Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I was alone and apprehensive, with the traveler's awareness of having made a leap in the dark. This heightened my senses and gave a sharpness to every moment that passed, every smell, every flash of light. Afterwards, when I thought about my traveling in Upper Burma, my first memory was of this night ride in the darkness, the heat in my face. The reason is probably simple: I was alone, I was with a stranger, I had no idea where I was going, I was moving through inspissated blackness. It summed up what was most vivid in my traveling life, but especially on this ghostly revisit—rattling into the night in this phantom rickshaw.

The slowness of the scooter rickshaw exaggerated the distance, but even half an hour in the darkness of such a place was suspenseful.

I was surprised when I saw the hotel ahead, just off the road, the driver having kept his word. Before I paid him, I made sure a room was available. The building was locked, the door chained, but I woke the night watchman, and he unchained the door and brought me to a desk. A man lying supine on a blanket behind the desk had heard the knock and was waking and yawning.

***

ON THE SUNNY DAYS that followed—only the nights were befogged—I saw that Mandalay hadn't changed much either. It had more hotels, in cluding a luxurious one, Singapore-owned, within walking distance of mine, that seemed empty. But there was no other prosperity or newness in the great flat city on its grid of streets. One of the blessings of such poverty was the absence of traffic. Just a few cars, many motorbikes and scooters, lots of bicycles, and that relic of the old Burma, the bicycle rickshaw, or pedicab.

The beauty of the bicycle rickshaw is the breeze in your face, fresh air and a placid journey, traveling at almost a walking pace through the deep sand of the back lanes of Mandalay. I found a man to take me to Maha Muni Temple, less for the temple experience than to travel from the southeast corner of the fort, through the populous part of the city, to the complex of temples and the monasteries of the southwest.

The driver, a slender but sturdy older man, spoke English well. He said life was awful, and like many other Burmese who told me this, he spoke in a whisper and often looked around.

"I look back," he said, turning his head, "because someone might be listening."

At Maha Muni a group of pretty girls beckoned me over to where they crouched in the temple garden under a tree. One of them held on her knees a basket of shivering sparrows.

"Good luck. You let one go. Five hundred kyat."

For twenty-five cents I could give a bird its freedom. I gave her a dollar and she handed me one stupefied bird at a time, and off each one went, chirping as they soared away.

The sights of Mandalay—the gold temples, the multilevel Zegyo bazaar, the carved teak of Shwe Nandaw Palace, the busy monasteries, the fort with its ramparts and its moat filled with lilies, the hill to the north with more temples—none of these held my attention as strongly as the driver.

His name was Oo Nawng, and he had the broad, kindly-seeming Polynesian face of many Burmese. He was exactly my age. He had spent his working life, almost forty years, as a primary school teacher in a small town outside Mandalay, and had retired at the age of sixty-two. He had two daughters; one of them, married to a carpenter, had five children and lived in a village on the road to Pyin-Oo-Lwin. The other daughter was a tailor, a seamstress, who was in her late thirties. Oo Nawng had urged her to get married, but (although some men had expressed a romantic interest) she refused, saying, "I can't get married. I have to look after my poor father and mother."

In ragged shorts, a faded shirt, and a woven bamboo pith helmet, Oo Nawng was poor in a vivid and easily explainable way. After he had retired from teaching, he lost the hut that went with the job. His pension was the equivalent of $2 a month. He had found a hut to rent on Mandalay's outskirts, "a small bamboo house." The rent was $4 a month. One of the reasons for his retirement was his kidney ailment, which required hospitalization. The cost of his medicine had emptied his savings, and though his daughter's sewing helped, he was struggling to get by.

The bicycle rickshaw on which he sat with dignity was the last resort. He was too old to get any other kind of job. He owned the bike, but the rickshaw itself, the seat, the wheel, the footrest, which was fastened to the bike by a clamp, was rented, 25 cents a day.