Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "Good point." I hadn't thought of that. I said, to change the subject, "So you want to go on traveling?"

  She said, "Yes. My hero is Michael Palin. The BBC guy? He goes all over the world."

  I said, "With a camera crew and someone to do his makeup and buy his tickets. He's got people who tell him where to stand!"

  "He's a real world traveler. And he's funny, too."

  "I'll give you that. He makes jokes."

  "He's clever too!" She leaned over. "I'd never heard of Lhasa until he went there."

  "Fiona, it's the capital of Tibet. I was there once."

  She didn't care. She said, "I'll bet Michael Palin has been here in Laos."

  "Or maybe not."

  "That's what I want to do."

  "Be Michael Palin? That's your ambition?"

  "Wouldn't you want to be Michael Palin?" she asked.

  The next day, as I was having lunch at an outdoor café in Vientiane, an old American woman entered with two young men. They sat near me, and from their conversation I gathered that one was her son and the other his Indian lover. The woman sat queening it for a while, and the young men talked intimately. And then a waiter approached her.

  "Ask them. They make all the decisions," she said. "I'm just along for the ride."

  Strange little dramas occurred, the glimpses I got as a traveler, not a short story but a fleeting look of something else. I always knew that there was much more, and so these people appeared like characters waiting for me, as some Americans had in India, to assign them parts in a bigger story.

  I was satisfied that the depraved Vientiane of whores and stoners I had known was gone, replaced by a Vientiane of budget travelers and backpackers. Meanwhile the Laotians themselves did their best to escape across the river to Thailand, where there were opportunities for work and real money.

  A pedicab, locally known as a tuk-tuk, passed me as I was walking down a street. The man said, "Where?"

  I thought that I might go to the museum or see some more temples. But I said, "How much to the bridge?"

  He named a price, and not long after that I was back at Nong Khai Station, waiting for the Bangkok train, thinking about the little dramas. A woman smiled at me.

  "Anyone sitting here?"

  "Be my guest."

  She was American, tubby and short, duck-butted, about fifty or so, in black capri pants, her hair drawn back but most of it fluttering around her sweaty face. She was pale, unnaturally so in this bright sunshine. She carried a misshapen duffle bag, which she unzipped, taking out a ten-inch baguette sandwich wrapped in paper. Pulling off the paper, holding the sandwich in two hands, like a tool, she tilted her head and began eating, working on it from its narrower end.

  "Real good," she said, chewing.

  "What's in it?"

  "Usual stuff. Mystery meat and salad." She laughed. She seemed sure of herself, and here she was, alone in an empty railway station on the Thai-Laos border on a hot afternoon.

  "You from the States?"

  "Missouri. But I live in Khon Kaen."

  Another one. I didn't say anything for a while. I was content. I'd just had some noodles across the road from the station, and the Thai noodle seller had said I should stay, live here, lots of farangs had done that and were happy. Eating noodles on the border in a shady open-sided restaurant, waiting for the Bangkok train, was a kind of bliss. Plenty of women here would want to move in with you, he said, promising me romance too. Now I was on the platform with the fat woman from Missouri as she gnawed at her sandwich.

  Nong Khai was perhaps the cleanest of any railway station I'd seen since I left London. Not a speck of litter on the platform or on the tracks, no one spitting, no graffiti, no one in rags, no beggars, the whole place swept and mopped, gleaming in the afternoon light.

  This order, and the politeness and efficiency of the ticket seller, put me in an optimistic mood. Really, this seemed to me an almost unimprovable society of happy families and good roads and people in clean clothes. And their self-respect and innate propriety meant that they did not have to be tyrannized and fined in order to be tidy.

  The woman was still noisily chewing, in a way that would have shocked a Thai. She was sweating in her tight jersey, her hair had come loose, she had a drop of mayonnaise on her nose and a smear of it on her cheek.

  "What do you do in Khon Kaen?"

  "Officially, I don't do anything"

  She looked at me meaningfully, still chewing.

  "Unofficially, I'm a missionary."

  "Spreading the word?"

  "You got it."

  "Quoting Scripture?"

  "Absolutely."

