Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

Travellers to Lashio were converging on the station: a rattling procession of tongas and stagecoaches down the avenue of eucalyptus trees; women running with shopping bags, clenching cigars in their teeth, and men dressed as frontiersmen, in boots and black hats, dodging the plodding oxen, who pulled wagonloads of firewood (split and bright, the colour of torn flesh) in the opposite direction. I had left my camera and passport behind; I felt the legality of the trip to Gokteik was questionable and I wanted to appear as unsuspicious a traveller as possible.

Tony, the Eurasian, was waiting for me. He took my three kyats and got me a ticket to Naung-Peng, the station after Gokteik. There was nothing but a bridge at Gokteik, he said, but there was a good canteen at Naung-Peng. We walked down the muddy platform to the last car. Three soldiers in mismatched uniforms – the poor fit indicating they might have been looted in the dark from some tiny enemies – stood outside the car, passing chopped betel nut across the barrels of the rifles they carried loosely at their shoulders. Tony spoke in Burmese to the tallest one, who nodded meaningfully at me. It struck me that their dented helmets and hand-me-down uniforms gave them the grizzled, courageous look you see in embattled legionnaires – a kind of sloppiness that seemed indistinguishable from hard-won experience.

'You will be safe here,' said Tony. 'Ride in this carriage.'

Ten years of guerrilla war in the outlying states of Upper Burma, as well as the persistent depredations of dacoits who hold up trains with homemade guns, have meant that the last car on the train is traditionally reserved for a group of armed escorts. They sit in this car, their vintage Enfields thrown higgledy-piggledy on the wooden benches, their woollen earflaps swinging; they lounge, eating bananas, slicing betel nut, reddening the floor with spittle; and they hope for a shot at a rebel or a thief. I was told they seldom have any luck. The rebels are demoralized and don't show their faces; but the thieves, wise to the escorts in the last car, have learned to raid the first few cars quickly, threatening passengers noisily with daggers, and can be safely back in the jungle before the soldiers can run up the line.

Our departure whistle put the crows to flight, and we were off, bowling along the single track. The early morning fog had become fine mist, the mist drizzle, but not even the considerable amount of rain that poured through the windows persuaded any of the soldiers (eating, reading, playfully fighting) to close the shutters. The windows that admitted light admitted rain: you had to choose between that and a dry darkness on upcountry trains. I sat on the edge of my bench, regretting that I hadn't brought anything to read, wondering if it really was illegal for me to be travelling to the Gokteik Viaduct, and feeling pity for the children I saw in soaked clothes splashing through the cold puddles in their bare feet.

Then the train pulled into a siding and stopped. Up ahead was a station, a wooden shed the size of a two-car garage. Its window boxes held the orange and red blossoms the Burmese call 'Maymyo flowers'. Some men in the forward coaches got out to piss. Two small girls ran from the jungle next to the line to sell bananas from enamel basins on their heads. Ten minutes passed, and a man appeared at the window waving a piece of paper, a leaf from the kind of pad on which Tony had scribbled his Morse code messages. This paper was passed to the tall soldier with the Sten gun, who read it out loud in an announcing voice. The other soldiers listened intently; one turned, and, with a swiftness I took to be embarrassment, glanced at me. I got up and walked to the back of the carriage, but before I reached the exit the soldier studying the message – a man who had only smiled apologetically earlier when I asked him if he could speak English – said, 'Sit down please.'

I sat down. A soldier muttered. The rain increased, making a boiling sputter on the roof.

The soldier put down his Sten gun and came over to me. He showed me the message. It was written in pencil, rows and rows of Burmese script that resembled the code in the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men'. But in the middle of all the dancing men, those crooked heads and arms, those kicking legs, were two English words in capital letters: 'PASS BOOK'.

'You have pass book?'

'No pass book,' I said.

'Where you going?'

'Gokteik, Naung-Peng,' I said. 'Just for the ride. Who wants to know?'

He thought a moment; then folded the paper over and with the stub of a pencil wrote very carefully in a wobbly column, Name, Number, Country, and Pass book. He handed me the paper. I gave him the information, while the rest of the soldiers – there were six altogether -gathered around. One peered over my shoulder, sucked his teeth, and said 'American'. The others verified this, putting their heads close and breathing on to my hand.

The message was taken to the wooden shed. I stood up. One of the soldiers said, 'Sit down.'

Two hours passed, the coach dripped, the roof boiled in the downpour, and the soldiers who had been speaking in whispers, perhaps fearing that I knew Burmese, resumed their eating, shelling peanuts, peeling bananas, slicing betel nuts. I don't think time can pass more slowly than in a railway carriage parked in the rain between two low walls of jungle in Upper Burma. There was not even the diversion of hawkers, or the desperate antics of pariah dogs; there were no houses; the jungle was without texture or light; there was no landscape. I sat chilled to the bone watching raindrop rings widen in a pool of water next to the track, and I tried to imagine what had gone wrong. I had no doubt that I was the cause of the delay – there was an objection to my being on the train; I had been seen boarding in May my o. I would be sent back; or I might be arrested for violating security regulations, thrown into jail. The effort of getting so far seemed wasted; and, really, had I come all that way to find a jail, as people travel in the greatest discomfort to the farthest ends of the earth, through jungles and bad weather for weeks and weeks, to hurry into a doomed plane or step into the path of a bullet? It is ignominious when a person travels a great distance to die.

It wasn't death that worried me – they wouldn't be silly enough to kill me. But they could inconvenience me. Already they had. It was past ten o'clock, and I was on the point of resigning. If the sun had been out I would have volunteered to walk back to May my o, turning the whole fiasco into a hike. But it was raining too hard to do anything but sit and wait.

Finally the tall soldier with the Sten gun returned. He was accompanied by a small fellow, rather young, in a wet jacket and wet hat, who mopped his face with a handkerchief when he got inside the carriage. He said, 'You are Mister Paul?'

'Yes. Who are you?'

'Security Officer U Sit Aye,' he said, and went on to ask when I had entered Burma, and why, and for how long. Then he asked, 'You are a tourist?'

'Yes.'

He thought a moment, tilting his head, narrowing his hooded eyes, and said, 'Then where is your camera?'

'I left it behind,' I said. 'I ran out of film.'

'Yes, we have no film in Burma.' He sighed. 'No foreign exchange.'

As he spoke another train drew up beside the one we were in.

'We will get in that train.'

In the last armed coach of this second train, sitting with a new batch of soldiers, U Sit Aye said he was in charge of railway security; he had three children; he hated the rainy season. He said no more. I assumed he was my escort, and, though I had no idea why we had changed trains, we were on the move, travelling in the direction of Gokteik.

A haggard Burmese man in a woollen cap took a seat across from us and began emptying a filtertip cigarette on to a small square of paper. It was the sort of activity that occupied the foreign residents of Afghanistan hotels, a prelude to filling the empty tube with hashish grains and tobacco. But this man didn't have hashish. His drug, in a small phial, was white powder, which he tapped into the tube, alternating it with layers of tobacco. He stuffed the tube with great care, packing it tight, smoothing and tapping it.