Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE SLOW TRAIN TO KANDY

ONE OF THE HAPPIER and more helpful delusions of travel is that one is on a quest. At the end of Avurudu, when the auspicious day for work, for travel, arrived, the one determined by the astrologers and soothsayers, I took the train to Kandy, the capital of the former kingdom, at the center of the island, sitting at a high altitude, where in a famous temple a tooth of the Buddha was enshrined in a gold casket. It was a place of pilgrimage.

All the trains I took in Sri Lanka were small and slow, possibly the same rolling stock as those I'd taken long ago, but dirtier. Yet the routes were so dramatic, by the blue sea or the green hills, I hardly noticed the condition of the railway cars or my hard bench. And it was only seventy-five miles to Kandy, the line rising from the coast, passing through the gardens and villages on the slopes, the rice terraces full of still, silvery water and mirroring the sky, the rock temples hacked out of cliffs, the monasteries at the higher elevations. Coconut plantations, vegetable farms, pineapple fields, markets overflowing with blossoms: the way to Kandy was strewn with flowers.

Into the cooler air and taller trees, past Ambepussa Station and Polgahawela Junction, with its Buddhist monastery and temple. In the middle of the steep ascent that began at a place called Rambukkana, it began to rain—the first rain I'd seen since Bokhara, over a month before. The train's windows were open, the rain spattered in, but there weren't many passengers, and there was enough room so that we could move to the drier seats.

An older man with a tightly rolled umbrella and a wide-brimmed hat and a briefcase made room for me on one of the benches.

"You are welcome."

His name was Mr. Kumara. He had been a clerk in the Department of Health and was now retired, living on a pension.

"And I have so many other interests." He had a confident manner, and his hat, his umbrella, and his briefcase gave him a look of authority. His calm smile seemed to invite questions.

"What sort of interests?"

"Palmistry and numerology. I make predictions."

"What was your best prediction?"

"That Franklin Roosevelt would be assassinated," he said, and before I could challenge this, he added, "And that a certain woman would leave her husband—and she did."

He asked me for some of my dates, of numbers related to my life. He took out a pad and did some calculations based on my birth date, covering the page with obscure mathematics and crossings-out until he arrived at a single number, which he circled.

"Your number is two," he said. "You look younger than your age. You will have a good sun line. I can tell you that without looking at your palm." He then made a new page of calculations. "Here are the years that fate has decided for you—the significant years. When you were twenty-three, thirty-two, forty-one, and fifty."

I considered these and thought: Africa, Railway Bazaar, disastrous affair, divorce—fateful years. Mr. Kumara was looking at my palm.

"Sun line is there! See, I told you!"

Now, without anything to do except hold on to the stanchions and the straps, the other passengers took an interest and leaned over, as though to double-check the lines on my palm.

"Here is lifeline. You could live to eighty-two or eighty-five," he said, manipulating my thumb flesh. "This is Mount of Jupiter. You are stubborn, self-made man. Determined. Don't bend to anyone. You brook no interference from anyone. You live life by your own self. You are flirtatious, but not good at satisfying your sexual appetite."

This drew murmurs from the other passengers, and I shook my head, trying to cast doubt on this assessment.

"You are a Jupiter, a leader among men," he said, but stated it as a fact—he wasn't impressed. "Your eyesight is bad, yet I see you don't wear glasses."

"I had double cataract surgery."

"What did I say?"

He was speaking to the onlookers.

"You are charitable, but you were cheated by the love of your heart," he said. "People abused your judgment in the past. Not true?"

"All true."

He was on to my left hand now. He said, "Your left hand is more interesting than your right."

"In what way?"

"More irritated," Mr. Kumara said. "You have won the battles with the enemy. In future you do not need to worry about the enemy."

"That sounds good."

"Very much foreign travel in your life," he said.

"Are you saying that because I'm in Sri Lanka?"

