Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  Mr. Bernard, a colonial from a transplanted family (he'd never been to India), was a link to the nineteenth century. His memory was wonderfully precise. He told me in detail about his working on the railway, his army career, his life as a chef and a steward. He had met Chiang Kaishek and Lord Curzon and the Duke of Kent—all in Mandalay, where he served them six-course dinners at the officers' mess. He remembered the day Queen Victoria died, the day the Japanese invaded Maymyo, and he told me about his many children. I met a couple of them when they came to my room to bring me buckets of hot water for my bath and to build a fire in my bedroom fireplace.

  Now I was back in this stately mansion, glad that it still existed and was in business.

  "Yes?"

  A man slipped behind the registration desk and twisted the guest book my way for my signature.

  "Welcome, sir."

  He was a smiling slender Indian, about fifty or so, in a baseball cap and a jacket—he had just come from supervising some gardeners repaving a path. The clothes made him seem athletic.

  I said, "I was here once a long time ago. This place is in really good shape."

  "Recently renovated," the young man said. "New paint. New varnish. Better plumbing. When were you here, sir?"

  "Thirty-something years ago!"

  "A long time, sir."

  "I wrote about it—about being here, meeting Mr. Bernard."

  "My father," the man said. He looked at me narrowly, and then his smile brightened. He had beautiful teeth, a friendly face. "You are Mr. Paul Theroux."

  "That's me."

  "I'm Peter Bernard"—and he shook my hand. "I'm manager now. I'm so glad to see you. We talk about you all the time. We have a copy of your book. You were up there in room eleven. Let me take you there."

  It is not often in life that you make a general travel plan and everything works out perfectly, but this was one of those times. And the best part was that, because perfection is unimaginable, there were limits to hopes. The rest came unexpectedly, unbidden, undreamed of.

  "I remember you, sir!" he said.

  It was more than I'd hoped for, and that was pure pleasure, a return to the past without an atom of disappointment—the past recaptured, like a refuge, everything that I'd wanted a homecoming to be but that a homecoming (at least in my case) never was. This was a wonderful way back, as though this man in his fifties, who'd been a teenager before, had been waiting for me to return.

  "You came from Lashio on the train, on a pony cart from the station," he said. "You smoked a pipe. You wore a black shirt. Such a small bag you had." We were in the room—spacious, with a fireplace and a view of the gardens. "I saw you writing at the table here."

  So, at last, a witness to my long-ago misery, my loneliness, my scribbling. I said, "Your father—what happened to him?"

  "Dead, sir. Some years ago." But he began to smile again. "He read your book! A guest brought him a copy. He was so happy to read about himself. Everyone knew about it. He became quite well known. Because of what you wrote in your book, many people came here. They mentioned you."

  Peter Bernard showed me around the mansion—the floors were polished, the beds made, the fireplaces whitewashed, flowers in vases, the tables laid in the dining room. The light was exceptional, because all the rooms had large windows and each room its own balcony. Imperial architecture here, the villas and bungalows of the British colonial officers—Indian army, civil service—was deliberately roomy and comfortable, reflecting their pretensions to be considered upper class if not aristocratic. That was the imperial ploy: as soon as the British got to the colonies, they jumped up a class or two and put on airs and browbeat the underlings, the servants, the workers they referred to as dogsbodies. Kipling dramatized it, Saki satirized it, Orwell objected violently to it, E. M. Forster fictionalized it, J. R. Ackerley tittered over it. But Mr. Bernard had stood and served; he was, after all, a Victorian, from a transplanted family, a loyal British subject.

  His first name had been Albert. If I had known that, I would have remembered it; it was my own father's name. Mr. Bernard had been chief steward of Candacraig, appointed in 1962 at the age of sixty-six, summoned out of semi-retirement to straighten the place out. He'd been so old when I'd met him (he had stories of World War I), he might have waited on the colonial policeman Eric Blair, who might have stayed here, before he left for London to become George Orwell. Mr. Bernard had died at the age of ninety.

