Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

After nearly an hour of this I crawled out of the compartment to stand by the door and watch the rain dropping out of a dark layer of high clouds just off the coast – the distant rain like majestic pillars of granite. To the right the sun was setting, and in the foreground were children, purpling in the sunset and skipping along the sand. That was on the ocean side of the train. On the jungle side it had already begun to pour heavily, and at each station the signalman covered himself with his flags, making the red one into a kerchief, the green one into a skirt, flapping the green when the train approached and quickly using it to keep the rain off when the train had passed.

A Chinese man and his Singhalese wife had boarded the train in Galle with their fat dark baby. They were the Wongs, off to Colombo for a little holiday. Mr Wong said he was a dentist; he had learned the trade from his father, who had come to Ceylon from Shanghai in 1937. Mr Wong didn't like the train and said he usually went to Colombo on his motorcycle except during the monsoon. He also had a helmet and goggles. If I ever went back to Galle he would show them to me. He told me how much they cost.

'Can you speak Chinese?'

'Humbwa - go, mingwa – come. That's all. I speak Singhalese and English. Chinese very hard.' He pressed his temples with his knuckles.

Simla had been full of Chinese dentists, with signboards showing horrible cross-sections of the human mouth and trays of white toothcaps in the window. I asked him why so many Chinese I had seen were dentists.

'Chinese are very good dentists!' he said. His breath was spiced with coconut. 'I'm good!'

'Can you give me a filling?'

'No, no stoppings.'

'Do you clean teeth?'

'No.'

'Can you pull them?'

'You want estraction? I give you name of a good estractionist.'

'What kind of dentist are you, Mr Wong?'

'Tooth mechanics,' he said. 'Chinese are the best ones for tooth mechanics.'

Tooth mechanics is this: you have a shop with a shelf of English putty, a pink semiliquid; you also have drawers filled with teeth in various sizes. A person comes in who has had two front teeth knocked out in a food riot or a quarrel over a coconut. You fill his mouth with pink putty and make a mould of his gums. A plate is made from this, and when it is trimmed, two Japanese fangs are stuck to it. Unfortunately, these plastic dentures are valueless for chewing food with and must be removed at mealtime. Mr Wong said business was excellent and he was taking in between iooo and 1400 rupees a month, which is more than a professor gets at Colombo University.

Inside the train the passengers were banging the windows shut to keep the rain out. The sunset's fire was tangled in leaden clouds, and the pillars of rain supporting the toppling thunderheads were very close; the fishermen were fighting their catamarans ashore through high surf. The train had begun to smell awful; Mr Wong apologized for the stink. People were jammed in the compartments and pressed in the corridors. I was at the door and could see the more nimble ones clinging to the steel ladders, balanced on the coupling. When the rain increased – and now it was really coming down – they fought their way into the carriages and slammed the doors and stood in the darkness while the rain hit the metal doors like hail.

My door was still open, and I was against the wall, while blurred gusts of rain beat past me.

'At least you can breathe here.'

The man who had spoken knotted a handkerchief on his head and stood with me. He had a briefcase. He whispered that he was a jeweller, down from Calcutta to take advantage of the market. Previously Indians were smuggling gems out of Ceylon to sell in India. Now the price in Ceylon was five times what it had been a few months ago, so the Indians were smuggling the gems back into Ceylon to sell at inflated prices.

'It's a funny situation,' he said.

'It's a pretty desperate country.'

'How many people in Ceylon – you know?'

I said I thought it was about twelve million.

'That's right,' he said, 'twelve million or so. And they can't feed them. You know how many people we have in Calcutta, in Calcutta alone"? Eight million!'

'Can you feed them?'

'Of course not. But we don't talk all the rubbish they talk. You hear the rubbish? Grow More Food Campaign, plant some yams, revolutionary rubbish, political rubbish, this and that.'

'The bread queues are the worst I've ever seen.'

'You call those bread queues? In Calcutta we have bread queues twice as long as that. Bread queues, rice queues, even milk queues. You name it, we've got a queue for it. This is nothing.'

The rain let up, and in the village of grass huts with steeply pitched roofs the lime kilns were sending clouds of smoke into the palm groves. It was another example of Ceylonese improvidence. They dynamite coral from reefs and burn it to make lime. But the broken reef lets in the sea to erode the shore. The government had begun a programme to cement the reefs, but the paradox is that cement is made with lime, and, as no cement can be imported, the reefs that are dynamited for the lime to mend others must themselves be replaced. They call it the cement-industry; it is an industry that is entirely self-consuming: nothing is achieved.

Normally in such a train – in India, for example – the people would be eating or reading to pass the time. But there was little food and the shortage of newsprint had drastically reduced the newspapers. So the passengers on the 16.25 from Galle to Colombo were sitting; in the early part of the trip they were sitting in the light from the glorious sunset, and now they were sitting in the storm's darkness. The train rattled; the waves crashed on the shore. Nearer Colombo, the monks in the last carriage (for clergy, said the sign over the door) serenely watched the sun go down; second class held a school outing, gaping in starched uniforms; in third, where I was, nearly everyone sat silently in the dark shuttered compartments. By six it was much lighter outside – the storm had let up and the sun cut through the haze – but no one bothered to open the shutters. At Mount Lavinia, when someone did unlatch a shutter and fling it down, the sun had disappeared.

I saw him at Madras Central, near the Howrah Mail, and, from the hesitant way he was standing, he looked as if he were working up the courage to board. His long hair hung like rags in the heat; his clothes were much washed and faded to pastel colours. His suitcase, a canvas affair, repeated his worn appearance and was bursting at the seams. He was a man, perhaps English, in his early thirties, for whom, I guessed, travel had become an exhausting routine: travel can be an addiction and can change the physique, like drugs, to stringy leanness. A beggar was bent beside him, coughing. The young man, paying no attention to the outstretched hand, continued to stare at the train. I avoided him. The trip to Calcutta was too long to begin making friends so soon. I noticed that when he picked up his bag to board he passed a coin to the beggar. He did it without looking at the coughing man, with embarrassed obedience, like handing over a small admission charge.

My taxi driver had been helpful. He had carried my bag, found me bedding, located my berth, and arranged for me to have a spoon included with my meals. He was about to go. I gave him five rupees – too much. He decided to stay, like an anxious bearer with nothing to bear.

'You have money?'

I told him I did.

'Be careful,' he said. 'Indians no good. They take from your pockets.'

He showed me how to lock the compartment. He glanced around, scowling at the Indians who passed down the corridor. He told me repeatedly to be careful, and he continued warning me in this vein for so long that I began to believe that my trip up the neck of Andhra Pradesh and through Orissa to Bengal was fraught with danger. Perhaps those bandy-legged Madrasis, spitting betel juice through the windows, were waiting for this man to leave so that they could pounce. And when the driver did leave I felt peculiarly exposed, vulnerable to attack. Most of the time I remained happily alone in my corner seat, and only at moments like this, when a casually met person helped me and passed on, did I feel the absence of his attention. The assisting stranger in India served only to erode my competence: his presence made me a sahib; his presence turned me into a child.