  "'The letter killeth,'" I said. "Who said that?"

  "Paul. Corinthians. 'The spirit giveth life.'"

  "They have plenty of spirit."

  "Not Christian spirit."

  "Like they need lessons in piety in Thailand?" I said, my voice cracking with impatience. And I thought of all the Thais I'd seen bringing flowers and incense to temples, their crouching and their prostrations, their faces glowing in the light of candle flames, the special quality of their beauty when they were in the act of praying.

  "They need Jesus."

  I took a deep breath and said, "What is it with you people?"

  She just chewed defiantly.

  "They need Almighty God"

  I said, "If Almighty God had been an immense duck capable of emitting an eternal quack, we would all have been born web-footed, each as infallible as the pope—and we would never have had to learn to swim"—a quotation from Henry James's father that I find useful on these occasions.

  Her eyes popped from her big mouthful, and her whole face was in motion as she chewed. She swallowed and said, "I have a mission," and it was no longer a Christian mission at all, but pure greedy appetite, as she took another bite, wagging her head, working her jaws, like an oversized mongrel worrying a bone.

  Soon after that, the train to Bangkok pulled in. I found my compartment. I sat for a while. An old man joined me, and as though a living reproach to the missionary, he meditated for a long time, looking beatific. His name was Vajara. Night fell. He took the upper berth. He was gone when I awoke in Bangkok.

  NIGHT TRAIN TO HAT YAI JUNCTION

  SPECIAL EXPRESS

  AN ENORMOUS MULTICOLORED portrait of Rama V, the great innovating King Chulalongkorn, hung above the waiting room at Bangkok Central—Hua Lamphong Station, built in 1910, the year the much-loved king died. He was the moving force behind the modernization of Thailand, introducing political reform, improving education and roads and the railway too, in 1891. He was also the king portrayed in the book that inspired the plonking musical The King and I, both book and musical loathed by all Thais, who see them as insulting falsifications poking fun at their revered monarch. Thais regard the king as semi-divine and Rama V (rightly) as especially benevolent and far-seeing, not to be spoken about casually, much less demeaned or criticized as a risible Siamese royal, waltzing or dallying with an intrusive farang.

  On my previous trip I had asked an idle question about the present king. I had been in a sampan with a young Thai man and a Thai woman, the man a photographer, the woman a journalist. The man was teaching me how to scull with one oar, like a gondolier. We were in a klong, a canal sixty feet wide, not near any other boat or person. My harmless question produced a silence so deep it was as though I had not spoken at all.

  Then the Thai woman looked down at the deck of the long boat and made a chirruping sound in her pretty nose. It meant uh-oh!

  "You say one word about the king," the Thai man said to me, in a voice more fearful than censorious, "and it's your neck."

  I had asked about King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rama IX, the one-eyed, unsmiling billionaire, also half god half man, the longest-ruling monarch in Thai history. He had reigned since 1950, and now, on my second visit, his eightieth birthday was coming up. Pictures of him were everywhere, and many Thais wore yellow T-shirts and yellow bracelets, because
yellow was the royal color.

  It was Sunday, and a hot bright somnolence, with a hint of sadness, descended on Bangkok, reminding me of the oppression of empty Sundays when I was very young. If I stayed in the big city (I reasoned) I would be caught, and in the pleasantest way would procrastinate, happily pummeled by delicate little princesses in massage rooms, with gong music playing softly and candles burning. I might never leave.

  Satisfied that Bangkok had gotten bigger but had kept its soul, I dragged myself away on a southbound express.

  The talk was of Muslim insurgency in the south, secessionists' bombs in markets, sectarian throat-cuttings, local militia groups and mujahideen and mentions of Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. There had been seven recent incidents, some deaths and torchings of Thai shops. The southern provinces, bordering Malaysia, had a Muslim majority, and there was talk of sovereignty and the introduction of sharia law and other repressions and archaisms. The Thai government hadn't had much success in pacifying the south, nor had the army managed to contain the bombers, whose numbers had grown in recent years.