  The portrait of Mr. Bernard in my book had done what the written word sometimes accidentally does, worked a kind of magic. It had brought visitors, and it had given Mr. Bernard "face," which was so important in Burma, especially for a non-Burmese of Indian descent. I had mentioned in my book that his father had been in the Indian army. Peter told me that his grandfather had held the post of bandmaster in the Madras Infantry, and that he had never returned to India, nor had any other member of the family ever been to India, even for the merest visit.

  "What's it like there, India?" Peter asked. "So many people, eh?"

  Later he invited me to his house—the family house, built by Mr. Bernard for his nine children.

  It was a sprawling bungalow called Newlands, at the end of a long driveway—the usual wall around it—and beneath a large banyan tree. I was greeted by two men in their sixties, Vincent and John, so delighted to be told who I was that they got my book from a back room and showed it to me. Mr. Bernard's signature was on the front endpaper.

  "He used to read it," Vincent said. "It made him really happy."

  Of the nine Bernard children, only two were married, John and Margaret. Victor—born in 1945, named for the victory over the Japanese—had died of heart failure.

  "He was a priest, a Salesian father, with a church upcountry in Wa State."

  Wa State was distant and isolated, in the Shan Plateau, the poppy-growing and opium-exporting area, in the smoky mountains of the Golden Triangle. But Father Victor Bernard hadn't been fazed and had been popular in his parish, which included the main town of Pang Wai. The Wa people were darker than the Burmese, animist, jungle-dwelling. They were mainly poppy cultivators and had a high incidence of opium smoking. What made them especially attractive to Catholic and Baptist missionaries was their colorful paganism. Noted for their dog eating, their headhunting, and their connoisseurship of skulls, they often set so many skulls on poles that they created (as Mr. Kurtz had done in the Inner Station) what seemed avenues of human skulls in the jungle, aiming at purification, to drive evil spirits away.

  The Wa denied they were cannibals, the Burmese historian Thant Myint-U claimed. It was only good fortune that they sought in their strenuous decapitations: "a good skull or two would ensure all the maize and dog and good liquor (strong rice wine) they needed to be happy." Wa State bordered China, and Pang Wai was conveniently near the Chinese town of Cangyuan, on the opium transshipment route. Even in a shrinking world, Wa State, east of the Salween River, was not just distant but almost inaccessible.

  I sat in the Bernards' parlor drinking tea, catching up. Margaret now lived in Berlin. A German doctor who'd read my book had made a visit to Candacraig. A widower, he'd taken the trip for his nerves and had met Margaret, who was a receptionist at the hotel. He fell in love with her. They married here, garlanded with flowers.

  In a country of slender, soft-voiced beauties with creamy skin, the loveliest smiles, and the gentlest manner, the rest of the Bernard brothers had remained stubbornly single. This baffled me. Apart from Margaret, the sisters, too, had chosen spinsterhood. The better I got to know them, the more I felt that this was a comment on their happy household, the mutually supportive family Mr. Bernard had fathered, and maybe an indication of how they had lived in Upper Burma, in a closed culture, Catholics of Indian descent among Buddhist Burmans. Pictures of Jesus, of Mary, of saints, were hung on the walls of the parlor. On the mantelpiece a gold chalice glittered among devotional tokens.

  Their mother, Theresa Bernard, had been beloved and doted on; she'd died only a few ye
ars before, also at the age of ninety. It was as though they were all so content they couldn't bear to leave the serenity of the homestead. Margaret had left the country. Jane had recently visited her in Germany, and reported that she was happy in Berlin. Of the others, none had left Myanmar. They continued to live the provincial life of the small town, with occasional visits to Mandalay.

  "I'm still waiting for my lucky day," Vincent said of his marriage prospects. He was a powerfully built man who, with a Dutch partner, managed two thousand acres of maize some distance from Pyin-Oo-Lwin.

  John, whose nickname was Sunny, was a thin, watchful man. He sat sideways on a straight-backed chair, tremulous in the early stages of Parkinson's disease. He said, "I remember you so well, Mr. Paul. You were in the corner room. You talked to us."

  "Your father was proud of you," I said.

  "You wrote our names in your book!" Vincent said.

  "Was your father strict?"

  "He beat me twice a week," Sunny said without rancor, smiling, widening his eyes.

