The Great Railway Bazaar

by Paul Theroux

  Mr Lau was a purveyor of fluorescent tubes. He was also a civil servant (‘Maybe you could say fluorescent tubes is my sideline’). He had been introduced to the business by his father-in-law, a clever man who had emigrated from Shanghai to Hong Kong, where he had learned how to make neon signs. Mr Lau said, ‘You can make a fortune in neon signs in Hong Kong.’

  I said I was sure of that.

  ‘But there was heavy competition. So the old man came to K.L.’ At first there were no competitors, then the fellow Shanghainese he had trained to make the signs left him and set up shops of their own. They almost ran him out of business, until the old man began training Malays to do the work. He had chosen Malays and not the harder-working Indians or Chinese because he could depend on the Malays to be too lazy to quit and start establishments of their own.

  ‘What brought you to Bangkok?’ I asked.

  ‘Fluorescent tubes.’

  ‘Buying or selling?’

  ‘Buying-lah. Cheaper.’

  ‘How much cheaper?’

  ‘I don’t know. I got to work out the costing. It’s all in my briefcase.’

  ‘Give me a rough idea.’

  ‘A hundred fifty models-lah! I haven’t worked out the packing, transport, what-not. So many cost factors.’

  I liked the lingo, but Mr Lau changed the subject, and, munching his squid, he told me how awful it was to be a Chinese in Malaysia. He had been passed over a dozen times and missed promotions and pay increments because ‘the government wants to bring up the Malays. It’s terrible. I don’t like the light business but they’re driving me further and further into fluorescent tubing.’

  I went to bed while the train was still standing in the glare of the station lights, and at 3.10 the next morning (the whistle woke me) we began to move. Rain poured through the window, waking me again an hour later, and when I slammed down the shutter the room became suffocating and airless. We crossed the endangered bridge in the dark, and at dawn it was still raining. The line was so flooded all the next day we travelled at a crawl, sometimes stopping in the middle of nowhere, with flooded fields all around, like a becalmed boat. I sat and wrote: I read and went to sleep; I drank; and often I would look up and be incapable of remembering where I was, the concentration of writing or reading bringing on a trancelike state. Extensive travelling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind. It had happened briefly on other trains, but on this one – it might have been prolonged by the sameness of the landscape or the steady beating of the rain – it lasted an entire day. I couldn’t recall what day it was; I had forgotten the country. Being on the train had suspended time; the heat and dampness had slowed my memory. What day was it anyway? Where were we? Outside there were only rice fields, giving an alarming view of Maharashtra, in India. The station signboards gave no clue: CHUMPHON and LANG SUAN moved past the window, leaving me baffled. It was a long day in the hot wet train with the sweating Thais, whom the heat had moved to rapid speech. Pensacola had disappeared, and so had Mr Thanoo. The conductor said we were ten hours late, but this did not worry me as much as my failing memory and a kind of squinting fear I took to be an intimation of paranoia. The jungle was thick past Haadyai, perfect for an ambush (a month later, on 10 December, five bandits with M16 rifles leaped out of the second-class toilets where they had been hiding, robbed seventy people, and vanished). After the passport control at Padang Besar I locked the door of my compartment, and, though it was only nine o’clock, went to bed.

  A rattling of the door handle woke me. The train was not moving. The room was hot. I slid the door open and saw a Malay with a wet mop. He said, ‘This is Butterworth.’

  ‘I think I’ll sleep here until the morning train comes.’

  ‘Cannot,’ he said. ‘Have to wash the train.’

  ‘Go ahead, wash it. I’ll go back to sleep.’

  ‘We don’t wash it here. Have to take it to the shed.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do in the meantime?’

  ‘Mister,’ said the little Malay, ‘I want you to get out and hurry up.’