  "Maybe we should just let the Muslims down there have their province," a Thai woman had said to me at a dinner party in Bangkok, speaking in a fatalistic way. "Maybe they'll stop killing people then."

  Leaving Bangkok for the south, I felt more than ever like a romantic voyeur in a half-drowned world. The train made a great loop around tin-roofed settlements. "There it was, spread largely on both banks, the Oriental capital," Conrad wrote in The Shadow-Line, published a hundred years ago, his descriptions still ringing true: "a vegetable-matter style of architecture, sprung out of the brown soil on the banks of the muddy river." Then the train rattled across the river on a rusty bridge. "Some of those houses of sticks and grass, like the nests of an aquatic race, clung to the low shores." The embankment temples ("gorgeous and dilapidated") and the watercraft, some chugging boats, some sampans being poled; onward past coconut palms, banana groves, mango trees, ponds choked with lotuses. Green, low-lying, the vertical sunlight glittering on the swamps and stagnation, the slender women carrying heavy loads—it all made me sad.

  It was a voyeur's ennui, the traveler's sense of being superfluous, just gaping and moving on; the sadness of seeing these graceful people in this big city—another big city—all their struggles, all their hopes. We rumbled past a suburban station, Bang Bamru, where women were washing clothes at a pump, their children splashing nearby. The women looked elegant even in their drudgery, and the sight of two small boys, hardly older than seven or eight, farther on at Nakhon Pathom, one with his arm lightly around the other, made me inexpressibly melancholy. They each wore clean shirts and shorts and were barefoot. Why did neat, tidy, dignified, obedient, well-behaved poverty strike me as so sad?

  At last, after an hour or more of the jungly countryside—of farmhouses, rice fields, bungalows, a family of four riding on a motorbike, browsing cows, a shrimp farm, a Christian school, a tall gold temple, a man setting off firecrackers in front of a crowd of people—I didn't feel so bad.

  Then birds singing, dogs barking on dusty roads, tall trees surrounded by fields of lemongrass, mango orchards—and I felt even better.

  And all the rest of the day, until nightfall, while I wrote more of my new story, "The Gateway of India," there were rice paddies, soft green squares of them with raised edges, some of them new, just flooded, to the horizon.

  In the compartment next to mine were two girls in their late teens and an older woman, whom I took to be Chinese. The woman had a broader face than most Thais, and she wore a cuff of gold bracelets and a gold necklace. The odd thing was that, though they spent most of the day sleeping, they left the compartment door open, and the woman always smiled when I went by, as I deliberately did, for her smile.

  "Way you going?"

  "Penang," I said.

  "We go Penang too."

  As often happens on long-distance trains, I kept bumping into them—at the window in the corridor, idling in the noisy passage between carriages, waiting to get into the lavatory.

  "Where are we?" I asked the woman, seeing a temple at the end of a road.

  "I don't know." But I had broken the ice. The next time I saw her, she said, "You business?"

  "Me business."

  "What you name?"

  "Paul."'

  "Baw," she said. She smiled and canted her head towards her compartment. "My name Lily. Those my babies."

  Then I guessed she was a procuress, and wanted to talk to her more, but the next time I passed their compartment the door was shut.

  Darkness dropped quickly, as it does on the equator, and in the morning I woke to golden clouds, a pinky blue sky, and jungle interspersed with rice fields like water meadows—the deep south of Thailand, near the Malaysian border, lush, deep green, thinly populated, and some of it under siege.

  At Hat Yai Junction I got out and was directed to a booth to buy an onward ticket, then I reboarded; only the front half of the train would go to Butterworth and the border. I looked for the procuress and her two girls but couldn't see them anywhere. Most of the seats were empty. I chose one in the open compartment and dozed. I woke twenty minutes later when the train got under way, passing among sudden boulder-shaped hills.

  Two young women—English, from their voices—each with an enormous bulging backpack, sat across the aisle from me. Both were engrossed in books, the dark one reading a John Irving, the skinny head-scratching one The Mosquito Coast. For a pleasant hour or so I watched this second one, rapt—or nearly so—chewing her lips as she read.

  From time to time they looked up and spoke.

  "Seen the bog?" the first one said.