"Your living depends on it," he said, twisting my hand, peering at my palm. "You will soon receive unexpected wealth in unexpected ways. And your career is good. Nothing bothers you. But you have bronchial problems and breathing problems."

"That part isn't true."

"They will come," he said confidently. "Before thirty-five you were very upset. Job, marriage, life—very bad."

"That's a fact."

"You will fall in love more than twice."

"Twice more?"

"It seems so." He looked me square in the face and let go of my hand. "You are a judge, a lawyer, a writer. Maybe an ambassador."

"If I were an ambassador, would I be sitting on this train?"

The passengers nearby looked at me for confirmation. I smiled. Apart from the insulting suggestion that I might be a lawyer, he was right on most counts.

I had gotten used to the tsunami damage on the coast, the ruins and the rebuilding. But inland, up these hills, the houses were whole and the villages intact, shining in the gentle rain, the dense green leaves of the foliage going greener in the drizzle.

"This is Peradeniya," Mr. Kumara said, getting up and unfastening the strap on his umbrella. He gave me his card—his name and address. "When you come back to Sri Lanka, please call me. You can meet my family. My wife is an excellent cook."

"And when I come back you'll be able to verify your predictions. 'Unexpected wealth.' "

"I tell only what I see," he said. And stepping out of the coach he said, "Lovely gardens here. You must see them."

I planned to, by going from Kandy, which was only a few miles away. I felt it would be harder to get a taxi at the gardens.

At Kandy I walked from the station with a growing crowd of pilgrims to the Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Tooth, thinking about Mr. Kumara's prophecies and palmistry. I had assumed that this Buddhist population of Sinhalese would be rational and compassionate. In some forms, Buddhism is like a vapor, an odor of sanctity, the minimalism of self-denial, not a religion at all but a philosophy of generosity and forgiveness.

Odd, then, to see Sri Lankans closely observing the bizarre Avurudu strictures ("Lighting the hearth should be done wearing colorful clothes and facing the south ... juice of nuga leaves on the head at 7:39 A.M....Set off facing the north..."); or being drawn to Mr. Kumara's numerology—his addition and subtraction and his confident soothsaying. And now in Kandy the panoply of this thickly decorated temple, the gilded pillars, the ribbons and semi-precious stones, the shrouded statues and heavy-lidded gaze of a hundred gesturing Buddhas—and flowers, candles, fruit and flags, relics and flaming tapers, all the paraphernalia I associated with the blood and gold and organ pipes that epitomize the interior decoration of South American cathedrals and the wilder excesses of Catholicism, complete with a swirling fog of warm incense: "That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die."*

* Philip Larkin, "Aubade."

I kicked off my shoes and joined the line of people eager to see the Buddha's tooth, which in this temple, in its gold casket, was like a saint's relic, Saint Francis's skull, a mummy in a catacomb, a splinter from the True Cross. The story of the Buddha's tooth dates from the fourth century A.D., and there is some question as to whether this is a real canine or a replacement for the tooth (a fake one, said the Sinhalese) that the pious Portuguese burned in Goa as being wicked and idolatrous. The Portuguese who venerated splinters of the True Cross and the skulls of saints, who had all but destroyed Kandy in their time; and what remained of it when the Dutch conquered them, in the sixteenth century, the Dutch had pulled down, leaving very little for the British when they showed up in 1815.

The inner rooms of the temple were crowded and stifling, mobbed with Buddhists propitiating the impassive statues, prostrating themselves, waving lighted tapers, and making passes with their outstretched arms—as though practicing to be Christians.

I walked outside and along the lake, liking this pleasant air at 1,600 feet, and then found a curry house (plate of rice covered with highly seasoned sauce, 75 cents), and sat reading the paper, about recent Tamil Tiger actions. In the place where I'd planned to cross from India to Sri Lanka, an armada of heavily armed Tiger watercraft, camouflaged as fishing boats, had attacked some Sri Lankan navy vessels. Eleven Sri Lankan sailors were either dead or missing, and in the retaliatory action, eight rebel boats were sunk, thirty Tigers dead. And in Colombo three Tiger commandos in diving gear, setting mines, had been captured; two of them committed suicide by swallowing cyanide capsules they kept handy for that purpose.

