Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

A Persian's Heav'n is easily made -'Tis but black eyes and lemonade.

At the evening call to prayer it is as if the train has been stricken with some strange illness. The passengers fall to their knees and salaam. The Night Mail to Meshed is probably the only train in the world in which all the passengers ride facing in the opposite direction from the one they're travelling in: they bob along with their eyes turned to Mecca. During the trip, the pressure of prayer builds and the carriages vibrate with these devotions. On the Teheran Express the women wear skirts and blouses; on the Night Mail they are swathed in robes, and their veils reveal nothing of their faces.

It was undoubtedly the Muslim character of the train that had eliminated beer from the dining car. But it was a hot evening when we left Teheran and I was anxious for a drink. I was saving my full bottle of gin for Afghanistan.

'No beer, eh?' I said to the steward. 'What do you have?'

'Chichenchebub.'

'No, what other drinks do you have?'

'Biftek.'

'Any wine?'

He nodded.

'What kind?'

'Chichen pilaff, soup, salade.'

I abandoned the idea of drinking and decided to have a meal. I was eating and watching the passing moonscape – craters, stark mountains on the horizon, and sand as far as the eye could see – when a man in a bush jacket, carrying a newspaper and a shopping bag, approached and said, 'Mind if I join you?'

'Not at all.' His newspaper, the London Daily Telegraph, was five days old; his shopping bag contained many cans of disinfectant. He sat, his elbow on the paper, his chin resting in his hand, in an attitude of concentration.

'Look at that girl,' he said. A pretty girl went past, and as she was in a rather tight-fitting dress and not the heavy wimple and habit the other women were wearing, she drew stares from the diners. I started to remark on this, but he shushed me. 'Wait. I want to concentrate on this.' He regarded the girl's backside until she was out of the car and said, i'd love to meet a girl like that.'

'Why don't you introduce yourself? It shouldn't be too difficult.'

'Impossible. They won't talk to you. And if you want to take them out – say, for a meal or a show – they won't go unless you intend to marry them.'

'That is awkward,' I said.

'And that's not all. I live in the wilds – no women in Ezna.'

'I take it you come up on weekends.'

'You're joking! This is my second time in Teheran -the first was four months ago.'

'You've been in the desert for four months?'

'The mountains,' he said. 'But it comes to the same thing.'

I asked him why he had chosen to live in the mountains of Iran, on a station where there were no women, if he was so keen on meeting a nice girl.

'I was supposed to meet one here. I knew her in Riyadh – a secretary, very nice girl – and she said she was coming to Teheran. Change of job. So when I got back to the UK I took this contract and wrote her a letter. But that was six months ago and she still hasn't answered.'

It was now dark outside, moonless, impenetrable, desert darkness; the tables of the dining car transmitted the click-click of the wheels to the knives and forks, and the stewards were removing the jackets of their neatly pressed uniforms for evening prayers. The engineer – he was an engineer, supervising the construction of an oil rig – continued his melancholy tale, about having signed a three-year contract in Iran on the slender possibility of meeting the secretary.

'What I'd really like to do is meet a wealthy girl, not Sophia Loren, but pretty and with some money. I used to know one – her father was in banking – but she was queer, always putting on a little-girl act. Couldn't see myself being married to that! Look.'

The girl who had passed through the dining car earlier had returned and was marching past once again. This time I had a good look at her, and I think one would have had to have been alone in the Iranian mountains for four months to find any charm in her. The engineer was absolutely ecstatic in a way I found touching and hopeless. 'God,' he said, 'the things I could do with her!'

Attempting to change the subject, I asked him what he did for amusement on the site.

'There's a snooker table and a darts board,' he said, 'but they're in such bad condition I don't use them. Anyway, even if they were usable I wouldn't go to the club. Can't stand the smell of the toilets. That's one of the reasons I went into Teheran – to buy some Harpic. I've got nine cans of it.

'What do I do? Well, let's see. Normally I read -1 love reading. And I'm learning Farsi. Sometimes I work overtime. I listen to the radio a lot. Oh, it's a quiet sort of life. That's why I'd like to meet a girl.'

I suggested that the fact that he had spent, as he told me, the past seven years in Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Iran might have something to do with his protracted bachelorhood. He readily agreed.

'What about brothels?'

'Not for me, mate. I want a nice steady girl – clean, pretty, with money, the works. My brother's had lots of them. It really annoys me. There was a ladies' hairdresser from Uxbridge, lovely she was, and she was mad about him. I was staying with him – I had home leave – in his flat in Hayes. But would he pay the slightest bit of attention to her? Not at all! She finally left him. Married someone else. I don't blame her. I'd love to have a chance with a girl like that. I'd take her to a show, buy her flowers, treat her to a slap-up meal. That's what I'd do. I'd be good to her. But my brother's selfish, always has been. Wants a big car and a colour telly, only interested in himself. Me, I'm interested in all kinds of people.

'I don't know why I'm running on like this, but my last home leave nearly finished me. I found a really sweet girl, a typist, from Chester, and just as things were going well I was rung up by her ex-boyfriend. Said he was going to kill me. I had to drop her.'

The dining car was now empty, the stewards had ended their prayers and were setting the tables for breakfast.

'I think they want us to leave,' I said.

'I've got great respect for these people,' said the engineer. 'You can laugh if you want, but I've often thought of becoming a Muslim.'

'I wouldn't laugh at that.'

'You have to know the Koran backwards and forwards. It's not easy. I've been reading it on the site -course, I keep it quiet. If my manager caught me reading the Koran he wouldn't understand. He'd think I was a nutter. But I think that might be the answer. Become a Muslim, renew my contract after three years, and meet a nice Persian girl. It should be dead easy to meet them if you're a Muslim.'

The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again. The railway was a fictor's bazaar, in which anyone with the patience could carry away a memory to pore over in privacy. The memories were inconclusive, but an ending, as in the best fiction, was always implied. The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away.

There were three people in my compartment, a Canadian husband and wife and a grim hairy boy from an East London slum. They were all going to Australia -the Canadian couple because 'We didn't feel like learning French', the cockney because London 'is 'eaving with bloody Indians'. It must be a sociological fact that prejudice is a more common motive for emigration than poverty, but what interested me about these three was that they were, like so many others, going to Australia the cheapest way, via Afghanistan and India, living like the poorest they were among, eating vile food, and sleeping in bug-ridden hotel rooms, because they were rejecting a society they saw to be in decay.