Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

'I think I'm in trouble,' said Boyce, lifting his foot to the bar.

'Very funny,' said Frank.

'Where are we?' said Rafe. He leaned towards the window. 'I can't see a thing. Peeraswamy, what's the next station? And while you're at it bring two more beers and a whisky for my father here.'

'This is my last one,' said Boyce. 'I've paid for a berth and I'm going to use it.'

'Coming up to Seremban,' said Peeraswamy, uncapping two bottles of beer and sliding over a glass of whisky.

'God, I miss Hench,' said Rafe. 'He was waiting for his chance to go. I never knew that. I hope he's not dead.'

'Well, I'm off,' said Frank, and, picking up his bottle of beer, he added, 'I'm taking this with me. Wish I had a woman.'

When he had gone, Boyce said, 'I'm worried about Frogget.'

'That caper about diabetes?'

'That's only part of it. He's beginning to behave like Hench did just before he disappeared. Secretive, you might say. Mention Australia sometimes – see what he says. He goes all queer.'

The whistle blew at Seremban, hushing the insects. Rafe turned to me. 'Saw you talking to that Indian chap. Don't let him worry you. In fact, if I were you I'd divide everything he said by ten. Good night.'

Then I was alone at the bar of the North Star Night Express. At the far end of the car the mahjong game was still in progress, and the curtains swayed as we left Seremban. Some insects had blown through the windows; they clustered at the lights and chased each other in dizzying spirals.

'Singapore?' said Peeraswamy.

I said yes, that's where I was going.

'Last year I myself in Singapore.' He had gone down for Thaipusam, he said. He had carried a kavadi. Thaipusam, a Tamil festival, has been banned in India. It is encouraged in Singapore, for the tourists, who photograph the frenzied Tamils parading to Tank Road with metal skewers through their cheeks and arms. The Tamils meet at a particular temple in the morning, and after being pierced by long skewers and having limes hung all over their bodies with fishhooks, carry enormous wooden shrines on their heads about two miles to another temple. I was interested that Peeraswamy had done it; I asked him about it.

'I have sixteen – one-six – what you call them, knives? – in body. Here, here, and here. One sticking through tongue. Also hooks in knees and up here, in my soldiers.

'I do this because wife getting pregnant ready, and I worried. I pray-pray for this matter, and son come out ready, so I give the thanks for my god Murugam, brother to Subramaniam. I make more prayers. We cannot sleep on the bed, cannot sleep on the pillow. Only can sleep on the floor until two weeks. Then, one week before, we cannot take the meat, just milk – banana and the fruits. I go to temple. Other people there, maybe one hundred or two. I pray ready, I take bath. The padre come and we make songs' – he showed me how he sang, clasping his hands under his chin, bulging his eyes, and jerking his head back and forth – 'and after songs is coming ready, we pray ready. The god comes inside! We hurry, cannot wait. The padre take the tongue and popl Pop with the knives, pop with the hooks ready – no blood from knives, not hurting – can even kill me! I not care! The song come and the god come and we don't know anything. We want to go out, not want to stop. They put in knives, hooks, what, and we just walk ready.

'The crowd follow – lot of people. The traffic stop -all cars let us pass – and my wife and sister pray-pray and the god come inside them and they faint. I don't see anything. I go fast, almost running down Serangoon Road, Orchard Road, Tank Road, and three times around the temple. The padre is there. He pray and putting the powder on face and take out the pop. We don't know anything -just faint inside the temple.'

Peeraswamy was out of breath. He smiled. I bought him a bottle of Green-Spot and then set off for my compartment, banging my shoulders as I felt my way down the corridor of the speeding train.

I got up early to be on the balcony for the crossing of the causeway from Johore Bahru. But I was met in the corridor by two men, who blocked my way and demanded to see my passport. One said, 'Singapore immigration.'

'Your hair is radda rong,' said the other.

'And yours is rather short,' I said, feeling that one impertinence deserved another. But according to Singapore law the immigration officers were within their rights to refuse me entry if they thought my hair was untidy. Singapore police, who have virtually no effect on the extortionists and murderers in the Chinese secret societies, are in the habit of frog-marching long-haired youths into the Orchard Road police station to shave their heads.

'How much money you have?'

'Enough,' I said. Now the train was on the causeway, and I was eager to have a look at the Strait of Johore.

'Exact amount.'

'Six hundred dollars.'

'Singapore currency?'

'American.'

'Show.'

When every dollar had been counted they gave me an entry visa. By then I had missed the causeway. The North Star was rolling past the wooded marshland on the northern part of the island to the Jurong Road. I associated this road with debt: five years before, I drove down it in the mornings to take my wife to work. It was always cool when we left the house, but so quickly did the rising sun heat the island that it was nearly 80 by the time my small boy (carsick in his wicker seat) and I got back – he to his amah, I to my unfinished African novel. It was curious, travelling across the island, having one's memory jogged by the keen smells of the market near Bukit Timah Circus and the sight of the tropical plants I loved – the palms by the tracks called pinang rajah, which have feathery fronds gathered at the top and look like ceremonial umbrellas, and the plants that spray green plumes from the fissures and boles of every old tree in Singapore, the lush ornament called 'ghost leaf that gives the deadest tree life. I felt kindly towards Singapore – how could I feel otherwise in a place where one of my children was born, where I wrote three books and freed myself from the monotonous routine of teaching? My life had begun there. Now we were passing Queenstown, where Anne had taught night-school classes in Macbeth; Outram Road General Hospital, where I'd been treated for dengue; and the island in the harbour – there, through the trees – where, on various Sunday outings, we had been caught in a terrifying storm, and seen a thick poisonous sea snake, and been passed ('Don't let the children see!') by a human corpse so old and buoyant it spun in the breeze like a beach toy.

Singapore Station is scheduled for demolition because its granite frieze of Anglo-Saxon muscle men posed as 'Agriculture', 'Commerce', 'Industry', and 'Transport' is thought to be as outmoded as the stone sign on the wall: federated malay states railway. Singapore thinks of itself as an island of modernity in a backward part of Asia, and many people who visit confirm this by snapping pictures of new hotels and apartment houses, which look like juke boxes and filing cabinets respectively. Politically, Singapore is as primitive as Burundi, with repressive laws, paid informers, a dictatorial government, and jails full of political prisoners. Socially, it is like rural India, with households dependent on washerwomen, amahs, gardeners, cooks, and lackeys. At the factory, workers – who, like everyone else in Singapore, are forbidden to strike – are paid low wages. The media are dull beyond belief because of the heavy censorship. Singapore is a small island, 227 square miles at low tide, and though the government refers to it grandly as 'the Republic', in Asian terms it is little more than a sand bank – but a sand bank that has been enriched by foreign investment (Singaporeans are great assemblers of appliances) and the Vietnam War. Its small size makes it easy to manage: immigration is strictly controlled, family planning is pervasive, no one is allowed to attend the university until he has a security clearance to show he is demonstrably meek, Chinese (from America, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) are encouraged to settle there, and everyone else is encouraged to leave. The police in Singapore are assigned to the oddest tasks; the courts are filled with the unlikeliest criminals. In what other country on earth would one see such items in the paper?