They were in the gem trade, the drug trade, in food and wood export. The mansions of Mandalay, in walled compounds, were mainly owned by Chinese merchants. The Sinocentric Singapore government, the People's Republic, and India were supporters of the Myanmar military dictatorship, propping up the regime and its arrest and imprisonment of people for political crimes. A number of Burmese told me in whispers that the country was full of collaborators, informers, and spies. Defying all the twenty-first-century trends of liberalization, Myanmar was going sideways and backwards.

  The government that had held on for forty years was determined to go on holding on. Quite a lot of money was at stake, because as a well-educated Burmese man told me in Mandalay, "The government is making a lot of money on drugs—on the opium trade. The generals here are all involved with the world drug cartels."

  I heard lots of praise for the United States in distancing itself from the regime, and lots of blame for China and Russia and Singapore in supporting it—China especially. But China's prosperity, its need for oil and wood and food, had created a new dynamic. China had no interest in any country's developing democratic institutions; on the contrary, it was a natural ally of repressive regimes. When the World Bank withheld funds from an African country because it was corrupt and tyrannous, demanding that it hold an election before it could qualify for aid, China would appear with money—"rogue aid," with no strings attached, and got the teak, the food, and the drugs.

  "We could have an internal coup, but it wouldn't change much," one man told me. "There are no liberals in this government."

  This man too had been reduced. "My family had a Mercedes when you were here before. Now all I have is a Chinese motorbike."

  "What will come?" Oo Nawng said. "More of the same."

  He said there weren't enough tourists, and the ones who visited were not interested in taking a bicycle rickshaw. They wanted a taxi. They spent money at the hotels. He was glad that I had hired him three days in a row, but I would go, and what then?

  "I meditate twice a day," he said, as though explaining how he made life bearable. He woke at four-thirty in the morning and sat for an hour. After dinner, he did the same. "My koan is 'Buddha meditates monk.' I pray and"—he shut his eyes and spoke with intensity—"Buddha sits on my head."

  It was too complicated to explain, he said. Most of Oo Nawng's teeth were missing, and he was down to one good front tooth.

  He seemed to represent the melancholy I felt in this return. He wasn't downhearted. He was realistic. He did not want to live well, only to have the meager rent for his bamboo hut and some money for food. What was the point of living if you had no food?

  He seemed to find it mildly amusing that I was shocked by his saying he'd rather die.

  Oo Nawng preyed on my mind. Thinking about him, I could not sleep. I had visions of him in his battered pith helmet of sun-darkened bamboo, pedaling his rickshaw along the ruts of Mandalay's back streets. The little skinny man with his rusted bike and his rented rickshaw and his notebook. Like me, he too was a ghost—invisible, aging, just looking on, a kind of helpless haunter.

  People gave money to children in the Third World, to orphanages, to empower women, to clinics, to schools, to governments, but they never gave money to people who were simply old so they could live a little longer and die in dignity. Oo Nawng wasn't old—he was my age—but in Burma this counted as elderly.

  The day before I was to leave for a trip to the north, a sentimental journey to Pyin-Oo-Lwin, I looked for him on his usual street corner, under the big shade tree. No sign of him.

  I took the trip to Pyin-Oo-Lwin. On my return, I looked for Oo Nawng again on his street corner. The other rickshaw drivers said they hadn't seen him. I thought I might find him in the market, where a trader might know where he was—Oo Nawng had brought me here to look at tribal tattoo implements, little stilettos the Karen people used as finials for their tattooing needles. I asked Soe Moe, the Muslim trader I'd met earlier (his real name was Hajji Ali; the Burmese name was fanciful),whether he'd seen Oo Nawng.

  "That old man who brought you here? No." Then, without any prompting from me, he said, "He is so poor."

  "I've been thinking about him."

  "He's a good man," Soe Moe said. "He has a good heart. He brings people here. I give him a little."

  Soe Moe meant that if a person bought something, he'd give him a tip.

