Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

In this sort of tyranny, without any opposition, everyone was forced to wheedle and whine, negotiate, horse-trade, and tell lies. But if the military in Myanmar was odious, the people I met were soft-tempered and helpful, and it was perhaps the only country I passed through where I met nothing but generosity and kindness. And the Burmese were the most ill-treated, worst-governed, belittled, and persecuted of any people I met—worse off than the Turkmen, which is saying a lot.

I didn't stay at the Strand, though I had done so long ago. It was ridiculous to pay $450 a night for a single room. I found a perfectly adequate (which is to say somewhat dreary but cheap) $45-a-night hotel near the Shwe Dagon Pagoda.

"Train is full," Mr. Nay Aung, the ticket agent, had told me at the station. He suggested that I come back the next day.

I waited a day. I walked to the Shwe Dagon and around the city. I saw hardly any tourists, not much traffic, all the signs of a dictatorship: selfishness and paranoia clinging to power, epitomized by well-dressed soldiers in heavy boots, threadbare citizens in rubber flip-flops. I was full of admiration for my younger self. Yangon had been ramshackle then, but I had no money; I had succeeded by improvising, flying by the seat of my pants. One of the lessons of this second trip was that I had been a hardy traveler, and yet I knew it was not so much hardiness as a desperation to make the trip fruitful.

"You are so lucky," Mr. Nay Aung said to me the following day. "We have a cancellation."

He sold me a ticket to Mandalay: first class, but with four people in the compartment. The train would leave around one in the afternoon and arrive in Mandalay at three the next morning. This improbable schedule—only one train a day—Mr. Nay Aung could not explain.

"Yes, it is not convenient to arrive at three o'clock. It will be so dark then."

I remembered the Mandalay train as basic, the trip an ordeal. This train was in better shape, but it was no less a ghost train, a decaying relic of the past, taking me from the skeletal city haunted by the military to the northerly ghost town of Mandalay. I felt that strongly as we set off. I had no idea how accurate that vision of Mandalay was, as a city of wraiths and the living dead, of people being screamed at by demonic soldiers.

In the sleeping compartment a young Frenchman was lolling in his berth, his sinuous Thai girlfriend, in her teens, wrapped around him. I said hello and then went to the platform to buy some oranges.

A monk with a bundle slung over his shoulder was being pestered by a ragged Burmese man. The monk was speaking English and trying to give the man some money—some folded worn bills.

"No, two dollah," the Burmese man said.

"This same, these kyats," the monk said.

"Two dollah," the Burmese man said again.

I said, "What's the problem?"

The ragged man was a scooter rickshaw driver who had taken the monk to the station. He insisted, as many Burmese did of foreigners, on being paid in American dollars.

"Here," I said, giving the man the two dollars. The man took them with both hands, fingers extended, then touched them to his forehead.

"You're a stranger," the monk said. "You don't know me."

I had been reading a Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra, as background for another Indian novella I was writing, "The Gateway of India," so I was able to say, "The Diamond Sutra says that you should give and not think about anything else. You don't speak Burmese?"

"I'm from Korea." It turned out that he was on this train to Mandalay, the fourth person in my compartment. He said hello to the Frenchman and the Thai girl, and soon after, with a clang of couplings, the train started to move.

I looked out the window and marveled again, as I had on arriving in Yangon. Nothing had changed on the outskirts, either—after the decaying bungalows and creekside villages, it was just dry fields, goats cropping grass on the tracks, ducks on murky ponds, burdened women walking, looking haughty because they were balancing bundles on their heads, slender sarong-wearing Burmese, and befouled ditches.

I dozed, I woke up; the Frenchman and his girlfriend had separated and were asleep in the upper berths. The monk sat opposite me.

He was a Zen monk, and his name was Tapa Snim ("Snim means monk in Korean"). He had just arrived in Myanmar. He was fifty. He had shifted his small bundle; it was now in the corner of his berth. He was a slender man, slightly built, very tidy, with clean brownish robes and a neatly shaved head that gave him a gray skull. He was not the smiling evasive monk I was used to seeing, who walked several inches above the ground, but an animated and watchful man who met my gaze and answered my questions.

"How long have you been a monk?" I asked.

"I became a monk at twenty-one," Tapa Snim said. "I have been meditating for twenty-nine years, but also traveling. I have been in a monastery here in Yangon for a few days, but I want to stay in a monastery in Mandalay."