Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE TRAIN TO PYIN-OO-LWIN

IN THE DARKNESS of early morning in the train's ordinary class, all the windows open, nothing was visible except the blurred outlines of the low buildings. Mandalay, like a city sketched in charcoal, was little more than these soft tracings and its complex smell, of wood fires and dust, dog hair and blossoms, crumbled brick and incense, diesel fumes, stagnant water, and the aroma of small fried cakes that the other passengers were wolfing out of fat-soaked wrappings of newspaper.

The way to Pyin-Oo-Lwin was the way to China. Nine hours north was the town of Mong Yu, on the border, with the Chinese town of Wanding on the other side. At the end of another day's travel, about three hundred miles by bus over the mountain roads of Yunnan, was the provincial capital of Kunming. Myanmar's close relationship with China meant that the border was wide open. Myanmar trucks went north carrying vegetables, huge teak logs, crates of precious rubies, and bales of opium; Chinese trucks came south with cargoes of rubber sandals and tin pots and cheap bikes, arms and ammo.

This train was so slow that the sun came up before we began the serious climb out of the flat river valley of Mandalay. As soon as we ascended the first hills, the air freshened with cooler aromas of vegetation, the yellow blobby flowers of the kasein trees, the canal odors with their hyacinths, which the Burmese feed their pigs. Ponds were layered with white lotuses, lovely orchards of plum trees spread out for miles, and fields bristled with onions. The recent rain had left a sparkle in the air—the sweetness still lingered.

The young teak trees here were spindly, with big fan-shaped leaves, lots of them beside the track.

"They are twenty-two years old," Ko Tin said. He was on the seat beside me—upright, on cushions, like a booth in a diner, too narrow to recline on, too stiff-backed to be comfortable, but Pyin-Oo-Lwin was only five hours up the line.

"In Kachin there are teak forests, trees one hundred years old. The Chinese buy them."

In the distance was a great blue humpbacked mountain, its scored and shoulder-like ridge extending for miles.

"We call that mountain 'the Buffalo,'" Ko Tin said. The name could not have been more apt. Once hearing it, I no longer saw a mountain but only a muscular animal.

I was inexpressibly glad to be heading this way on this creaky train—grateful that so little had changed, though I hated to think that the time warp was entirely due to the military dictatorship, which had kept Myanmar in a state of suspended animation. All that had changed was that the prisons were bigger, and the army was so huge it was like a parallel population—healthier, better dressed, better educated, feared and hated ("Soldiers here don't have to pay taxes!"). In a country where everyone else lived precariously, the military was secure. But because of their struggle, the Burmese were eager to talk, to help, to work, and in spite of the threats and dangers, willing to confide in a foreigner.

I mentioned the army and people said without prompting: We hate them. I mentioned the government and they said: They're corrupt, they're bad, they're destroying the country. I mentioned Aung San Suu Kyi and her fourteen years of house arrest and they said: We want her. Or: We want democracy. I asked questions about Buddhism and they said: The monks are angry too! When I raised these subjects I always got the same answers.

Ko Tin was no different. He said he hated the army, and "I like democracy." And he mentioned that anyone who criticized the government was imprisoned.

"Do you know people who've gone to prison?" I asked.

"I know many people who, one day, just disappeared. Here—then not here. Went away suddenly. That is what happens. You never know where they went. They go and never come back. You never see the police. It all happens in the dark."

Now on the steepness of the mountain slopes, the train was in and out of tunnels and crossing the motor road. Convoys of trucks, tarpaulins lashed to their cargo, lumbered up the road.

One open-sided truck was filled with straw.

"Watermelons," Ko Tin said, "going to China."

One flatbed truck with enormous shrouded figures.

"Carved Buddha images. We make good ones. The Chinese people buy them for their temples."

Other trucks laden with rice, tomatoes, beans, onions, bananas, oranges, lemons, peppers—poor, hungry Myanmar supplying food to wealthy China. Myanmar was like a fiefdom of China, sending tribute, so that China could abandon its farms, build factories in its paddy fields, and spend more time developing its manufacturing and technology.

