Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I had asked about King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rama IX, the one-eyed, unsmiling billionaire, also half god half man, the longest-ruling monarch in Thai history. He had reigned since 1950, and now, on my second visit, his eightieth birthday was coming up. Pictures of him were everywhere, and many Thais wore yellow T-shirts and yellow bracelets, because yellow was the royal color.

It was Sunday, and a hot bright somnolence, with a hint of sadness, descended on Bangkok, reminding me of the oppression of empty Sundays when I was very young. If I stayed in the big city (I reasoned) I would be caught, and in the pleasantest way would procrastinate, happily pummeled by delicate little princesses in massage rooms, with gong music playing softly and candles burning. I might never leave.

Satisfied that Bangkok had gotten bigger but had kept its soul, I dragged myself away on a southbound express.

The talk was of Muslim insurgency in the south, secessionists' bombs in markets, sectarian throat-cuttings, local militia groups and mujahideen and mentions of Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. There had been seven recent incidents, some deaths and torchings of Thai shops. The southern provinces, bordering Malaysia, had a Muslim majority, and there was talk of sovereignty and the introduction of sharia

law and other repressions and archaisms. The Thai government hadn't had much success in pacifying the south, nor had the army managed to contain the bombers, whose numbers had grown in recent years.

"Maybe we should just let the Muslims down there have their province," a Thai woman had said to me at a dinner party in Bangkok, speaking in a fatalistic way. "Maybe they'll stop killing people then."

Leaving Bangkok for the south, I felt more than ever like a romantic voyeur in a half-drowned world. The train made a great loop around tin-roofed settlements. "There it was, spread largely on both banks, the Oriental capital," Conrad wrote in The Shadow-Line, published a hundred years ago, his descriptions still ringing true: "a vegetable-matter style of architecture, sprung out of the brown soil on the banks of the muddy river." Then the train rattled across the river on a rusty bridge. "Some of those houses of sticks and grass, like the nests of an aquatic race, clung to the low shores." The embankment temples ("gorgeous and dilapidated") and the watercraft, some chugging boats, some sampans being poled; onward past coconut palms, banana groves, mango trees, ponds choked with lotuses. Green, low-lying, the vertical sunlight glittering on the swamps and stagnation, the slender women carrying heavy loads—it all made me sad.

It was a voyeur's ennui, the traveler's sense of being superfluous, just gaping and moving on; the sadness of seeing these graceful people in this big city—another big city—all their struggles, all their hopes. We rumbled past a suburban station, Bang Bamru, where women were washing clothes at a pump, their children splashing nearby. The women looked elegant even in their drudgery, and the sight of two small boys, hardly older than seven or eight, farther on at Nakhon Pathom, one with his arm lightly around the other, made me inexpressibly melancholy. They each wore clean shirts and shorts and were barefoot. Why did neat, tidy, dignified, obedient, well-behaved poverty strike me as so sad?

At last, after an hour or more of the jungly countryside—of farmhouses, rice fields, bungalows, a family of four riding on a motorbike, browsing cows, a shrimp farm, a Christian school, a tall gold temple, a man setting off firecrackers in front of a crowd of people—I didn't feel so bad.

Then birds singing, dogs barking on dusty roads, tall trees surrounded by fields of lemongrass, mango orchards—and I felt even better.

And all the rest of the day, until nightfall, while I wrote more of my new story, "The Gateway of India," there were rice paddies, soft green squares of them with raised edges, some of them new, just flooded, to the horizon.

In the compartment next to mine were two girls in their late teens and an older woman, whom I took to be Chinese. The woman had a broader face than most Thais, and she wore a cuff of gold bracelets and a gold necklace. The odd thing was that, though they spent most of the day sleeping, they left the compartment door open, and the woman always smiled when I went by, as I deliberately did, for her smile.

"Way you going?"

"Penang," I said.

"We go Penang too."

As often happens on long-distance trains, I kept bumping into them—at the window in the corridor, idling in the noisy passage between carriages, waiting to get into the lavatory.

"Where are we?" I asked the woman, seeing a temple at the end of a road.

"I don't know." But I had broken the ice. The next time I saw her, she said, "You business?"

"Me business."

"What you name?"

"Paul."'

"Baw," she said. She smiled and canted her head towards her compartment. "My name Lily. Those my babies."