  That night I thought of Oo Nawng again, as a superior ghost, a nat, a Burmese guardian figure dressed in a long gold tunic, smiling, obliging, radiating goodness and protection. He reminded me of my father, the soul of kindness. And the following morning I went to Oo Nawng's street corner again and waited. No one had seen him. This seemed odd, given his punctuality. One man said, "He's not coming today. It's Saturday."

  I went away, fearing that he was dead. Later in the morning I looked again—no Oo Nawng. I walked down a side street where men were selling oranges out of wheelbarrows, and others hawking onions and bananas. I kept walking in the noon heat, the sun beating on my head, thinking of Oo Nawng's battered pith helmet.

  After forty-five minutes of useless kicking through the sand piles and gravel of these streets, I turned and—as in my dreams—saw Oo Nawng pedaling towards me, smiling.

  "Get on, sir."

  I got onto the seat of the rickshaw.

  "Where to today?"

  "Take me to a quiet place where no one can see us."

  He pedaled awhile, then stopped in the shade of a banyan tree at the opening to an alley.

  "Quiet enough?"

  "Perfect." I then gave him an unsealed envelope.

  He looked in. He did not seem surprised, though he touched the contents to his forehead. Then he frowned and said, "We must go change it. You change it. They won't believe me—they'll say I stole it."

  So we went to a moneychanger, and the fat envelope of dollars was swapped for a big dirty brick of Myanmar kyats, secured by rubber bands.

  "Let's get a drink."

  We drank lemonade, and he told me his full name, Oo Ng Nawng. He wrote his address, and after that, trishaw driver, chair man. As though thinking out loud, he said, "I will pay my rent for a year, maybe two years. I will buy a secondhand rickshaw. Later, I can sell it. Yes, yes."

  "Good."

  "I'm happy," he said. His smile, too, was almost unearthly, beatific, a ghost smile of reassurance. "Now where do you want to go, Mister Baw?"

  THE TRAIN TO PYIN-OO-LWIN

  IN THE DARKNESS of early morning in the train's ordinary class, all the windows open, nothing was visible except the blurred outlines of the low buildings. Mandalay, like a city sketched in charcoal, was little more than these soft tracings and its complex smell, of wood fires and dust, dog hair and blossoms, crumbled brick and incense, diesel fumes, stagnant water, and the aroma of small fried cakes that the other passengers were wolfing out of fat-soaked wrappings of newspaper.

  The way to Pyin-Oo-Lwin was the way to China. Nine hours north was the town of Mong Yu, on the border, with the Chinese town of Wanding on the other side. At the end of another day's travel, about three hundred miles by bus over the mountain roads of Yunnan, was the provincial capital of Kunming. Myanmar's close relationship with China meant that the border was wide open. Myanmar trucks went north carrying vegetables, huge teak logs, crates of precious rubies, and bales of opium; Chinese trucks came south with cargoes of rubber sandals and tin pots and cheap bikes, arms and ammo.

  This train was so slow that the sun came up before we began the serious climb out of the flat river valley of Mandalay. As soon as we ascended the first hills, the air freshened w
ith cooler aromas of vegetation, the yellow blobby flowers of the kasein trees, the canal odors with their hyacinths, which the Burmese feed their pigs. Ponds were layered with white lotuses, lovely orchards of plum trees spread out for miles, and fields bristled with onions. The recent rain had left a sparkle in the air—the sweetness still lingered.

  The young teak trees here were spindly, with big fan-shaped leaves, lots of them beside the track.

  "They are twenty-two years old," Ko Tin said. He was on the seat beside me—upright, on cushions, like a booth in a diner, too narrow to recline on, too stiff-backed to be comfortable, but Pyin-Oo-Lwin was only five hours up the line.

  "In Kachin there are teak forests, trees one hundred years old. The Chinese buy them."

  In the distance was a great blue humpbacked mountain, its scored and shoulder-like ridge extending for miles.

  "We call that mountain 'the Buffalo,'" Ko Tin said. The name could not have been more apt. Once hearing it, I no longer saw a mountain but only a muscular animal.