  "Toilets are rank!"

  "Should we wait till later?"

  "Wrong question!"

  "Bound to be loos at the border."

  "Tidy loos? Here? I don't think so!"

  They went back to their reading. After a while the first one yawned and twisted the John Irving in her hands and said, "This book is so dense!"

  I waited for a response, but the second one didn't volunteer anything about me. She was near the end. I waited until she finished the book, and when she did, she placed it on her lap and took a deep breath.

  "What do you think?" I asked.

  "The book?" She made a face. "Wasn't what I was expecting."

  She handled the paperback as if to grasp at a thought. "All the bugs. All the jungle. It reminded me of when we were in Vietnam."

  "But the family in it," I said, "did they convince you, or is it just another story?"

  She nodded hard and said, "I'm like way convinced. Way, way."

  Satisfied, I revealed myself as the author.

  "Was this a trip you took?" she said, tapping the book.

  "No. It's a novel. It's a story. It's, um, fiction."

  She was smiling, as though she'd learned my secret. She said, "So I guess—what?—writing's your hobby?"

  This threw me, but I was also smiling.

  She said, "What do you do the rest of the time?"

  "That's pretty much it. Scribble, scribble."

  The other girl said, "Were you influenced by The Poisonwood Bible?"

  "No. See, my book was published in 1981."

  "I wasn't even born then," the first one said.

  "I can't believe you're sitting right there," the second one said. "Hey, Doug!"

  A young man a few seats away turned around and then came over. He was short, compact, and looked portable and somewhat satirical, being introduced by the pretty girls to this guy who wrote this book he had never heard of. She waved the beat-up paperback she said she'd stolen from a shelf in a youth hostel in Phuket. Doug had a small bag and wore sun-faded clothes and sandals. He said he had been traveling for three months. Apart from that he was noncommittal.

  "Where are you going?" I asked.

  "I'm not going anywhere," he said. He looked me in the eye. "Going nowhere."

  I liked him for his vagueness. The pen in his s
hirt pocket said something. He reminded me of the person I had been all those years ago, on this train from Bangkok to Penang.

  He wasn't talking, and the backpackers just had questions, so I excused myself, and passing down the car saw Lily, the procuress, and her two girls in the last seat. The girls, on her right and left, were asleep, and she slumped to pillow their heads as if they were a pair of kittens.

  "Baw," Lily said and gestured for me to take the seat opposite. "Sit here." After I sat down she said, "What kind business?"

  "Book business."

  "That good!" She smiled. She had gold teeth to match her jewelry. "What you country, Baw?"

  I told her.

  "America good!" She hugged the girls. "You like them?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "They sleep so much!"

  It was true. I had seen them awake only once, the night before, in the train's corridor.

  "Pretty, huh? Cue, huh?"

  "Very cute."

  One of them stirred and yawned. The woman squeezed the girl's cheeks affectionately, and her eyes briefly opened.

  "He business," Lily said. The girl wrinkled her nose and went back to sleep. Then she winked at me. "Penang nice place. Baw, you come visit me?"

  Later in the morning we halted at the frontier station. It was the ideal border post, a long platform, Thailand at one end, Malaysia at the other. About twenty passengers entered, presented their passports to be stamped at each country's desk, and went through the last turnstile.

  At a noodle stall on the Malaysian side I bought a bowl of laksa, one of the great soups of Straits cuisine—spicy, curried coconut soup with noodles and bean spouts. It is thick and rust-colored from the chilies and its many ingredients—laksa, from the Sanskrit word lakh, for 100,000 (as Mr. Kailash had said to me in Jaipur), is a Straits colloquialism for "many."

  A doddery white man in a torn shirt and tennis shoes shuffled behind me. His laces were undone, his fly was half unzipped. He could have been eighty. He carried a small duffle bag. He was alone and hard of hearing—the immigration clerk had to shout—and squinted through thick glasses. What was he doing at this jungle border crossing? I was worried for him and watched him until he found his seat on the onward train, where he sat with his head in his hand. Traveling kids were everywhere, and it was rare, almost unheard-of, to see a frail man like this on his own.