Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Chandra took me to Penang's botanical garden so I could see the varieties of bamboo. I debated whether to look up the procuress Lily, but I was still convalescing. I felt too fragile to roam the streets at night. I found an old paperback of The Great Railway Bazaar in a Georgetown bookstore and read some of it and thought: I am not that man anymore, nor do these places exist anymore. I was impatient to get to Singapore, so I bought a ticket and returned to Butterworth on the ferry and got a night train to Kuala Lumpur, in a compartment that was jammed with so many cardboard boxes there was hardly room for me. My fellow traveler was a Malay salesman for a firm dealing in table fans.

"Samples-lah!" he explained, but he was gone, with his boxes, when I woke up.

Even in the dim early morning I could see that Kuala Lumpur's main railway station was a marvel of good design, with marble floors, efficient clerks, and lots of trains to choose from. Any city in America would have been proud to have such a station. I bought a ticket on a later train to Singapore so that I could have my noodles here.

Pulling away from Kuala Lumpur, I could see the city like a mirage hovering at treetop level, a capriccio of spires—jungle and palms in the foreground, the otherworldly skyscrapers showing in the mist, silvery in all the green, a fantasy skyline. That sight was a reminder that Malaysia was an oil-producing nation; the beautiful railway station and this train were more proof of the country's prosperity.

In the seven hours through the jungles of southern Malaysia, the kampongs of graceful houses, the palm-oil plantations, I wrote more of my Indian story. The verdant zone was restful and reassuring. Approaching Johore Bahru and the border, I saw that all I had written in my notebook was jungle—palms—muddy river.

Welcome to Singapore

was the greeting at Woodlands Station, the customs post, and under it a warning: The Penalty for Drugs Is Death.

***

LITTLE TINKY-WINKY SINGAPORE was unrecognizable, the most transformed of any city I had ever known in my life, a place twisted into something entirely new; and the people, too, like hothouse flowers that are forced to grow in artificial light, producing strange blooms and even stranger fruit. But I was disarmed by the feline good looks of Singapore women, soft, pale, kittenish girls with skinny arms and fragile bones; vulpine women, fox-faced and canny, quick-eyed, tense with frustrated intelligence. In great contrast, the toothy men hurried clumsily after them, down futuristic streets, giggling into cell phones, pigeon-toed in their haste.

No one was fat. No one was poor. No one was badly dressed. But many Singaporeans had (so it seemed to me) the half-devil, half-child look of having been infantilized and overprotected by their unstoppably manipulative government. The entirety of Singapore's leadership was personified by the grouchy, hard-to-please Lee Kwan Yew. This tenacious nag, it seemed, refused to go away: after forty-one years in the government, at age eighty-three, he was still micromanaging the place. The city-state showed his tweaked and tinkered-with look, and so did the people. I had lived and worked here, at the University of Singapore, for three years in the 1960s. Then I'd passed through on my Railway Bazaar in 1973. Now I was back again, and nothing was familiar.

I was disoriented as soon as I left my hotel near the city center, a place I had once known well, at the top of Orchard Road. But it no longer looked like Orchard Road. The street names had stayed the same, which made it all the more confusing because the streets themselves had been redrawn. Singapore had been a tiny colonial city on a tiny island, with a hinterland. It was now a single modernized piece of geography—island, city, and rural areas had been combined to form a city-state, with muddy shores. It was a thoroughly urbanized island, 270 square miles of it—about the size of the Spanish island of Menorca, but much smaller than New York City.

It was a place without solitude. Cameras everywhere, snitches too. You can be arrested and fined for being naked in your own house, if someone gets a glimpse of you through a window and reports you. This is an inconvenient law, because being a place with no privacy, Singapore is also a place of great loneliness and fear, the apprehension of people who know they are forever being watched. Singaporeans are encouraged to spy on each other; rats are rewarded.