  I had slept through the arrival. It was two in the morning: the train was empty; the station was deserted. I found a waiting room, where two German men and two Australians, a boy and girl, were sleeping in chairs. I sat down and opened Dead Souls. The Australian boy woke up and folded and refolded his legs, sighing. Then he said, ‘Oh Christ!’ and took his shirt off. He crumpled his shirt into a ball and got on to the cement floor, and, using the shirt as a pillow, curled up like a koala bear and began to snore. The Australian girl looked at me and shrugged, as if to say, ‘He always does that!’ She put her fists into her lap and crouched in her chair, the way people die in sparsely furnished rooms. The Germans woke and immediately started to argue over a map on which they were marking a route. It was then about four o’clock in the morning. When I couldn’t bear it any longer I took a hooting ferry to Penang, returning to Butterworth as dawn broke; then everything was painted in simple colours, the ferry orange, the water pink, the island blue, the sky green. Minutes later the sun burned the vaporous colours away. I had breakfast at a Tamil coffee shop, milky tea and an egg scrambled with a doughy square of paratha. Strolling back to the station I saw a man and woman leaving a disreputable hotel. The unshaven man was European and wore a T-shirt; the rumpled woman, powdering her nose as she walked, was Chinese. They hurried into a very old car and drove away. The melancholy cliché of this tropical adultery – the scuttling pair in the Malaysian morning – had a comic aptness that put me in a good mood.

  22. The Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur

  THE two classes on Malaysian Railways include eight different varieties of carriage, from the simple cattle car with wooden benches to the teak-panelled sleeper with its wide berths, armchair, brass spittoon, and green curtains decorated with the railway motif (a tiger, rampant, savaging a dowsing rod). But the best place to ride on this ten-hour trip to Kuala Lumpur is on the wooden balcony between the coaches. This windy space, where the verandah of one car meets the verandah of the other, is about seven feet long: there are overhanging roofs at each end, and on either side are balusters and railings. A brass plate warns you in three languages of the dangers on this speeding porch – in fact, you are expressly forbidden to ride there – but it is quite safe, and that day it was certainly safer there than in the lounge car, where five Malay soldiers were getting drunk on Anchor beer and abusing the Chinese who passed by them. I had been in the lounge car reading, but when the soldiers had overcome their native shyness with drink and began singing ‘Ten Green Bottles’, I decided to move to the balcony. Just inside the car a Chinese man had crammed himself into a luggage rack, where he was sulking, and below me, on the verandah stairs, Malay boys clung, swinging their feet.

  High world prices for rubber, tin, and palm oil have made Malaysia prosperous, and it seemed as relaxed and unaggressive a place as when I had first seen it, in 1969. But the Malay smile is misleading: it was shortly after I decided that it was one of the quietest countries in the world that Malays came howling out of mosques with white rags tied around their heads. When they were through, 2,000 Chinese lay dead and hundreds of shops had been burned to the ground. Mr Lau, who in Thailand had been strolling through the train complaining loudly about the ten-hour delay, was now seated uneasily in the Golden Arrow, hugging his briefcase, with his box of fragile samples between his knees. And the girl gymnasts from Taiwan were no longer limbering up in the corridors. The Chinese had fallen silent: it was a Malay train, and it would have been unthinkable for a group of Chinese to be in the lounge car, singing (as the Malay soldiers were) ‘Roll Me Over in the Clover’. A Malay in third class was more privileged than a Chinese in first.

  For lunch I had my old favourite, mee-hoon soup with a partly poached egg whisked in among the Chinese cabbage, meat scraps, prawn slices, bean sprouts, rice noodles, and a number of other atomized ingredients that thicken it to the point where it can be eaten with
chopsticks. There were no tables in the dining car, which was a noodle stall; there were sticky counters and stools, and Chinese sitting elbow to elbow, shaking soy sauce over their noodles and calling out to the waiters, little boys in red clogs, carrying beer bottles on tin trays.

  Ipoh, the first major stop on the Kuala Lumpur run, has a station hotel, a late Victorian Gormenghast with long windows covered by sombre curtains. The brown drapery hangs in thick folds, keeping out the breeze and preserving the heat, which is paddled around the dining room by ten slow fans. All the tables are set, and the waiter, who might be dead, is propped against the wall at the far end of the room. It is fairly certain there is a suicide upstairs waiting to be discovered, and the flies that soar through the high-ceilinged bar are making for the corpse of this ruined planter or disgraced towkay. It is the sort of hotel that has a skeleton in every closet and a register thick with the pseudonyms of adulterers. I once walked into the station hotel at Ipoh with my little boy, and as soon as we crossed the threshold he began to cry. His innocent nose had smelled what mine couldn’t, and I rushed away with him, relieved, savouring the well-being of deliverance.

