Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Boats, too. Full damage," his son said.

These heavy twenty-five-foot boats, shaped like large fiberglass dories, had been lifted by the tidal wave and tumbled across the road onto the lawn of St. Mary's College.

"Master," one man said, tugging my arm. "Help us."

"You want money?"

"No money. You help pull boat."

I surprised them by taking hold of the line, and they laughed as I joined them in pulling one of the fishing boats up the beach and away from the tidemark.

That was one of six boats named Acts of Mercy. Others were named SOS Children's Village. The names reflected the charitable agencies that had provided them after the disaster struck.

I hung around to see them unloading the morning's catch—three or four boats accounting for about fifty pounds of small elongated fish, like oversized sardines. Skinny children gathered near me and made pleas of hunger, gesturing to their mouths, rubbing tummies, and some of the men, too, asked for handouts.

"I'll buy your fish," I said. I intended to give them money for their catch and then hand the fish back to them. "How much for all of this?"

"No. Buyers are there," the old man said.

"Money, money," the younger men said.

I was backing up. I didn't want to show them any money. I said, "You have fish. Fish is money."

"Fish is little money."

That was probably true. I said to one of the boys, "You come with me," and he followed me to Beach Road. I gave him some rupees, just to make a graceful escape from this crowd of twenty or more hungry and half-naked men, looking small and spidery on the hot white sand.

I walked up the scorching road by the beach, and after a mile or so I recognized an odd cylindrical building from my first trip, and from an old watercolor I owned. The painting's style, the art of it, was undistinguished—I had bought it cheap in London—but it depicted an unusual structure of this city. The title was The Ice House, Madras. I knew very little about the building other than that it had been put up to store ice that had been sent by ship from New England.

The building, with its single castle tower, which I had first seen in a state of disrepair, a ruin of flaking green paint, had been renovated and repainted. With wide verandas, arched windows, and a bright, creamy façade, it looked smug and renewed in a compound behind a wall. Around it was a garden of purplish bougainvillea, and in the driveway a statue ringed by flowering shrubs. The plaque at the gate said, Vivekanandar Illam.

Since I owned an old picture of this former ice house, I had wondered about the building for thirty years. Now it was open, one of the sights of Chennai, with its history displayed in its newly painted rooms. I went inside and bought a ticket and browsed. A little of its past was given, and I dug up the rest. It had been built in 1842 by Frederic Tudor, "the Ice King," a merchant from Boston. Tudor had brought the first shipment of ice in 1833 from Massachusetts to Madras on the clipper Tuscany,

and later built this storehouse. In the beginning, most of Tudor's ice came from ponds near Boston where I had skated as a boy.

From his cabin, Henry David Thoreau had watched the Tudor Ice Company cutting blocks of ice on Walden Pond in the winter of 1846-47. Impressed, Thoreau wrote about it in his journal, as well as in the "Pond in Winter" chapter of Walden, estimating that on a good day the cutters could produce "a thousand tons" of ice slabs. Knowing that the ice was being shipped to India provoked Thoreau to lyricism in his journal: "Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of ... Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well," and "The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."

Tudor continued to bring ice to India for the next thirty years, until he died in 1864. Later (so one of the captions in the Ice House said), "the invention of the 'steam process' of making ice ruined [the ice import] business." The Madras Ice House became defunct, and in the 1890s it passed into the hands of an Indian businessman, who enlarged it, naming it Castle Kernan.

When Swami Vivekananda visited Madras in February 1897, the fanciful-seeming structure, cylindrical and strange, was regarded as suitable for his holy presence. The Swami stayed in the building, "delivered seven electrifying lectures," and was urged to consecrate it as a spiritual center. He agreed, and a few months later sent his disciple Swami Ramakrishna to spread the word. Ramakrishna lived a guru's life here, meditating and preaching spiritual renewal.

One day in 1902, while praying in the Ice House, Swami Ramakrishna heard "a bodiless but familiar voice declaring 'O Sasi [Swami R], I have spat out the body'"—and soon afterwards Ramakrishna received the news that Vivekananda had passed away.