Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Peter Bernard showed me around the mansion—the floors were polished, the beds made, the fireplaces whitewashed, flowers in vases, the tables laid in the dining room. The light was exceptional, because all the rooms had large windows and each room its own balcony. Imperial architecture here, the villas and bungalows of the British colonial officers—Indian army, civil service—was deliberately roomy and comfortable, reflecting their pretensions to be considered upper class if not aristocratic. That was the imperial ploy: as soon as the British got to the colonies, they jumped up a class or two and put on airs and browbeat the underlings, the servants, the workers they referred to as dogsbodies. Kipling dramatized it, Saki satirized it, Orwell objected violently to it, E. M. Forster fictionalized it, J. R. Ackerley tittered over it. But Mr. Bernard had stood and served; he was, after all, a Victorian, from a transplanted family, a loyal British subject.

His first name had been Albert. If I had known that, I would have remembered it; it was my own father's name. Mr. Bernard had been chief steward of Candacraig, appointed in 1962 at the age of sixty-six, summoned out of semi-retirement to straighten the place out. He'd been so old when I'd met him (he had stories of World War I), he might have waited on the colonial policeman Eric Blair, who might have stayed here, before he left for London to become George Orwell. Mr. Bernard had died at the age of ninety.

The portrait of Mr. Bernard in my book had done what the written word sometimes accidentally does, worked a kind of magic. It had brought visitors, and it had given Mr. Bernard "face," which was so important in Burma, especially for a non-Burmese of Indian descent. I had mentioned in my book that his father had been in the Indian army. Peter told me that his grandfather had held the post of bandmaster in the Madras Infantry, and that he had never returned to India, nor had any other member of the family ever been to India, even for the merest visit.

"What's it like there, India?" Peter asked. "So many people, eh?"

Later he invited me to his house—the family house, built by Mr. Bernard for his nine children.

It was a sprawling bungalow called Newlands, at the end of a long driveway—the usual wall around it—and beneath a large banyan tree. I was greeted by two men in their sixties, Vincent and John, so delighted to be told who I was that they got my book from a back room and showed it to me. Mr. Bernard's signature was on the front endpaper.

"He used to read it," Vincent said. "It made him really happy."

Of the nine Bernard children, only two were married, John and Margaret. Victor—born in 1945, named for the victory over the Japanese—had died of heart failure.

"He was a priest, a Salesian father, with a church upcountry in Wa State."

Wa State was distant and isolated, in the Shan Plateau, the poppy-growing and opium-exporting area, in the smoky mountains of the Golden Triangle. But Father Victor Bernard hadn't been fazed and had been popular in his parish, which included the main town of Pang Wai. The Wa people were darker than the Burmese, animist, jungle-dwelling. They were mainly poppy cultivators and had a high incidence of opium smoking. What made them especially attractive to Catholic and Baptist missionaries was their colorful paganism. Noted for their dog eating, their headhunting, and their connoisseurship of skulls, they often set so many skulls on poles that they created (as Mr. Kurtz had done in the Inner Station) what seemed avenues of human skulls in the jungle, aiming at purification, to drive evil spirits away.

The Wa denied they were cannibals, the Burmese historian Thant Myint-U claimed. It was only good fortune that they sought in their strenuous decapitations: "a good skull or two would ensure all the maize and dog and good liquor (strong rice wine) they needed to be happy." Wa State bordered China, and Pang Wai was conveniently near the Chinese town of Cangyuan, on the opium transshipment route. Even in a shrinking world, Wa State, east of the Salween River, was not just distant but almost inaccessible.

I sat in the Bernards' parlor drinking tea, catching up. Margaret now lived in Berlin. A German doctor who'd read my book had made a visit to Candacraig. A widower, he'd taken the trip for his nerves and had met Margaret, who was a receptionist at the hotel. He fell in love with her. They married here, garlanded with flowers.