I had been wakeful at five A.M. when we set off, but a few hours later I was slumped in my seat, asleep. I woke in the chill of the higher altitude—about three thousand feet—and saw coffee bushes, flower stalls, and poinsettia trees seven feet tall.

Also army camps, many of them: big walled compounds, well-built houses and office buildings and barracks, the neatest landscaping, and one had its own airport. All of them were probably here because of the salubrious climate on the lower slopes of the Shan States.

Just before we got to Pyin-Oo-Lwin, the train passed the outer walls of what could have been a university campus—gates, archways, green lawns, flower beds—but was (Ko Tin told me) a large military academy and had a sign in Burmese and English: The Triumphant Elite of the Future.

***

I HAD KNOWN Pyin-Oo-Lwin as Maymyo. All that had changed in thirty-three years was the name. Almost the first thing I saw were pony carts—the gaily painted tongas that resembled small wood-framed stagecoaches. I had taken one long ago to the old guesthouse Candacraig. In any other country the pony carts would have been a tourist lark, something picturesque in which a visitor could sit for a photo. But no, here they were still used as public transport, the cheapest form, a short-distance conveyance to and from the bazaar.

The railway station was the same, probably from the 1930s, a Burmese man told me, though the simplicity suggested much earlier—one-story, brick and timber, tin roof, the train schedules painted onto the whitewashed wall. Beside the new name was the message 3506 Above Sea Level.

A train waiting in the station was due to leave shortly for Lashio, an eleven-hour trip, not far from the China border. I was happy to get out here and reacquaint myself. I had no desire to go farther—didn't have the stomach for it. Once again, I was somewhat in awe of my younger self, that thirty-two-year-old who sat on wooden benches in third class all the way to Naun Peng, just to see the all-steel Gokteik Viaduct that crossed a gorge in the upper Shan States. I had been hard-up and homesick, with no idea of what lay ahead, worried about money, not sure of my route. I had been completely out of touch and—while tramping through the mud of Maymyo and hailing a pony cart to Candacraig—missing my wife and children.

"You know Candacraig?" I asked a man lingering at the station.

"I take you."

He had a thirty-year-old Datsun. I had remembered Burma as a country of old cars, in some cases antiques, bangers and jalopies.

The driver's name was Abdul Hamid, a man perhaps in his seventies. He asked me where I was from, and was pleased when I told him.

"I like Texas," he said.

"Why Texas?"

"Cowboys. John Wayne." He drove a little, murmuring, then said, "Gary Cooper. From films."

Pyin-Oo-Lwin was frozen in time, which is to say it looked bigger and shabbier than before—the market, the shophouses, the arcades, the bungalows, the clock tower in the town center showing the wrong time and lettered Purcell Tower—1936, perhaps the heyday of Maymyo.

As a British hill station it had been planned by Colonel James May, and for his pains, his urban planning, the British had bestowed his name on the town. Quite rightly, the Burmese changed the name back to that of the village it had once been, its only drawback being that Pyin-Oo-Lwin was hard to say without faltering.

But the villas of the Raj remained, the most amazing oversized bungalows and tin-roofed chateaus, many of them with a tower or cupola, a set of verandas and a porte-cochèe for the carriage, and tall chimneys—the town was chilly in January. These houses were of wood with red or painted brick facings, still looking elegant and rather bizarre. In England they would have seemed like satirical versions of parsonages or vicarages or shooting lodges, but here they looked outlandishly, assertively handsome and spacious.

Some had twee Cotswoldish names like "The Hedges" and "Rose Manor," and others had Burmese names. Many locations had two names: Maymyo and Pyin-Oo-Lwin were interchangeable. Tapsy Road was now also Thiksar Road. Candacraig was the Thiri Myaing Hotel.

But Candacraig was the same place, a big imperial double-fronted villa with a tower. The only difference was that instead of standing at the end of a muddy road, in a damp sloping field among scrubby bushes, the building—freshly painted—was now set in gardens. The landscaping included some hopeful topiary and flower beds, a gravel walk, and a fixed-up tennis court. The front walkway was lined with low trimmed hedges and clusters of pink and white impatiens. Just inside the front veranda was a foundation stone lettered Candacraig, 1904.

