Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

He owned a stall in the Myoma bazaar in Ye-u, a town northwest of Mandalay. It was a 150-mile journey, six hours by bus from there on bad roads, he said. All overland travel in Myanmar was slow and dirty, but though he did not complain about the difficulty, he clucked as he described the distances and the road conditions.

After the usual questions—country? wife? children? job?—he laughed and said, "I like democracy."

He was a stallholder in a small bazaar in a benighted corner of the country, north-central Myanmar, and he launched into a long denunciation of the government, the generals, the roads, the disrepair of the trains and the buildings. He traveled quite a lot, supplying outlying towns with biscuits and noodles, and he said the situation was terrible. He used all the old names: Burma, Rangoon instead of Yangon, Maymyo instead of Pyin-Oo-Lwin.

"The army is no good. They make trouble."

"What's the answer?"

"We want elections," he said.

"Didn't Aung San Suu Kyi win the last one?"

"Yes. She is good. She should be in the government. We like her."

To bait him I said, "Why do you want democracy?"

"Because life will be better. We will have development—not this, what you see, rich soldiers and poor people."

A big boy joined us at the table, Oo Mindon's son, who was sixteen. He did not speak a word of English, though he was in high school. This was the next generation, the one that the generals had intimidated and shortchanged by limiting their education. Oo Mindon himself had studied English and had a high school education.

"What does he do?" I asked Oo Mindon, of his son.

"He likes to play video games," he said, and furiously manipulated his thumbs to illustrate the obsession.

I'd had no lunch, yet, hungry as I was, I did not want to risk the fried rice being jogged and swilled in a blackened wok by the churning wooden paddle of the chef in his sweat-soaked undershirt, a cigarette dangling from his lips—or was it the sight of the plates being dunked in the sludgy water of the washbasin?

Back in the compartment, seeing me hunched over my notebook, the Frenchman said again, "You must be a writer"—the only words he spoke to me in fifteen hours.

Tapa Snim, the Zen Buddhist, was quietly sleeping in a small compact way, wrapped in his robes and pillowing his head on his bundle of possessions. I dozed but could not stay asleep. The problem was the over-bright fluorescent lights on the compartment ceiling that could not be turned off, which kept waking me from hectic dreams of persecution.

***

TOWARDS FOUR IN THE MORNING, lights flashed outside the train, the marshaling yards of Mandalay. My memory of the city was of air so dense that at twilight it resembled the fog of a London particular: furious dust clouding orangy bulbs, dimming them; air that had made me gag; a nebulous nightmare of swirling murk.

The air was just as thick with choking dust as I lingered on the station platform to say goodbye to Tapa Snim. And then I hurried out to the street, hounded by rickshaw drivers. I had the name of an inexpensive hotel. I singled out an elderly driver with a weary face and got in the back of his scooter rickshaw, and he drove me into the darkness.

The back streets of Mandalay were unpaved, rutted, and irregular. There were no streetlights, the shops were shut, though some houses had glaring spotlights for security purposes. The air was foul, the night hot, the darkness oppressive. The invisible city stank, and even after fifteen or twenty minutes the old man was still jogging along, humping and bumping on the bad surface. It was four in the morning.

This knowledge that I was completely in the hands of a stranger was not something new. It had happened many times on my trip. A man representing himself as a driver offered me a ride in his jalopy several times in Turkey; again in Georgia; memorably, on the border of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan I'd had to crawl through the passengerside window before I was bounced to Bokhara; in India a number of times, by rickshaw wallahs. And there was my humbling hitchhiking experience in Sri Lanka, the rattletraps of Yangon, and now this, the scooter rickshaw in Mandalay darkness, no one awake. All these modes of transport counted as the Orient Express.

But this was the ghostliest experience I'd yet seen. The night-black streets of risen thickened dust, the dim lights, the smell of dead fires and cooling embers, the chatter and flap of the scooter, the stranger riding with his back turned to me—all of this filled me with the same surrealistic sense of being borne into the darkness by a skinny old man in rags, spirited into his world. I thought: I don't know who he is. I don't know where I am or where I'm going. I could not read a single sign, and there wasn't a soul around.