  I was inexpressibly glad to be heading this way on this creaky train—grateful that so little had changed, though I hated to think that the time warp was entirely due to the military dictatorship, which had kept Myanmar in a state of suspended animation. All that had changed was that the prisons were bigger, and the army was so huge it was like a parallel population—healthier, better dressed, better educated, feared and hated ("Soldiers here don't have to pay taxes!"). In a country where everyone else lived precariously, the military was secure. But because of their struggle, the Burmese were eager to talk, to help, to work, and in spite of the threats and dangers, willing to confide in a foreigner.

  I mentioned the army and people said without prompting: We hate them. I mentioned the government and they said: They're corrupt, they're bad, they're destroying the country. I mentioned Aung San Suu Kyi and her fourteen years of house arrest and they said: We want her. Or: We want democracy. I asked questions about Buddhism and they said: The monks are angry too! When I raised these subjects I always got the same answers.

  Ko Tin was no different. He said he hated the army, and "I like democracy." And he mentioned that anyone who criticized the government was imprisoned.

  "Do you know people who've gone to prison?" I asked.

  "I know many people who, one day, just disappeared. Here—then not here. Went away suddenly. That is what happens. You never know where they went. They go and never come back. You never see the police. It all happens in the dark."

  Now on the steepness of the mountain slopes, the train was in and out of tunnels and crossing the motor road. Convoys of trucks, tarpaulins lashed to their cargo, lumbered up the road.

  One open-sided truck was filled with straw.

  "Watermelons," Ko Tin said, "going to China."

  One flatbed truck with enormous shrouded figures.

  "Carved Buddha images. We make good ones. The Chinese people buy them for their temples."

  Other trucks laden with rice, tomatoes, beans, onions, bananas, oranges, lemons, peppers—poor, hungry Myanmar supplying food to wealthy China. Myanmar was like a fiefdom of China, sending tribute, so that China could abandon its farms, build factories in its paddy fields, and spend more time developing its manufacturing and technology.

  I had been wakeful at five A.M. when we set off, but a few hours later I was slumped in my seat, asleep. I woke in the chill of the higher altitude—about three thousand feet—and saw coffee bushes, flower stalls, and poinsettia trees seven feet tall.

  Also army camps, many of them: big walled compounds, well-built houses and office buildings and barracks, the neatest landscaping, and one had its own airport. All of them were probably here because of the salubrious climate on the lower slopes of the Shan States.

  Just before we got to Pyin-Oo-Lwin, the train passed the outer walls of what could have been a university campus—gates, archways, green lawns, flower beds—but was (Ko Tin told me) a large military academy and had a sign in Burmese and English: The Triumphant Elite of the Future.

  ***

  I HAD KNOWN Pyin-Oo-Lwin as Maymyo. All that had changed in thirty-three years was the name. Almost the first thing I saw were pony carts—the gaily painted tongas that resembled small wood-framed stagecoaches. I had taken one long ago to the old guesthouse Candacraig. In any other country the pony carts would have been a tourist lark, something picturesque in which a visitor could sit for a photo. But no, here they were still used as public transport, the cheapest form, a short-distance conveyance to and from the bazaar.

  The railway station was the same, probably from the 1930s, a Burmese man told me, though the simplicity suggested much earlier—one-story, brick and timber, tin roof, the train schedules painted onto the whitewashed wall. Beside the new name was the message 3506 Above Sea Level.

  A train waiting in the station was due to leave shortly for Lashio, an eleven-hour trip, not far from the China border. I was happy to get out here and reacquaint myself. I had no desire to go farther—didn't have the stomach for it. Once again, I was somewhat in awe of my younger self, that thirty-two-year-old who sat on wooden benches in third class all the way to Naun Peng, just to see the all-steel Gokteik Viaduct that crossed a gorge in the upper Shan States. I had been hard-up and homesick, with no idea of what lay ahead, worried about money, not sure of my route. I had been completely out of touch and—while tramping through the mud of Maymyo and hailing a pony cart to Candacraig—missing my wife and children.

  "You know Candacraig?" I asked a man lingering at the station.

