Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Of course: a place of such serenity, such glitter and sanctity, it was inevitable that the Tigers would violate it. And why not? In a paragraph that reads like a historical free-for-all, Christopher Ondaatje describes the skirmishes over the Buddha's tooth going on for a thousand years, how Kublai Khan tried but failed to capture it, how the Indians succeeded in snatching it in the thirteenth century but lost it to a Sinhalese king. When the Chinese failed in their attempt to steal the tooth, they took hostages instead—members of the royal family. The Portuguese were fobbed off with a fake tooth. So the Tamil Tigers were the latest in a long list of predators, poachers, and violators of the Temple of the Tooth.

The Kaduwellas lived in Colombo. While his wife and children smiled shyly, Mr. Kaduwella invited me to his house.

"We'll have a good meal," he said with a glance at my plate, as though dismissing it, but he and his family were all eating something similar.

I asked him how to get to Peradeniya. He said it was too far to walk, and when we finished lunch he went out of his way to find me a taxi and negotiate the price. And as we parted he repeated his invitation.

In the past I might not have visited Peradeniya Botanic Gardens. More likely I would have visited the Peradeniya Bar and sat there most of the night. But these days, in travel, I seldom went out at night, and got up earlier, and often visited gardens—particularly the gardens that were devised by the British, in which many of the trees were ancient, and some of the specimens planted in the nineteenth century. I got interested in gardening only after I became a householder, and that was as a result of the windfall occasioned by the success of The Great Railway Bazaar. I used the money to buy a house, I planted shrubs, I planted flowers, and more recently have been planting various varieties of noninvasive bamboo.

The bamboo groves at Peradeniya were dense, many of the canes gigantic—even named giganteus

on their labels. What happens to the clumping noninvasive bamboo after one hundred years? The clumps are twenty feet wide and the plant itself grows as tall as a three-story house. The cycads were vast and feathery, the old palms stood tall; in a place like Sri Lanka, a land of procrastination and decline, these great gardens had ripened and flourished. I was reminded of the palms and mangroves on the coast—Bowles called them "triumphant vegetation"—that had resisted the onslaught of the tidal wave and the fury of the flood, and stood, like these trees and ferns and bamboos at Peradeniya, not only unviolated but bigger and more beautiful.

Leonard Woolf had walked here, so Ondaatje said. He had spent a year in Kandy, at the law court, fascinated by the convoluted murder cases and the complex marriage disputes. He had so impressed his overlords he got a better post in Hambantota, where, so he claimed, he would have been happy to spend the rest of his life.

It was easy to see how Sri Lanka could capture your heart, as it had Sir Arthur's. It was especially pleasant to be in a place where not much changed. Yet it was a violated place—the war, the tsunami, had held it back, kept it from improving in any way. The war of Tamil secession had probably had the greatest effect. War is weird in that way: time stops, no one thinks of the future but only of survival or escape.

I left Kandy. And a few days after I left Colombo, just down the street from my hotel, near a park I'd passed many times for its being so pleasant, a large group of pregnant women had lined up to be examined at a prenatal clinic, the weekly "maternity day" offered by the Sri Lankan army. Without warning, one of the women, a member of the Black Tiger Suicide Squad, pretending to be pregnant (her maternity dress bulged with a bomb), blew herself up and took six people with her into oblivion.

GHOST TRAIN TO MANDALAY

MY FIRST REACTION to Rangoon, now a sad and skeletal city renamed Yangon, was disbelief. The unreality of arriving in a distant modernized city cannot compare with the unreality of seeing one that has hardly changed at all. If a place, after decades, is the same, or worse than before, it is almost shaming to behold. Like a prayer you regret has been answered, it exists as a mirror image of yourself, the traveler, who has to admit: I'm the same too, but aged—wearier, frailer, fractured, abused, weaker, shabbier, spookier. There was a human pathos in a city that had faded in the years I'd been away, something more elderly, almost senile. So, adrift in the futility of being in a foreign city, woozy in the stifling heat, I fitted right in. After a day or so I took a horrid pleasure in being here, back in time, in the place I had remembered and had once mocked with youthful satire, a ghost town that made me feel old and ghostly.