  Peter agreed: I had described their father's interesting career as a colonial servant, but I hadn't mentioned his severity. Well, how was I to know? Their father had been punctual, methodical, demanding, an early riser. Candacraig had been his entire responsibility, and the burden had come at the end of his career. He had supervised the place until his retirement. And, though it had been owned by the government, he had turned it into a family enterprise: all the children had worked here at one time or another.

  Vincent said, "People came holding your book, wanting to meet my father. Tourists from Britain. From America. Aussies, too. My father met them and talked to them and told them his stories."

  "He was eighty-one when he retired," Peter said.

  "Later, when they came, we informed them he was dead," Sunny said. "Some of them cried. They went away sad."

  They showed me family albums, memorabilia, a large studio portrait of their father, looking owlish in horn-rimmed glasses. And so I sat there, and drank tea, and was happy. It was a homecoming I had not expected, like a visit to generous grateful relatives I had not seen in decades. Nothing like this had ever happened to me among my own family. Was this a motivation, the embrace of strangers, in my becoming a traveler? It was all positive and pleasurable, the men I had remembered as eager polite boys; the women who'd just been names. The wonderful part was the continuity of it all, that life had gone on. Without daring to anticipate such an event, it was the sort of reunion I had hoped for when I set out to repeat my trip.

  I looked at the bazaar and the Christian churches—Gothic in red brick—and spent a day at Kandawgyi, botanical gardens that dated from the first serious settlement of the town, when the railway had been finished in 1900. It was a beautifully landscaped area of more than four hundred acres, with a pond and bamboo groves and endangered deer and a research center devoted to growing mulberry trees for silkworms, as well as the raising of silkworms themselves. Walking along the flower-bordered paths I was reminded that at an earlier time I would have directed the rickshaw driver to pass the Kandawgyi Gardens and asked him to stop at the Kandawgyi Bar, if such a place could be found, and I would have stayed there, getting half drunk and homesick.

  The night before I left, I did get half drunk at the Aung Padamyar, an Indian restaurant that Vincent recommended. It was run by one of his female cousins, for Mr. Bernard's brother was also an old-time resident of Maymyo.

  Dennis Bernard, another cousin, introduced himself. Another genial wraith from the distant past, he said, "Remember me? I set the table for you at Candacraig."

  He was also in his fifties, semi-retired. He said that he had worked for Mr. Bernard as a waiter and a cleaner.

  "It wasn't easy," he said. "We had to get up at four in the morning to clean the dining room and set the tables. Empty the ashtrays. Sweep. Uncle Bernard insisted that we get there at that time. 'Be very quiet, the guests are sleeping.' He was so strict. He checked each table. 'Don't hurry,' he said. 'Do it all correctly.' And he could get really angry."

  "What made him angry?"

  "If we left the spoon out of the sugar bowl."

  ***

  I WENT BACK TO MANDALAY. It was then that I searched for and found Oo Nawng and gave him the money. He said, "I'm happy."

  Before I left, I made a visit to the Irrawaddy, just to see the river and the boats and the landing stage. It was too far for Oo Nawng to go in his bicycle rickshaw, so I took a taxi. On the way, we passed a big bold sign: The Tatmadaw Will Never Betray the National Cause.

  "What's the Tatmadaw?"

  "Damadaw," the driver said, giving it the correct pronunciation. "Is the army."

  "Yes?"

  "Stupid army."

  NIGHT TRAIN TO NONG KHAI

  THE GREAT CHALLENGE in travel is not arriving at the glamorous foreign city, but solving the departure problem, finding a way out of it, without flying. Buses are usually nasty, and bus stations the world over are dens of thieves, cutpurses, intimidators, mountebanks, and muggers. Hired cars are convenient but nearly always a ripoff, and who wants narration from the driver? The train is still the ideal—show up and hop on.

