Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Regarding my birthday as auspicious, and while it was still daylight, I sat in the garden of the hotel under a fragrant arbor, opened the new notebook, and began a story, "The Elephant God": something to occupy my evenings later on and a way of venting my feelings about India. Darkness fell as I was writing. The garden was empty, the hotel was empty; no one wanted to come to Sri Lanka these days. The Tamil Tiger offensive was in the news: a mine in Trincomalee the day before had exploded and killed seven people, shootings in the north had claimed four lives, and suicide bombers were expected in Colombo.

In my room, I saw that a small cake, a bottle of wine, and a birthday card were arranged on the coffee table. I yanked the cork on the wine and poured a glass. I sat down and sipped it. The room was still and hot and mostly dark. The wine was like purple ink. I drank some more of it and thought: Debauchery. Who would know? It's my birthday!

I ate a piece of the cake and was about to have more wine when my scalp shrank and my skull began to burn. I had a terrible headache from the first glass of wine. I fell asleep on the sofa, my own snores waking me around midnight, still snorting and drooling; then I pulled my clothes off and went to bed. In the morning, I woke up a year older and went in search of train tickets.

On my Railway Bazaar visit, I had wanted to see Sri Lanka's most celebrated alien, Arthur C. Clarke, who had settled here in 1956. But then, in the wake of his 2001 notoriety and the demands on his time, I hadn't managed it. Another lesson in the Tao of Travel is: wait long enough and all things are possible. This time I made a plan. I sent a message to him through a mutual friend and hoped for a favorable reply.

In the meantime, I went to the main railway station to buy a ticket to Galle, some way down the tsunami-ravaged coast.

"No advance booking," the clerk said through the barred window that made him seemed caged.

"How do I get a ticket?"

"Come before the train leaves."

"Any reserved seats?"

"No. Just push"

"How much does it cost to Galle?"

He made a face. "A hundred-something for any ticket."

A dollar to go anywhere on the train.

The next day, I had a message that Sir Arthur would meet me. His secretary said that he was not strong, that he was suffering from what she called post-polio syndrome, but that I could stop by tomorrow. This meant hanging around Colombo for another day. I was eager to meet him. Sir Arthur pops up in all sorts of contexts: sci-fi and real science, pulp magazines and scientific journals, astronomy and astrophysics and paranormal mumbo-jumbo, the earliest satellites, a pedophilia scandal (in which he was libeled), the space program, Stanley Kubrick, celebrities, as a booster of Sri Lankan culture, as an early ecologist, a maker of documentaries, and a TV pundit. He was a speechifier and a prognosticator and a prolific writer. He had been at it so long, many people (including ones I met in Sri Lanka) wondered whether he was still alive. But he was, nearing eighty-nine.

The Tamil Tiger secessionist war had had the effect of turning Colombo into a very quiet place, with few visitors and no tourists to speak of. There were not even many Sri Lankans on the sidewalks, except in the bazaar near the main railway station. A "speak only Sinhalese" policy, which had been established in schools by the government in the 1970s, meant that so few Sri Lankans spoke English, they were unemployable by foreign companies looking for cheap labor in the IT industries. (On one occasion in the 1990s, three thousand college-educated Sri Lankans showed up for call center jobs; fewer than one hundred spoke English.)

Rebuffed by the high-tech employers, they were instead hired to make polo shirts and jeans and T-shirts and sneakers in Sri Lankan sweatshops. The economy was in terrible shape, the war was picking up, the government was stumbling; but like many poverty-stricken tropical countries with an incompetent government and its army under fire in the provinces, Sri Lanka was old-fashioned and, except for the war zones, rather sedate, or at least quiet, like a place holding its breath.

I had lunch with a diplomat who filled me in on the Tamil Tigers. He told me that the secession-minded Tamils in Sri Lanka had been calling for their own state for the past thirty years. And not just giving speeches but fighting. The Tigers fought with single-minded savagery. At one time there had been dozens of Tamil organizations intent on secession—groups of all persuasions, some moderate, some conciliatory, and some not fighting at all, but open to debate and compromise.

One by one, the leaders of these groups had been killed by the Tigers, their members ambushed, huts burned, women raped, soldiers scattered; now only the Tigers remained. I had been told in Trichy by a boasting Tamil that the Tigers pioneered the suicide bomb.

My diplomat friend said this was true.