Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

'There is a train to Maymyo at seven tomorrow morning,' he said. In a country where all trains leave at seven, a printed timetable was superfluous. *

'I'd like to buy a ticket.'

'Ticket office is closed. Come at six. What is your final destination?'

'After Maymyo I want to go to Gokteik. To see the viaduct.'

'It is forbidden for foreign tourists to see the viaduct.'

He might have been cautioning me against defilement of a sacred shrine.

'Then l'll go to Lashio.'

'It is forbidden. Lashio is a security area. There are rebellions.'

'Then you mean I have to stay in Maymyo?'

'Maymyo is a nice place. All foreigners like Maymyo.'

'I wanted to go to Gokteik.'

'Too bad. Why don't you go to Pagan?'

'I've been to Pagan.'

'Or Inle Lake. They have a hotel.'

'I wanted to take a train.'

'Why not take the train back to Rangoon?' said the stationmaster.

He shook my hand and showed me to the door. Outside was Mandalay. It is a low city of immense size, so dusty at night the lanterns on the pony carts and the headlights of wooden buses shine as if through thick fog. The city is large but without interest; the fort is off-limits, the monasteries have burned down, and the temple at the top of Mandalay Hill is recent and unattractive. Mandalay is a magic name, but little more than that. What of Kipling's poem then? Well, the fact is Kipling never set foot in the place, and his experience of Burma was limited to a few days in 1889, when his ship stopped in Rangoon.

Mandalay has two hotels, one cheap, the other expensive. Both are uncomfortable, so I chose the cheap one. The manager said he had no rooms. He was frowning with fatigue and anxious for me to go. I said, 'But where will I sleep?' He considered the question and then showed me to a room, complaining as he did so about a leprosy conference meeting at his hotel ('They want this, they want that – '). I asked for food. He said he had none and proved it by showing me the empty kitchen. I ate a banana I had bought in Thazi, and thanked him for the room. He was a good Burmese. He could not turn me away, though he did not want me to stay. He allowed me a little shelter but no food, treating me, literally, the way he would a pariah, with a kind of grudging reverence.

Asia washes with spirited soapy violence in the l morning. The early train takes you past people discovered laundering like felons rehearsing – Pakistanis charging their sodden clothes with sticks, Indians trying to break rocks (this is Mark Twain's definition of a Hindu) by slapping them with wet dhotis, grimacing Ceylonese wringing out their lungis. In Upper Burma, women squat in conspiratorial groups at bubbly streams, whacking their laundry flat with broad wooden paddles, children totter knee-deep in rock pools, and small-breasted girls, chastely covered by sarongs to their armpits, dump buckets of water over their heads. It was dull and cloudy, starting to mist, as we left Mandalay, and the old man next to me with a neat cloth bundle on his knees watched one of these bathing girls.

Steeping tresses in the tank

Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,

– Can't I see his dead eye glow

Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?

(That is, if he'd let it show!)

Briefly, I thought of leaping from the train, proposing marriage, and throwing my life away on one of these nymphs. But I stayed in my seat.

The full streams, whitened by peaks of froth, told of heavy rains farther on; we had left the rancid heat and dusty palms of Mandalay and were climbing sideways through pine forests, where the gold-tipped pagodas, repeating the shape of pine tops, rose above the deep green trees. A dirigible of white cloud had settled against one station; we emerged from it to a view of hardier, muddier people carrying buckets on yokes. A light rain began to fall, and the train was moving so slowly I could hear the patter of raindrops on the leaves that grew beside the track.

At the early sloping stations, women with trays were selling breakfast to the passengers: oranges, sliced pawpaws, fried cakes, peanuts and bananas. One had a dark shining assortment of beady objects on her tray. I beckoned her over and had a look. They were fat insects skewered on sticks – fried locusts. I asked the old man next to me if he'd like some. He said politely that he had had breakfast already, and anyway he never ate insects. 'But the local people are quite fond of them.'

The sight of the locusts took away my appetite, but an hour later, in a thunderstorm, my hunger came back. I was standing near the door and struck up a conversation with a Burmese man on his way to Lashio to see his family. He was hungry too. He said we would be arriving at a station soon where we could buy food.

'I'd like some tea,' I said.

'It is a short stop – a few minutes, not more.'

'Look, why don't you get the food and I'll get something to drink? It'll save time.'

He agreed, accepted my three kyats, and when the train stopped we leaped out – he to the food stall, I t.o an enclosure where there were bottles on display. The hawker explained with apologetic smiles that I couldn't remove his teacups, so I had a cup of tea there and bought two bottles of soda water. Back on the train I couldn't find the Burmese man, and it was not until after the train pulled away that he appeared, out of breath, with two palm-leaf parcels, bound with a knotted vine. We uncapped the bottles on the door hinge, and, elbow to elbow at the end of the coach, opened the palm leaves. There was something familiar in the contents, a wooden skewer with three blackened things on it – lumps of burned meat. It wasn't that they were irregularly shaped, but rather that they were irregular in exactly the same way. The skewers lay half-buried in beds of rice.

'In Burmese we call them – ' He said the word.

I peered at them. 'Are those wings?'

'Yes, they are birds.'

Then I saw the little heads, the beaks and burned-out eyes, and dark singed claws on feeble feet.

'Maybe you call them sparrows,' he said.

Maybe we do, I thought, but they looked so tiny without their feathers. He slipped one off the skewer, put the whole thing into his mouth, and crunched it, head, feet, wings, the whole bird; he chewed it, smiling. I pinched a little meat from one of mine and ate it. It did not taste bad, but it is hard to eat a sparrow in Burma and not feel reproached by flights of darting birds. I risked the rice. I went back to my seat, so that the man would not see me throw the rest of the birds away.

The old man next to me said, 'How old do you think I am? Guess.'

I said sixty, thinking he was seventy.

He straightened up. 'Wrong! I am eighty. That is, I passed my seventy-ninth birthday, so I am in my eightieth year.'

The train switched back and forth on curves as sharp as those on the way to Simla and Landi Kotal. Occasionally, for no apparent reason, it ground to a halt, starting up without a warning whistle, and it was then that the Burmese who had jumped out to piss chased after the train, retying their sarongs as they ran along the track and being whooped at by their friends in the train. The mist, the rain, and cold low clouds gave the train a feel of early morning, a chill and predawn dimness that lasted until noon. I put a shirt over my jersey, then a sweater and a plastic raincoat, but I was still cold, the damp penetrating to my bones. It was the coldest I had been since leaving England.

'I was born in eighteen ninety-four in Rangoon,' said the old man suddenly. 'My father was an Indian, but a Catholic. That is why I am called Bernard. My father was a soldier in the Indian Army. He had been a soldier his whole life – I suppose he joined up in Madras in the eighteen seventies. He was in the Twenty-sixth Madras Infantry and he came to Rangoon with his regiment in eighteen eighty-eight. I used to have his picture, but when the Japanese occupied Burma – I'm sure you have heard of the Japanese war – all our possessions were scattered, and we lost so many things.'