  "I take you."

  He had a thirty-year-old Datsun. I had remembered Burma as a country of old cars, in some cases antiques, bangers and jalopies.

  The driver's name was Abdul Hamid, a man perhaps in his seventies. He asked me where I was from, and was pleased when I told him.

  "I like Texas," he said.

  "Why Texas?"

  "Cowboys. John Wayne." He drove a little, murmuring, then said, "Gary Cooper. From films."

  Pyin-Oo-Lwin was frozen in time, which is to say it looked bigger and shabbier than before—the market, the shophouses, the arcades, the bungalows, the clock tower in the town center showing the wrong time and lettered Purcell Tower—1936, perhaps the heyday of Maymyo.

  As a British hill station it had been planned by Colonel James May, and for his pains, his urban planning, the British had bestowed his name on the town. Quite rightly, the Burmese changed the name back to that of the village it had once been, its only drawback being that Pyin-Oo-Lwin was hard to say without faltering.

  But the villas of the Raj remained, the most amazing oversized bungalows and tin-roofed chateaus, many of them with a tower or cupola, a set of verandas and a porte-cochèe for the carriage, and tall chimneys—the town was chilly in January. These houses were of wood with red or painted brick facings, still looking elegant and rather bizarre. In England they would have seemed like satirical versions of parsonages or vicarages or shooting lodges, but here they looked outlandishly, assertively handsome and spacious.

  Some had twee Cotswoldish names like "The Hedges" and "Rose Manor," and others had Burmese names. Many locations had two names: Maymyo and Pyin-Oo-Lwin were interchangeable. Tapsy Road was now also Thiksar Road. Candacraig was the Thiri Myaing Hotel.

  But Candacraig was the same place, a big imperial double-fronted villa with a tower. The only difference was that instead of standing at the end of a muddy road, in a damp sloping field among scrubby bushes, the building—freshly painted—was now set in gardens. The landscaping included some hopeful topiary and flower beds, a gravel walk, and a fixed-up tennis court. The front walkway was lined with low trimmed hedges and clusters of pink and white impatiens. Just inside the front veranda was a foundation stone lettered Candacraig, 1904.

  It was a "chummery," a sort of frat house of the Raj where young single men—someone like George Orwell, who was a policeman, or H. H. Munro, who was also in the police—would have gone in the hot season for a mon
th of leave. The more established officers of empire, with wives and children, had their own bungalows or villas. The town had always had a large population of Indian descent, and many Nepalese too, descendants of the courageous and well-drilled Gurkha soldiers the British had brought to Burma.

  I walked up the path and onto the veranda and inside the open door, into the past.

  Here there was no letdown. The whole place had been restored: the big varnished staircase with its curved banisters, the teak railings running along the upper gallery as in an English country house, the vast entryway rising two stories to the beamed ceiling and the stuffed buffalo head, and more trophies—small, sharp deer horns mounted on plaques in a long row.

  I stood before the bare desk with its guest book open on it. The floor had been polished, the place was clean, with its tang of new varnish. Not a single guest in sight, no one at all, yet it was as warm and as welcome a destination as it had been thirty-three years before—more so, since it was for me, as some other places had been, a homecoming. It was full of memories, a ghost-haunted house in an unthreatening sense.

  Though I had claimed in The Great Railway Bazaar to have encountered him on the train—I wanted to give my little trip some drama—it was here at Candacraig that I'd first met the hospitable Mr. Bernard.

  This kindly and dignified man had challenged me to guess his age, and when I guessed wrong, he told me he was eighty, saying, "I was born in eighteen ninety-four in Rangoon. My father was an Indian, but a Catholic. That is why I am called Bernard. My father was a soldier in the Indian Army. He had been a soldier his whole life—I suppose he joined up in Madras in the eighteen seventies. He was in the Twenty-sixth Madras Infantry and he came to Rangoon with his regiment in eighteen eighty-eight. I used to have his picture, but when the Japanese occupied Burma ... all our possessions were scattered, and we lost so many things."