Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

The devotees are multiplying. Letters pour in to the Parish Priest testifying to the wonderful favours granted by invocation to the Saint. Many of them have been those who, tangled in a seemingly hopeless web of bureaucratic red tape, and who invoked St Jude who has helped them find a solution. The Parish Priest receives regular remittances from those who, prior to leaving the island on some business visit or scholarship, were tied down by regulations and unsympathetic officialdom and who overcame these after prayer to St Jude.

In the same edition of the paper, food riots were reported in several towns after the rice ration had been cut (for the third time, said the teacher – it was now a quarter of what it had been five months previous). The current harvest was a failure, chillies were unobtainable, and from the train I could see bread lines – hundreds of listless people in misshapen queues, waiting with empty baskets. At the stations, children stood champing on sticks of raw cassava, and pariah dogs fought over the discarded peels, tearing with narrow fishlike jaws that were all teeth. The teacher said there were hunger marchers in Colombo, and a story was circulating that a military coup was imminent. The government had vigorously denied the coup story. There was no food shortage, really, said the minister of agriculture – many people were successfully growing yams and cassava in their gardens. There was plenty of food in Ceylon, he said, but some people didn't want to eat it: all these people had to do was to change their diet from the loaves of bread they craved. This American-style bread, introduced as an emergency measure during the war, has become a staple of the Ceylonese diet. The catch is that not a single grain of wheat is grown in Ceylon, which makes bread as inconvenient a staple on that lovely island as water chestnuts would be in Nevada. The minister heaped scorn on Singapore's Straits Times, which had printed a story about the Ceylonese army's being so starved it was eating grass. But the outraged denials only seemed to confirm that the food situation was desperate. At Colombo Fort I was approached separately by three piratical Singhalese. 'Anything to sell?' said the first; 'Chinese girl?' said the second; 'Give me a shirt,' said the third, not mincing his words – though he offered to carry my suitcase in exchange for it. Saint Jude seemed to have his work cut out for him, and the preparations for his feast day were perfectly understandable in the land no longer known as Serendip.

It struck me as practically insane in a country that was starving to death that thirty people should choose to attend a three-day seminar on American literature, at which I would be the principal speaker. American literature is fine, but I feel it to be an irrelevance in a disaster area. I had not counted on the resourcefulness of the American embassy; when the seminar got under way I saw my alarm was pointless. The clever man who supervised the seminar had assured me there would be 100 per cent attendance, and his method was not very different from that of the family planner in India who gives a new transistor radio to every male who agrees to a vasectomy. Here, on the hungry island of Ceylon, the American literature seminar included three huge meals, high tea, a free room in the New Orient Hotel in Galle, and all the whisky you could drink. Little wonder it was well attended. After a mammoth four-course breakfast, the bloated delegates met in an upstairs room and dozed through my inoffensive lecture, waking at noon to rush downstairs to a spectacular lunch. The afternoon meeting was short, truncated by tea, and the main event of the day was dinner, a leisurely good-humoured affair, followed by a movie that put everyone to sleep. The first day's meals were frenzied sessions of gourmandizing, but after that things settled down; the delegates padded back and forth from dining room to seminar room, to meals and their justification. In between they stoked themselves with cookies, occasionally finding it necessary to absent themselves with indigestion, and they were often so stupefied with food, they began to look like victims of some dropsical illness, the chief symptom of which was prolonged slumber interrupted by attacks of furious belching. Some of the delegates gave me books they had written. The gravy stains on the covers will continue to remind me of that weekend, and I shall always remember the unanimous hoot that went up at the end of the seminar when the American organizer said, 'Shall we leave at ten o'clock, or after lunch?'

One night I left the eructating delegates at the hotel and went in search of a snooker game. I found the Gymkhana Club, but several members had locked themselves in the snooker room where they were secretly listening to a fizzling short-wave radio. It was the latest racing news on the BBC Overseas Service, and the men, who were bookies, scribbled on tote-sheets as the plummy voice said, 'At Doncaster today, in a seven-furlong race on a slow track, Bertha's Pill came in at twenty to one, and Gallant Falcon, Safety Match, and Sub Rosa – ' Racing is banned in Ceylon, so the Ceylonese bet on races in Epsom, Doncaster, and Kemp-ton Park. The bookies said I could use the table as soon as the broadcast was over.

The Public Services Club was right across the road. The snooker table was free, and the members said they had no objection to my playing, but added that it might be difficult because the billiard boy had to catch his bus. I was a bit puzzled by this explanation, but after a while I saw in the billiard boy a clue to the unspeakable idleness in Ceylon.

I began to play one of the gasconading Singhalese, and after a few balls were potted there was some muttering.

'Billiard boy will get later bus.'

The billiard boy, a shiny clerical Buddhist named Fernando, carried the bridge with the confident authority of a bishop with crook. The game depended on him. He kept score; he passed the bridge when it was needed; he spotted the balls; he chalked the cues; he reminded the players of the rules; once when I was in doubt about a shot he told me the best one to take, sucking his teeth when I missed. None of his tasks was especially strenuous, but they had the effect of ruining my concentration. The singular virtue of snooker and pool is that they are played in complete silence. Fernando's panting attentions violated this silence. I was glad to hear my opponent say – after about forty minutes – 'Billiard boy must go.'

'Good,' I said. 'Let him go.'

Fernando racked his bridge and sped out of the room.

'I beat you by one point.'

'No you didn't,' I said. 'The game's not over.'

'Game is over.'

I pointed out that there were still four balls on the table.

'But no billiard boy,' said the Singhalese. 'So the game is over. I win.'

Was it any wonder that in this fertile country – so fertile the fence posts and telephone poles had taken root and sprouted branches (and what a shame they didn't bear fruit) – people were faint with hunger? They had driven out the Tamils, who had done all the planting; they had forgotten how to scatter seeds on the ground -this scattering would have given them a harvest. Galle was a beautiful place, garlanded with red hibiscus and smelling of the palm-scented ocean, possessing cool Dutch interiors and ringed by forests of bamboo. The sunset's luminous curtains patterned the sky in rufous gold for an hour and a half every evening, and all night the waves crashed on the ramparts of the fort. But the famished faces of the sleepwalkers and the deprivation in that idyllic port made its beauty almost unbearable.

The train from Galle winds along the coast north towards Colombo, so close to the shoreline that the spray flung by the heavy rollers from Africa reaches the broken windows of the battered wooden carriages. I was going third class, and for the early part of the trip sat in a dark overcrowded compartment with people who, as soon as I became friendly, asked me for money. They were not begging with any urgency; indeed, they didn't look as if they needed money, but rather seemed to be taking the position that whatever they succeeded in wheedling out of me might come in handy at some future date. It happened fairly often. In the middle of a conversation a man would gently ask me if I had any appliance I could give him. 'What sort of appliance?' 'Razor blades.' I would say no and the conversation would continue