Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I stood before the bare desk with its guest book open on it. The floor had been polished, the place was clean, with its tang of new varnish. Not a single guest in sight, no one at all, yet it was as warm and as welcome a destination as it had been thirty-three years before—more so, since it was for me, as some other places had been, a homecoming. It was full of memories, a ghost-haunted house in an unthreatening sense.

Though I had claimed in The Great Railway Bazaar to have encountered him on the train—I wanted to give my little trip some drama—it was here at Candacraig that I'd first met the hospitable Mr. Bernard.

This kindly and dignified man had challenged me to guess his age, and when I guessed wrong, he told me he was eighty, saying, "I was born in eighteen ninety-four in Rangoon. My father was an Indian, but a Catholic. That is why I am called Bernard. My father was a soldier in the Indian Army. He had been a soldier his whole life—I suppose he joined up in Madras in the eighteen seventies. He was in the Twenty-sixth Madras Infantry and he came to Rangoon with his regiment in eighteen eighty-eight. I used to have his picture, but when the Japanese occupied Burma ... all our possessions were scattered, and we lost so many things."

Mr. Bernard, a colonial from a transplanted family (he'd never been to India), was a link to the nineteenth century. His memory was wonderfully precise. He told me in detail about his working on the railway, his army career, his life as a chef and a steward. He had met Chiang Kaishek and Lord Curzon and the Duke of Kent—all in Mandalay, where he served them six-course dinners at the officers' mess. He remembered the day Queen Victoria died, the day the Japanese invaded Maymyo, and he told me about his many children. I met a couple of them when they came to my room to bring me buckets of hot water for my bath and to build a fire in my bedroom fireplace.

Now I was back in this stately mansion, glad that it still existed and was in business.

"Yes?"

A man slipped behind the registration desk and twisted the guest book my way for my signature.

"Welcome, sir."

He was a smiling slender Indian, about fifty or so, in a baseball cap and a jacket—he had just come from supervising some gardeners repaving a path. The clothes made him seem athletic.

I said, "I was here once a long time ago. This place is in really good shape."

"Recently renovated," the young man said. "New paint. New varnish. Better plumbing. When were you here, sir?"

"Thirty-something years ago!"

"A long time, sir."

"I wrote about it—about being here, meeting Mr. Bernard."

"My father," the man said. He looked at me narrowly, and then his smile brightened. He had beautiful teeth, a friendly face. "You are Mr. Paul Theroux."

"That's me."

"I'm Peter Bernard"—and he shook my hand. "I'm manager now. I'm so glad to see you. We talk about you all the time. We have a copy of your book. You were up there in room eleven. Let me take you there."

It is not often in life that you make a general travel plan and everything works out perfectly, but this was one of those times. And the best part was that, because perfection is unimaginable, there were limits to hopes. The rest came unexpectedly, unbidden, undreamed of.

"I remember you, sir!" he said.

It was more than I'd hoped for, and that was pure pleasure, a return to the past without an atom of disappointment—the past recaptured, like a refuge, everything that I'd wanted a homecoming to be but that a homecoming (at least in my case) never was. This was a wonderful way back, as though this man in his fifties, who'd been a teenager before, had been waiting for me to return.

"You came from Lashio on the train, on a pony cart from the station," he said. "You smoked a pipe. You wore a black shirt. Such a small bag you had." We were in the room—spacious, with a fireplace and a view of the gardens. "I saw you writing at the table here."

So, at last, a witness to my long-ago misery, my loneliness, my scribbling. I said, "Your father—what happened to him?"

"Dead, sir. Some years ago." But he began to smile again. "He read your book! A guest brought him a copy. He was so happy to read about himself. Everyone knew about it. He became quite well known. Because of what you wrote in your book, many people came here. They mentioned you."