Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

One of the squid-eaters was Mr Lau, from Kuala Lumpur. He wasn't hungry, but he explained that he was eating the squid because they were so expensive in Kuala Lumpur. He was morose about the delay. He didn't have a berth. He asked how much I had paid for mine and seemed annoyed that my fare was so low; he behaved as if, by some devious stratagem, I had taken his bed from him. He hated his seat. The chair car was too cold; the passengers were rude; the girl gymnasts wouldn't talk to him. He said, 'In Malaysia I'm a second-class citizen, and in Thailand I'm a second-class passenger. Ha! Ha!'

Mr Lau was a purveyor of fluorescent tubes. He was also a civil servant ('Maybe you could say fluorescent tubes is my sideline'). He had been introduced to the business by his father-in-law, a clever man who had emigrated from Shanghai to Hong Kong, where he had learned how to make neon signs. Mr Lau said, 'You can make a fortune in neon signs in Hong Kong.'

I said I was sure of that.

'But there was heavy competition. So the old man came to K.L.' At first there were no competitors, then the fellow Shanghainese he had trained to make the signs left him and set up shops of their own. They almost ran him out of business, until the old man began training Malays to do the work. He had chosen Malays and not the harder-working Indians or Chinese because he could depend on the Malays to be too lazy to quit and start establishments of their own.

'What brought you to Bangkok?' I asked.

'Fluorescent tubes.'

'Buying or selling?'

'Buying-lah. Cheaper.'

'How much cheaper?'

'I don't know. I got to work out the costing. It's all in my briefcase.'

'Give me a rough idea.'

'A hundred fifty models- lah ! I haven't worked out the packing, transport, what-not. So many cost factors.'

I liked the lingo, but Mr Lau changed the subject, and, munching his squid, he told me how awful it was to be a Chinese in Malaysia. He had been passed over a dozen times and missed promotions and pay increments because 'the government wants to bring up the Malays. It's terrible. I don't like the light business but they're driving me further and further into fluorescent tubing.'

I went to bed while the train was still standing in the glare of the station lights, and at 3.10 the next morning (the whistle woke me) we began to move. Rain poured through the window, waking me again an hour later, and when I slammed down the shutter the room became suffocating and airless. We crossed the endangered bridge in the dark, and at dawn it was still raining. The line was so flooded all the next day we travelled at a crawl, sometimes stopping in the middle of nowhere, with flooded fields all around, like a becalmed boat. I sat and wrote; I read and went to sleep; I drank; and often I would look up and be incapable of remembering where I was, the concentration of writing or reading bringing on a trancelike stare. Extensive travelling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind. It had happened briefly on other trains, but on this one – it might have been prolonged by the sameness of the landscape or the steady beating of the rain – it lasted an entire day. I couldn't recall what day it was; I had forgotten the country. Being on the train had suspended time; the heat and dampness had slowed my memory. What day was it anyway? Where were we? Outside there were only rice fields, giving an alarming view of Maharashtra, in India. The station signboards gave no clue: chumphon and lang suan moved past the window, leaving me baffled. It was a long day in the hot wet train with the sweating Thais, whom the heat had moved to rapid speech. Pensacola had disappeared, and so had Mr Thanoo. The conductor said we were ten hours late, but this did not worry me as much as my failing memory and a kind of squinting fear I took to be an intimation of paranoia. The jungle was thick past Haadyai, perfect for an ambush (a month later, on 10 December, five bandits with M16 rifles leaped out of the second-class toilets where they had been hiding, robbed seventy people, and vanished). After the passport control at Padang Besar I locked the door of my compartment, and, though it was only nine o'clock, went to bed.

A rattling of the door handle woke me. The train was not moving. The room was hot. I slid the door open and saw a Malay with a wet mop. He said, 'This is Butterworth.'

'I think I'll sleep here until the morning train comes.'

'Cannot,' he said. 'Have to wash the train.' 'Go ahead, wash it. I'll go back to sleep.' 'We don't wash it here. Have to take it to the shed.' 'What am I supposed to do in the meantime?' 'Mister,' said the little Malay, 'I want you to get out and hurry up.'

I had slept through the arrival. It was two in the morning: the train was empty; the station was deserted. I found a waiting room, where two German men and two Australians, a boy and a girl, were sleeping in chairs. I sat down and opened Dead Souls. The Australian boy woke up and folded and refolded his legs, sighing. Then he said, 'Oh Christ!' and took his shirt off. He crumpled his shirt into a ball and got on to the cement floor, and, using the shirt as a pillow, curled up like a koala bear and began to snore. The Australian girl looked at me and shrugged, as if to say, 'He always does that!' She put her fists into her lap and crouched in her chair, the way people die in sparsely furnished rooms. The Germans woke and immediately started to argue over a map on which they were marking a route. It was then about four o'clock in the morning. When I couldn't bear it any longer I took a hooting ferry to Penang, returning to Butterworth as dawn broke; then everything was painted in simple colours, the ferry orange, the water pink, the island blue, the sky green. Minutes later the sun burned the vaporous colours away. I had breakfast at a Tamil coffee shop, milky tea and an egg scrambled with a doughy square of paratha. Strolling back to the station I saw a man and woman leaving a disreputable hotel. The unshaven man was European and wore a T-shirt; the rumpled woman, powdering her nose as she walked, was Chinese. They hurried into a very old car and drove away. The melancholy cliche of this tropical adultery -the scuttling pair in the Malaysian morning – had a comic aptness that put me in a good mood.

The two classes on Malaysian Railways include eight different varieties of carriage, from the simple cattle car with wooden benches to the teak-panelled sleeper with its wide berths, armchair, brass spittoon, and green curtains decorated with the railway motif (a tiger, rampant, savaging a dowsing rod). But the best place to ride on this ten-hour trip to Kuala Lumpur is on the wooden balcony between the coaches. This windy space, where the verandah of one car meets the verandah of the other, is about seven feet long: there are overhanging roofs at each end, and on either side are balusters and railings. A brass plate warns you in three languages of the dangers on this speeding porch – in fact, you are expressly forbidden to ride there – but it is quite safe, and that day it was certainly safer there than in the lounge car, where five Malay soldiers were getting drunk on Anchor beer and abusing the Chinese who passed by them. I had been in the lounge car reading, but when the soldiers had overcome their native shyness with drink and began singing 'Ten Green Bottles', I decided to move to the balcony. Just inside the car a Chinese man had crammed himself into a luggage rack, where he was sulking, and below me, on the verandah stairs, Malay boys clung, swinging their feet.

High world prices for rubber, tin, and palm oil have made Malaysia prosperous, and it seemed as relaxed and unaggressive a place as when I had first seen it, in 1969. But the Malay smile is misleading: it was shortly after I decided that it was one of the quietest countries in the world that Malays came howling out of mosques with white rags tied around their heads. When they were through, 2,000 Chinese lay dead and hundreds of shops had been burned to the ground. Mr Lau, who in Thailand had been strolling through the train complaining loudly about the ten-hour delay, was now seated uneasily in the Golden Arrow, hugging his briefcase, with his box of fragile samples between his knees. And the girl gymnasts from Taiwan were no longer limbering up in the corridors. The Chinese had fallen silent: it was a Malay train, and it would have been unthinkable for a group of Chinese to be in the lounge car, singing (as the Malay soldiers were) 'Roll Me Over in the Clover'. A Malay in third class was more privileged than a Chinese in first.