  The express trains out of Bangkok were brand-new and comfortable, yet Bangkok was hard to leave. I had thought I would breeze through, but found myself seated in a cool shadowy room with muted gong music playing and a Thai woman washing my feet. She called herself Sky, because her name (she said) was too hard for me to say. I was so moved by the foot-washing I wanted to weep. Then she had me on the table and was kneeling on the backs of my thighs and tugging the kinks out of my arms. They were sore from rocking up and down Myanmar on the ghost trains. She poked her elbows into the small of my back and did a sort of samba along my spine, digging her toes into my vertebrae, and I thought of my trip from Colombo to Galle. She punched my upper back, giving me noogies in the recesses of my muscles, and I thought of the two drunks on the train from Bokhara, their hands in the remains of a tornapart chicken, their eyes glazed with vodka, as I stayed in the corridor trying to remain upright. She worked on my arms, flexed one then the other, twisted them, and I saw the rigid posture of the Muslim sitting stiff-backed on the train from Ashgabat to Mary.

  She straddled me, as though playing horsy. This was heaven, having her seated on my back like a child on a pony ride, her knees forward, using them to massage my kidneys as she hammered the kinks out of my back. I had seen horsemen sitting like this in the desolate fields of Romania, but I was the pony now, and she the rider.

  She slipped back, gripped my legs with hers and pressed, a wrestling move, kneading my calves with her heels, and then she took hold of my feet, finding each joint, each muscle, rolling each toe—whose feet are ever venerated and squeezed and chafed in this way, even by a lover? I had a vision of all the people, in India and Sri Lanka and Myanmar, whom I had seen walking—their cracked and tortured feet in broken shoes and shattered sandals.

  "Over, please."

  Then I was face-up, with a cloth mask over my eyes, as Sky knuckled and punched my legs and made a circular syncopation, open-handed against my inner thighs, playing a percussive tune. All this for almost two hours, a kind of bliss, some of it hurting badly, but when she stopped I wanted more. What lover ever spent that much time appeasing the tension in her lover's body?

  Near the end she took my right hand. I write with this hand. It is cramped like a claw most of the time from holding a pen. She used her fingers to pry my hand bones apart, massaging my palm, bending my whole hand backwards, flexing my fingers, and then, finger by finger, cracking my joints, pulling each digit, until my hand stopped being a blunt instrument and acquired an elasticity, opening like a blossom.

  "The children's hands bleed, sir!" a carpet seller had told me in Jaipur, unrolling a rug. "Look at the tiny knots!"

  And then fruit juice under the stars, and my thinking, I'll stay a little while longer.

  The last time I had stayed at the Erawan Hotel—famous, venerable, atmospheri
c—it was full of American army officers and camp followers of the Vietnam War. There had been only two great hotels in Bangkok then, the other being the Oriental, just as venerable and luxurious. Now there were many posh hotels. Bangkok was a so-called spa destination, and the Grand Hyatt Erawan, on the site of the old hotel, had a whole upper level of spa bungalows, like a village for sybarites and lotus eaters on a high rooftop. My bungalow had its own massage room, steam room, veranda, and bamboo garden. A swimming pool was just outside. Did I want another massage? Was I hungry? What about a cup of tea? How about a banana?

  In a much too big, humid city, still with a traffic problem, even with most of the klongs (canals) and creeks paved over, and questionable sights—newly painted temples and the murky Chao Phraya River—the hotel had become the destination. People checked in and simply stayed for a week, being waited on and pampered, without leaving. The Oriental was more palatial, with its spa and cooking school in a villa across the river, its five gourmet restaurants. The same general manager, Kurt Wachtveitl, had been there all those years ago.

  "Ten million tourists come here," Kurt told me. "But it won't be long before there are twenty million, because the Chinese are starting to arrive—to shop, mainly for gemstones."

  The city itself is still busy and bright, the side streets still sleazy, with grubby bars and brothels in the same districts as before. Tourists come to shop for silks and eat great meals. Some book buyers, too—the five-story Paragon Shopping Center had the best bookstore I'd seen since leaving London. Bangkok had been a destination for sex tourists and soldiers on R and R. Though the city is now prosperous from manufacturing—sweatshops and outsourcing—that rosy dimension remains. Pat Pong Road, which used to have a seedy charm, good-natured in its pimping, is now just scuzzy, and raucous, with loudly contending whores.

  I was on my way to see a tailor. The taxi driver said, "You like sandwich?"

  "I'm not hungry."