Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

'But that could be years from now!'

'Well, that's the problem,' said Mr Rahman.

'In the meantime the population will get bigger and bigger – it'll be fantastic.'

'You see what I mean?' said Mr Ghosh. 'Our people don't know this. I can say at the moment they lack jeal.'

'Zeal?'

'Yes, and purpose.'

'May I ask you another question, Mr Ghosh?'

'Go right ahead. You ask so many!'

'How many children do you have?'

'I am having four.'

'Mr Rahman?'

'I am having five.'

'Is that a good size for Bangladesh?'

'Perhaps not. It is hard to say,' said Mr Rahman. 'We have no statistics.'

'Are there other family-planning people like yourselves in Bangladesh?'

'Many! We have had an ongoing programme for -what? Mr Ghosh – three years? Four years?'

'Do these other family planners have big families or small families?' I asked.

'Some family planners are having big and some are having small.'

'What do you call big?'

'More than five,' said Mr Rahman.

'Well, it's hard to say,' said Mr Ghosh.

'Do you mean more than five in the family?'

'More than five children,' said Mr Rahman.

'Okay, but if a family planner goes to a village and word gets out that he has five children of his own, how the hell is he going to convince people that – '

'It is so hot,' said Mr Rahman. 'I think I will go inside.'

'Wery interesting to talk to you,' said Mr Ghosh. 'I think you are a teacher. Your name?'

It was dark when we pulled into Kuala Lumpur Station, which is the grandest in southeast Asia, with onion-domed cupolas, minarets, and the general appearance of the Brighton Pavilion, but twenty times larger. As a monument to Islamic influence it is much more persuasive than the million-dollar National Mosque down the road, which gets all the tourists. I rushed off the train and ran to the Booking Hall to get a ticket for the next train to Singapore. It was leaving at eleven that night, so I had time to have a quiet beer with an old friend and a plate of chicken satay in one of those back lanes that made Cocteau call the city 'Kuala L'impure'.

THE NORTH STAR NIGHT EXPRESS TO SINGAPORE

'T wouldn't go to Singapore if you paid me,' said the JL man at the end of the bar in the lounge car. He was an inspector in the Malaysian police, a Tamil Christian named Cedric. He was getting drunk in the lazy confident way people do when they are on a train and have a long journey ahead of them. It was overnight to Singapore, and the people in the lounge car (Chinese at mahjong, Indians at cards, a scrum of English planters and estate managers telling stories) had the relaxed look of members in the bar of a Malaysian club. Cedric said Singapore had lost its charm. It was expensive; people ignored you there. 'It's the fast life. I pity you.'

'Where are you headed for?' I asked.

'Kluang,' he said. 'On transfer.'

'Let's hear it for Kluang!' said one of the planters. 'Hip! Hip!'

The others, his friends, ignored him. A man near by, with his feet wide apart like a mate on a quarter deck – it is the stance of the railway drinker – said, 'Hugh got his fingers burned in Port Swettenham. Chap said to him – '

I moved over to Cedric and said, 'What's the attraction in Kluang?' Kluang, a small town in Johore State, is the typical Malaysian outstation, with its club, rest houses, rubber estate, and its quota of planters going to pieces in their breezy bungalows.

'Trouble,' said Cedric. 'But that's why I like it. See, I'm a roughneck.' There were labour problems with the Tamil rubber-tappers, and I gathered Cedric had been chosen as much for his colour as for his size and intimidating voice.

'How do you deal with troublemakers?'

'I use this,' he said, and showed me a hairy fist. 'Or if we can get a conviction, the bloke gets the rotan. '

The rotan is a cane – a four-foot rod, about half a finger thick. Cedric said that most jail sentences included strokes of the rotan. The usual number was six strokes; one man in Singapore recently got twenty.

'Doesn't it leave a mark?'

'No,' said an Indian near Cedric.

'Yes,' said Cedric. He thought a moment and sipped his whisky. 'Well, it depends what colour you are. Some of the blokes are pretty dark, and rotan scars don't show up. But take you, for instance – it would leave a huge scar on you.'

'So you whip people,' I said.

7 don't,' he said. 'Anyway, it's much worse in Singapore, and they're supposed to be so civilized. Let's face it, it happens in every country.'

'It doesn't happen in the States,' I said.

'And it doesn't happen in UK,' said one of the planters, who was eavesdropping on the conversation. 'They did away with the birch years ago.'

'Maybe they should still have it,' said Cedric. It was a genial challenge.

The planter looked a bit nonplussed, as if he believed in corporal punishment but didn't want to admit his agreement with the views of a man he held in contempt. He said, 'It's against the law in UK.'

I asked Cedric why, if it was such a marvellous solution, he was being sent to Kluang, where obviously they had been caning men for years?

'You don't know anything,' he said. 'It teaches them a good lesson. Wham! Wham! Then they're nice and quiet.'

As it grew late, some of the drinkers left the lounge car, and Cedric (shouting 'Boy!') told the Tamil barman to open the windows. He obeyed, and in the dark, just above the rumble of the train wheels, there was a continuous twitter, like amplified bubbles rapidly popping; and a whine, a vibrant warble that was nearly the crackle of a trunk call on a Malaysian telephone: the sound of locusts, frogs, and crickets, hidden in a pervading dampness that muffled their hubbub.

Cedric finished his drink and said, 'If you're ever in Kluang give me a tinkle. I'll see what I can fix up for you.' Then he staggered out.

'Peeraswamy,' said one of the planters to the barman, 'give each of these gentlemen a large Anchor and see if you can find a whisky for me.'

'There's someone missing here,' said one of the men, looking around the lounge car. 'Tell me who it is – no prizes.'

'Hench!' said another man. 'Used to stand right by that pillar. "Charming," he used to say. Christ, could that man drink!'

'Doesn't seem the same without Hench.'

'What do you hear from him?'

'Rafe was in touch with him.'

'No, I wasn't,' said Rafe, 'I just heard some stories. You know the ones.'

'Someone said he went blind,' said one man, who was pouring beer into a glass. 'Cheers, Boyce,' he said, and drank.

'All the best,' said Boyce.

'I never believed that story,' said Rafe.

'Then we heard he was dead,' said the third one.

'Didn't you say he went to Australia, Frank?'

'That's worse than being dead,' said Boyce.

'Cheers, Boyce,' said Frank. 'No, I never said that. In fact, I thought he was in the Federation somewhere.'

'Reminds me,' said Rafe. 'Used to be a bloke on the estate who thought he was going blind. Irish – complete hypochondriac, always pulling down his cheek and showing you his horrible eyeball. Bloody sickening it was, but everyone humoured him. Anyway, he goes and sees this specialist in Singapore. Comes back furious. "What's wrong, Paddy?" we ask. And he says, "That quack doesn't know a thing about glaucoma!"'

'Sounds like Frogget,' said Boyce.

'Thank you very much,' said Frank.

'Tell Rafe about your diabetes,' said Boyce.

'I never said I had it,' Frank complained. Then he spoke to Rafe. 'I just said it was possible. One symptom of diabetes -1 was reading this somewhere – is that if you piss on your shoe and the spot turns white you're in trouble.'