  I remained on a balcony of the Golden Arrow, listening to the excited talk of the passengers. English is spoken in Malaysia in a nasal bark, a continual elision of words; phrases are spat and every word-ending is bitten. It is a pared-down version of English and sounds for all the world like Chinese until one’s ear is tuned to it by the din of jungle sounds next to the track, the squawks of locusts and macaws, and monkeys cleaning their teeth on twanging strips of bamboo. This brand of English is devoid of every emotion but whispered hysteria; it drones in excellent contrast to Malay, which to hear – the gliding duplication for the plural and the constant gong of words like pisang, kachang, sarong – is almost to understand. The Malayanized English, used in conversation and seen on station notice boards, is easily grasped: feri-bot, jadual, setesyen, tiket, terafik, and nombor.

  Two Indians crept out to the balcony. Their size (very small) and their demeanor (fearful) said at once they were not of Malaysia. They had the slightly reptilian features of the hungriest people I’d seen in Calcutta. The other travellers on the balcony, mostly Malays, made way for them, and the Indians stood, the turbulence blowing the wrinkles out of their suit jackets, chatting softly in their own language. The stations raced by: Bidor, Trolak, Tapah, and Klang – names like science fiction planets – and more frequently rubber estates intruded on jungle, a symmetry of scored trunks and trodden paths hemmed in by classic jungle, hanging lianas, palms like fountains, and a smothering undergrowth of noisy greenery all dripping in the rain. ‘We mine tin in Thailand and Malaya, just like Cornwall in Great Britain,’ Mr Thanoo had said on the International Express, and here were the battered huts, the rickety conveyor belts that looked like abandoned ski jumps, the smokestacks, and the little hills of washed soil.

  ‘Industry,’ said one of the Indians.

  ‘But not vorking,’ said the other.

  ‘But not vorking,’ said a Malay boy, mimicking the Indians for his friends. They all laughed. The Indians fell silent.

  Towards the end of the afternoon the balcony emptied. The sallow light just pierced the haze, and the air had gone stale; it was damp and hot. When the train stopped the air blanketed my shoulders. The Malays had gone inside to sleep, or perhaps to prowl for girls. It was the durian season, and this fruit, to which the Malays ascribe aphrodisiac properties, has inspired the Malay saying: ‘When the durians come down the sarongs go up.’

  Then there were only the two Indians and me on the balcony. They were taking a holiday – this was the end of it – having spent the previous week at a conference in Singapore. They were from Bangladesh; their names were Ghosh and Rahman; it was a family-planning conference.

  ‘Are you family planners?’

  ‘We are officers,’ said Mr Rahman.

  ‘Of course we have other jobs,’ said Mr Ghosh, ‘but we went to the conference as family-planning officers.’

  ‘Did you read papers?’

  ‘We were observers,’ said Mr Ghosh. ‘Others read papers.’

  ‘Interesting?’

  They waggled their heads; this meant yes.

  ‘Many papers,’ said Mr Rahman. ‘ “The Two-Child Family as a Social Norm”, “Methods of Contraception”, also sterilization, wasectomy, dewices, fitting IUD –’

  ‘Some good discussion,’ said Mr Ghosh. ‘It was a seminar covering all aspects of family planning. Practical, very informative of course. But there are many problems.’

  ‘What do you think is the greatest problem in family planning?’

  ‘Without a doubt, communication,’ said Mr Ghosh.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Rural areas,’ said Mr Rahman. I thought he was going to add something to this observation, but he stroked his Vandyke beard and gazed off the balcony and said, ‘So many girls on motor scooters in this country.’

  I said, ‘Now, you’ve been to the conference, right? And I suppose you’re going back to Bangladesh – ’

  ‘Back to Singapore, then Bangkok by air, then Dacca,’ said Mr Ghosh.

  ‘Right. But when you get back there – I mean, you’ve heard all these papers about family planning – what are you going to do?’

  ‘Ghosh?’ said Rahman, inviting his colleague to reply.

