Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

For lunch I had my old favourite, mee-hoon soup with a partly poached egg whisked in among the Chinese cabbage, meat scraps, prawn slices, bean sprouts, rice noodles, and a number of other atomized ingredients that thicken it to the point where it can be eaten with chopsticks. There were no tables in the dining car, which was a noodle stall; there were sticky counters and stools, and Chinese sitting elbow to elbow, shaking soy souce over their noodles and calling out to the waiters, little boys in red clogs, carrying beer bottles on tin trays.

Ipoh, the first major stop on the Kuala Lumpur run, has a station hotel, a late Victorian Gormenghast with long windows covered by sombre curtains. The brown drapery hangs in thick folds, keeping out the breeze and preserving the heat, which is paddled around the dining room by ten slow fans. All the tables are set, and the waiter, who might be dead, is propped against the wall at the far end of the room. It is fairly certain there is a suicide upstairs waiting to be discovered, and the flies that soar through the high-ceilinged bar are making for the corpse of this ruined planter or disgraced towkay. It is the sort of hotel that has a skeleton in every closet and a register thick with the pseudonyms of adulterers. I once walked into the station hotel at Ipoh with my little boy, and as soon as we crossed the threshold he began to cry. His innocent nose had smelled what mine couldn't, and I rushed away with him, relieved, savouring the well-being of deliverance.

I remained on a balcony of the Golden Arrow, listening to the excited talk of the passengers. English is spoken in Malaysia in a nasal bark, a continual elision of words; phrases are spat and every word-ending is bitten. It is a pared-down version of English and sounds for all the world like Chinese until one's ear is tuned to it by the din of jungle sounds next to the track, the squawks of locusts and macaws, and monkeys cleaning their teeth on twanging strips of bamboo. This brand of English is devoid of every emotion but whispered hysteria; it drones in excellent contrast to Malay, which to hear – the gliding duplication for the plural and the constant gong of words like pisang, kachang, sarong – is almost to understand. The Malayanized English, used in conversation and seen on station notice boards, is easily grasped: feri-bot, jadual, setesyen, tiket, terafik, and nombor.

Two Indians crept out to the balcony. Their size (very small) and their demeanour (fearful) said at once they were not of Malaysia. They had the slightly reptilian features of the hungriest people I'd seen in Calcutta. The other travellers on the balcony, mostly Malays, made way for them, and the Indians stood, the turbulence blowing the wrinkles out of their suit jackets, chatting softly in their own language. The stations raced by: Bidor, Trolak, Tapah, and Klang – names like science fiction planets – and more frequently rubber estates intruded on jungle, a symmetry of scored trunks and trodden paths hemmed in by classic jungle, hanging lianas, palms like fountains, and a smothering undergrowth of noisy greenery all dripping in the rain. 'We mine tin in Thailand and Malaya, just like Cornwall in Great Britain,' Mr Thanoo had said on the International Express, and here were the battered huts, the rickety conveyor belts that looked like abandoned ski jumps, the smokestacks, and the little hills of washed soil.

'Industry,' said one of the Indians.

'But not vorking,' said the other.

'But not vorking,' said the Malay boy, mimicking the Indians for his friends. They all laughed. The Indians fell silent.

Towards the end of the afternoon the balcony emptied. The sallow light just pierced the haze, and the air had gone stale; it was damp and hot. When the train stopped the air blanketed my shoulders. The Malays had gone inside to sleep, or perhaps to prowl for girls. It was the durian season, and this fruit, to which the Malays ascribe aphrodisiac properties, has inspired the Malay saying: 'When the durians come down the sarongs go up.'

Then there were only the two Indians and me on the balcony. They were taking a holiday – this was the end of it – having spent the previous week at a conference in Singapore. They were from Bangladesh; their names were Ghosh and Rahman; it was a family-planning conference.

'Are you family-planners?'

'We are officers,' said Mr Rahman.

'Of course we have other jobs,' said Mr Ghosh, 'but we went to the conference as family-planning officers.'

'Did you read papers?'

'We were observers,' said Mr Ghosh. 'Others read papers.'

'Interesting?'

They waggled their heads; this meant yes.

'Many papers,' said Mr Rahman. '"The Two-Child Family as a Social Norm", "Methods of Contraception", also sterilization, wasectomy, dewices, fitting IUD – '

'Some good discussion,' said Mr Ghosh. 'It was a seminar covering all aspects of family planning. Practical, very informative of course. But there are many problems.'

'What do you think is the greatest problem in family planning?'

'Without a doubt, communication,' said Mr Ghosh.

'In what way?'

'Rural areas,' said Mr Rahman. I thought he was going to add something to this observation, but he stroked his Vandyke beard and gazed off the balcony and said, 'So many girls on motor scooters in this country.'

I said, 'Now, you've been to the conference, right? And I suppose you're going back to Bangladesh – '

'Back to Singapore, then Bangkok by air, then Dacca,' said Mr Ghosh.

'Right. But when you get back there – I mean, you've heard all these papers about family planning – what are you going to do?'

'Ghosh?' said Rahman, inviting his colleague to reply.

Mr Ghosh cleared his throat. He said, 'There are many problems. I should say first we will start straightaway on curriculum. Curriculum is most important. We must build a model – work with a model of aims and objectives. What are we trying to do? What do we aim to achieve? And why? And costings must be considered. All those questions: answers must be found. Do you follow me?' He cleared his throat again. 'Then, next important, is areas of information' – he spread his hands to suggest the size of the areas – 'that is, we must create areas of information so that ordinary people can understand importance of our work.'

'Where are you going to do this?'

'In universities,' said Mr Ghosh.

'Universities?'

'We have many universities in Bangladesh,' said Mr Rahman.

'You mean you're going to get the universities to practise family planning?'

'No, to study the problem,' said Mr Ghosh.

'Hasn't it been studied before?'

'Not in these new ways,' said Mr Rahman. 'We haven't got areas of information, as Ghosh said. And we have no trained people. Ghosh and myself were the only delegates from Bangladesh at the conference. Now we must take all this knowledge back.'

'But why to the universities?'

'Explain,' said Mr Rahman to Mr Ghosh.

'He does not understand,' said Mr Ghosh. 'First to the universities, then, when the trained people are there, to the rural areas.'

'What's the population of Bangladesh?'

'That is a difficult question,' said Mr Ghosh. 'There are many answers.'

'Give me a rough estimate.'

'Round about seventy-five million,' said Mr Ghosh.

'What's the growth rate?'

'Some say 3 per cent, some say 4,' said Mr Ghosh. 'You see, no work can begin until a proper census is taken. Do you know when the last census was taken in our country? Guess.'

'I can't guess.'

'It was years ago.'

'When?'

'So many, I don't know myself. Years and years. British time. Since then we have had cyclones, wars, floods, so many things to add and subtract. We cannot begin until we have a census.'