Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I HAD KNOWN Pyin-Oo-Lwin as Maymyo. All that had changed in thirty-three years was the name. Almost the first thing I saw were pony carts—the gaily painted tongas that resembled small wood-framed stagecoaches. I had taken one long ago to the old guesthouse Candacraig. In any other country the pony carts would have been a tourist lark, something picturesque in which a visitor could sit for a photo. But no, here they were still used as public transport, the cheapest form, a short-distance conveyance to and from the bazaar.

The railway station was the same, probably from the 1930s, a Burmese man told me, though the simplicity suggested much earlier—one-story, brick and timber, tin roof, the train schedules painted onto the whitewashed wall. Beside the new name was the message 3506 Above Sea Level.

A train waiting in the station was due to leave shortly for Lashio, an eleven-hour trip, not far from the China border. I was happy to get out here and reacquaint myself. I had no desire to go farther—didn't have the stomach for it. Once again, I was somewhat in awe of my younger self, that thirty-two-year-old who sat on wooden benches in third class all the way to Naun Peng, just to see the all-steel Gokteik Viaduct that crossed a gorge in the upper Shan States. I had been hard-up and homesick, with no idea of what lay ahead, worried about money, not sure of my route. I had been completely out of touch and—while tramping through the mud of Maymyo and hailing a pony cart to Candacraig—missing my wife and children.

"You know Candacraig?" I asked a man lingering at the station.

"I take you."

He had a thirty-year-old Datsun. I had remembered Burma as a country of old cars, in some cases antiques, bangers and jalopies.

The driver's name was Abdul Hamid, a man perhaps in his seventies. He asked me where I was from, and was pleased when I told him.

"I like Texas," he said.

"Why Texas?"

"Cowboys. John Wayne." He drove a little, murmuring, then said, "Gary Cooper. From films."

Pyin-Oo-Lwin was frozen in time, which is to say it looked bigger and shabbier than before—the market, the shophouses, the arcades, the bungalows, the clock tower in the town center showing the wrong time and lettered Purcell Tower—1936, perhaps the heyday of Maymyo.

As a British hill station it had been planned by Colonel James May, and for his pains, his urban planning, the British had bestowed his name on the town. Quite rightly, the Burmese changed the name back to that of the village it had once been, its only drawback being that Pyin-Oo-Lwin was hard to say without faltering.

But the villas of the Raj remained, the most amazing oversized bungalows and tin-roofed chateaus, many of them with a tower or cupola, a set of verandas and a porte-cochèe for the carriage, and tall chimneys—the town was chilly in January. These houses were of wood with red or painted brick facings, still looking elegant and rather bizarre. In England they would have seemed like satirical versions of parsonages or vicarages or shooting lodges, but here they looked outlandishly, assertively handsome and spacious.

Some had twee Cotswoldish names like "The Hedges" and "Rose Manor," and others had Burmese names. Many locations had two names: Maymyo and Pyin-Oo-Lwin were interchangeable. Tapsy Road was now also Thiksar Road. Candacraig was the Thiri Myaing Hotel.

But Candacraig was the same place, a big imperial double-fronted villa with a tower. The only difference was that instead of standing at the end of a muddy road, in a damp sloping field among scrubby bushes, the building—freshly painted—was now set in gardens. The landscaping included some hopeful topiary and flower beds, a gravel walk, and a fixed-up tennis court. The front walkway was lined with low trimmed hedges and clusters of pink and white impatiens. Just inside the front veranda was a foundation stone lettered Candacraig, 1904.

It was a "chummery," a sort of frat house of the Raj where young single men—someone like George Orwell, who was a policeman, or H. H. Munro, who was also in the police—would have gone in the hot season for a month of leave. The more established officers of empire, with wives and children, had their own bungalows or villas. The town had always had a large population of Indian descent, and many Nepalese too, descendants of the courageous and well-drilled Gurkha soldiers the British had brought to Burma.

I walked up the path and onto the veranda and inside the open door, into the past.

Here there was no letdown. The whole place had been restored: the big varnished staircase with its curved banisters, the teak railings running along the upper gallery as in an English country house, the vast entryway rising two stories to the beamed ceiling and the stuffed buffalo head, and more trophies—small, sharp deer horns mounted on plaques in a long row.