  Mr Ghosh cleared his throat. He said, ‘There are many problems. I should say first we will start straightaway on curriculum. Curriculum is most important. We must build a model – work with a model of aims and objectives. What are we trying to do? What do we aim to achieve? And why? And costings must be considered. All those questions: answers must be found. Do you follow me?’ He cleared his throat again. ‘Then, next important, is areas of information’ – he spread his hands to suggest the size of the areas – ‘that is, we must create areas of information so that ordinary people can understand importance of our work.’

  ‘Where are you going to do this?’

  ‘In universities,’ said Mr Ghosh.

  ‘Universities?’

  ‘We have many universities in Bangladesh,’ said Mr Rahman.

  ‘You mean you’re going to get the universities to practise family planning?’

  ‘No, to study the problem,’ said Mr Ghosh.

  ‘Hasn’t it been studied before?’

  ‘Not in these new ways,’ said Mr Rahman. ‘We haven’t got areas of information, as Ghosh said. And we have no trained people. Ghosh and myself were the only delegates from Bangladesh at the conference. Now we must take all this knowledge back.’

  ‘But why to the universities?’

  ‘Explain,’ said Mr Rahman to Mr Ghosh.

  ‘He does not understand,’ said Mr Ghosh. ‘First to the universities, then, when the trained people are there, to the rural areas.’

  ‘What’s the population of Bangladesh?’

  ‘That is a difficult question,’ said Mr Ghosh. ‘There are many answers.’

  ‘Give me a rough estimate.’

  ‘Round about seventy-five million,’ said Mr Ghosh.

  ‘What’s the growth rate?’

  ‘Some say 3 per cent, some say 4,’ said Mr Ghosh. ‘You see, no work can begin until a proper census is taken. Do you know when the last census was taken in our country? Guess.’

  ‘I can’t guess.’

  ‘It was years ago.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘So many, I don’t know myself. Years and years. British time. Since then we have had cyclones, wars, floods, so many things to add and subtract. We cannot begin until we have a census.’

  ‘But that could be years from now!’

  ‘Well, that’s the problem,’ said Mr Rahman.

  ‘In the meantime the population will get bigger and bigger – it’ll be fantastic.’

  ‘You see what I mean?’ said Mr Ghosh. ‘Our people don’t know this. I can say at the moment they lack jeal.’

  ‘Zeal?’

  ‘Yes, and p
urpose.’

  ‘May I ask you another question, Mr Ghosh?’

  ‘Go right ahead. You ask so many!’

  ‘How many children do you have?’

  ‘I am having four.’

  ‘Mr Rahman?’

  ‘I am having five.’

  ‘Is that a good size for Bangladesh?’

  ‘Perhaps not. It is hard to say,’ said Mr Rahman. ‘We have no statistics.’

  ‘Are there other family-planning people like yourselves in Bangladesh?’

  ‘Many! We have had an ongoing programme for – what? Mr Ghosh – three years? Four years?’

  ‘Do these other family planners have big families or small families?’ I asked.

  ‘Some family planners are having big and some are having small.’

  ‘What do you call big?’

  ‘More than five,’ said Mr Rahman.

  ‘Well, it’s hard to say,’ said Mr Ghosh.

  ‘Do you mean more than five in the family?’

  ‘More than five children,’ said Mr Rahman.

  ‘Okay, but if a family planner goes to a village and word gets out that he has five children of his own, how the hell is he going to convince people that –’

  ‘It is so hot,’ said Mr Rahman. ‘I think I will go inside.’

  ‘Wery interesting to talk to you,’ said Mr Ghosh. ‘I think you are a teacher. Your name?’

  It was dark when we pulled into Kuala Lumpur Station, which is the grandest in southeast Asia, with onion-domed cupolas, minarets, and the general appearance of the Brighton Pavilion, but twenty times larger. As a monument to Islamic influence it is much more persuasive than the million-dollar National Mosque down the road, which gets all the tourists. I rushed off the train and ran to the Booking Hall to get a ticket for the next train to Singapore. It was leaving at eleven that night, so I had time to have a quiet beer with an old friend and a plate of chicken satay in one of those back lanes that made Cocteau call the city ‘Kuala L’impure’.