Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

At a noodle stall on the Malaysian side I bought a bowl of laksa, one of the great soups of Straits cuisine—spicy, curried coconut soup with noodles and bean spouts. It is thick and rust-colored from the chilies and its many ingredients—laksa, from the Sanskrit word lakh, for 100,000 (as Mr. Kailash had said to me in Jaipur), is a Straits colloquialism for "many."

A doddery white man in a torn shirt and tennis shoes shuffled behind me. His laces were undone, his fly was half unzipped. He could have been eighty. He carried a small duffle bag. He was alone and hard of hearing—the immigration clerk had to shout—and squinted through thick glasses. What was he doing at this jungle border crossing? I was worried for him and watched him until he found his seat on the onward train, where he sat with his head in his hand. Traveling kids were everywhere, and it was rare, almost unheard-of, to see a frail man like this on his own.

Doug had seemed to me the person I had been, so I felt affectionate towards him. But I felt only sadness when I saw this old man; I felt protective, and fearful too. In a matter of years that wandering coot, the ghost whom no one noticed, would be me.

NIGHT TRAIN TO SINGAPORE

THE LANKAWI EXPRESS

WHEN THE TRAIN pulled into the station at Butterworth I felt ill—the laksa,

I guessed. Greedy for the taste of it, I'd had seconds. I had not stopped at Penang on my previous trip. I might have passed by this time too, except that my guts were griping. I was dizzy and couldn't bear the thought of onward travel. So, bent double, I took the ferry across the harbor to Georgetown, got a taxi to the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, and curled into a ball, rising only to rehydrate with glasses of water fortified by a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar. I felt so ghastly the next day I took a pill; when that didn't work I went to a Chinese herbalist down a side lane and got a potion. I stayed in bed. After three months of travel I was seriously laid low.

All that second night I heard loud music from the nearby streets—the bars, the clubs, the narrow lanes of massage parlors and neon signs. I had been sick only a few times on this trip, but this was by far the worst—cramps and nausea. My usual way of dealing with illness was to suspend all activity, find a good hotel, and sleep it off—eat nothing, keep drinking salted water. I did so here at the E&O.

Eventually I felt well enough to shuffle around the town on the sea legs of convalescence. With its colonial houses and covered walkways, its monsoon drains and narrow Chinese shops stacked high with goods, Georgetown (named for King George III) was a marvel of preservation. It looked much like the Singapore where I had worked in the 1960s. I had been to Georgetown once before, in 1970, on my way to a remote fishing village up the coast, Batu Ferringhi (Foreigner's Rock). Out of curiosity I went there again, in a taxi, and found that it had become a corniche of high-rise hotels and condominiums, luxury homes, big resorts, and dreary tenements crowding the beachfront, a place of unparalleled ugliness.

Chandra, the taxi driver, was of Tamil extraction but born in Penang. He had never been to India. I asked him why. He said, "Too many people." He was married to a Chinese woman who had been a childhood neighbor and friend. They had two children. His sense of hospitality was such that he invited me to his house for tea, and when I commented on his addressing his wife in Tamil, he said, "We always speak Tamil at home." His wife was a Hokkien-speaker, and of course the national language was Malay, and he was fluent in English and knew "a bit of German. Danke. Guten morgen"

Many Germans had second homes here, he said. But mainly it was a resort for Arabs.

"Saudis—they have the money," he said. "But also Jordanians and Syrians. Their country is too hot—they have to leave, but they don't want to go to Europe or America. They know people hate them there. Americans say they're terrorists. They get double-checked at airports. And they don't want to be in a country where the women have to remove veil."

"They wear veils here?" It seemed odd in a country where Muslim women were gracefully dressed in sarongs and tight-fitting blouses.

"The women eat like this," Chandra said, and gestured, lifting an imaginary veil and sipping an imaginary drink. "No man can look at their wife. Only them."

"Lots of Arabs?"

"Thousands. Many thousands. Big planes, full of families—women in black, men in suits. Children. They can be very rude. They break things at the hotels and they fight when we ask them to pay. And rude when they talk to you. Sometimes they say to me, 'We go'"—and Chandra flapped his arms—"because they can't say 'airport.'"

"So what do you think?"

"I think if you're a good person, you don't need religion."

"They've got a lot of religion."

"They pray five times a day, and still they are terrible. So rude!"