A Sri Lankan sitting near me struck up a conversation. Seeing the article I was reading, he said, "Sixty-seven people killed in the last two weeks. And this is during a cease-fire!"

His name was Kaduwella. He had come to Kandy to see the sacred tooth. He said that the Tamil Tigers had attacked the temple.

Of course: a place of such serenity, such glitter and sanctity, it was inevitable that the Tigers would violate it. And why not? In a paragraph that reads like a historical free-for-all, Christopher Ondaatje describes the skirmishes over the Buddha's tooth going on for a thousand years, how Kublai Khan tried but failed to capture it, how the Indians succeeded in snatching it in the thirteenth century but lost it to a Sinhalese king. When the Chinese failed in their attempt to steal the tooth, they took hostages instead—members of the royal family. The Portuguese were fobbed off with a fake tooth. So the Tamil Tigers were the latest in a long list of predators, poachers, and violators of the Temple of the Tooth.

The Kaduwellas lived in Colombo. While his wife and children smiled shyly, Mr. Kaduwella invited me to his house.

"We'll have a good meal," he said with a glance at my plate, as though dismissing it, but he and his family were all eating something similar.

I asked him how to get to Peradeniya. He said it was too far to walk, and when we finished lunch he went out of his way to find me a taxi and negotiate the price. And as we parted he repeated his invitation.

In the past I might not have visited Peradeniya Botanic Gardens. More likely I would have visited the Peradeniya Bar and sat there most of the night. But these days, in travel, I seldom went out at night, and got up earlier, and often visited gardens—particularly the gardens that were devised by the British, in which many of the trees were ancient, and some of the specimens planted in the nineteenth century. I got interested in gardening only after I became a householder, and that was as a result of the windfall occasioned by the success of The Great Railway Bazaar. I used the money to buy a house, I planted shrubs, I planted flowers, and more recently have been planting various varieties of noninvasive bamboo.

The bamboo groves at Peradeniya were dense, many of the canes gigantic—even named giganteus on their labels. What happens to the clumping noninvasive bamboo after one hundred years? The clumps are twenty feet wide and the plant itself grows as tall as a three-story house. The cycads were vast and feathery, the old palms stood tall; in a place like Sri Lanka, a land of procrastination and decline, these great gardens had ripened and flourished. I was reminded of the palms and mangroves on the coast—Bowles called them "triumphant vegetation"—that had resisted the onslaught of the tidal wave and the fury of the flood, and stood, like these trees and ferns and bamboos at Peradeniya, not only unviolated but bigger and more beautiful.

Leonard Woolf had walked here, so Ondaatje said. He had spent a year in Kandy, at the law court, fascinated by the convoluted murder cases and the complex marriage disputes. He had so impressed his overlords he got a better post in Hambantota, where, so he claimed, he would have been happy to spend the rest of his life.

It was easy to see how Sri Lanka could capture your heart, as it had Sir Arthur's. It was especially pleasant to be in a place where not much changed. Yet it was a violated place—the war, the tsunami, had held it back, kept it from improving in any way. The war of Tamil secession had probably had the greatest effect. War is weird in that way: time stops, no one thinks of the future but only of survival or escape.

I left Kandy. And a few days after I left Colombo, just down the street from my hotel, near a park I'd passed many times for its being so pleasant, a large group of pregnant women had lined up to be examined at a prenatal clinic, the weekly "maternity day" offered by the Sri Lankan army. Without warning, one of the women, a member of the Black Tiger Suicide Squad, pretending to be pregnant (her maternity dress bulged with a bomb), blew herself up and took six people with her into oblivion.