It was a "chummery," a sort of frat house of the Raj where young single men—someone like George Orwell, who was a policeman, or H. H. Munro, who was also in the police—would have gone in the hot season for a month of leave. The more established officers of empire, with wives and children, had their own bungalows or villas. The town had always had a large population of Indian descent, and many Nepalese too, descendants of the courageous and well-drilled Gurkha soldiers the British had brought to Burma.

I walked up the path and onto the veranda and inside the open door, into the past.

Here there was no letdown. The whole place had been restored: the big varnished staircase with its curved banisters, the teak railings running along the upper gallery as in an English country house, the vast entryway rising two stories to the beamed ceiling and the stuffed buffalo head, and more trophies—small, sharp deer horns mounted on plaques in a long row.

I stood before the bare desk with its guest book open on it. The floor had been polished, the place was clean, with its tang of new varnish. Not a single guest in sight, no one at all, yet it was as warm and as welcome a destination as it had been thirty-three years before—more so, since it was for me, as some other places had been, a homecoming. It was full of memories, a ghost-haunted house in an unthreatening sense.

Though I had claimed in The Great Railway Bazaar to have encountered him on the train—I wanted to give my little trip some drama—it was here at Candacraig that I'd first met the hospitable Mr. Bernard.

This kindly and dignified man had challenged me to guess his age, and when I guessed wrong, he told me he was eighty, saying, "I was born in eighteen ninety-four in Rangoon. My father was an Indian, but a Catholic. That is why I am called Bernard. My father was a soldier in the Indian Army. He had been a soldier his whole life—I suppose he joined up in Madras in the eighteen seventies. He was in the Twenty-sixth Madras Infantry and he came to Rangoon with his regiment in eighteen eighty-eight. I used to have his picture, but when the Japanese occupied Burma ... all our possessions were scattered, and we lost so many things."

Mr. Bernard, a colonial from a transplanted family (he'd never been to India), was a link to the nineteenth century. His memory was wonderfully precise. He told me in detail about his working on the railway, his army career, his life as a chef and a steward. He had met Chiang Kaishek and Lord Curzon and the Duke of Kent—all in Mandalay, where he served them six-course dinners at the officers' mess. He remembered the day Queen Victoria died, the day the Japanese invaded Maymyo, and he told me about his many children. I met a couple of them when they came to my room to bring me buckets of hot water for my bath and to build a fire in my bedroom fireplace.

Now I was back in this stately mansion, glad that it still existed and was in business.

"Yes?"

A man slipped behind the registration desk and twisted the guest book my way for my signature.

"Welcome, sir."

He was a smiling slender Indian, about fifty or so, in a baseball cap and a jacket—he had just come from supervising some gardeners repaving a path. The clothes made him seem athletic.

I said, "I was here once a long time ago. This place is in really good shape."

"Recently renovated," the young man said. "New paint. New varnish. Better plumbing. When were you here, sir?"

"Thirty-something years ago!"

"A long time, sir."

"I wrote about it—about being here, meeting Mr. Bernard."

"My father," the man said. He looked at me narrowly, and then his smile brightened. He had beautiful teeth, a friendly face. "You are Mr. Paul Theroux."

"That's me."

"I'm Peter Bernard"—and he shook my hand. "I'm manager now. I'm so glad to see you. We talk about you all the time. We have a copy of your book. You were up there in room eleven. Let me take you there."

It is not often in life that you make a general travel plan and everything works out perfectly, but this was one of those times. And the best part was that, because perfection is unimaginable, there were limits to hopes. The rest came unexpectedly, unbidden, undreamed of.

"I remember you, sir!" he said.

It was more than I'd hoped for, and that was pure pleasure, a return to the past without an atom of disappointment—the past recaptured, like a refuge, everything that I'd wanted a homecoming to be but that a homecoming (at least in my case) never was. This was a wonderful way back, as though this man in his fifties, who'd been a teenager before, had been waiting for me to return.

"You came from Lashio on the train, on a pony cart from the station," he said. "You smoked a pipe. You wore a black shirt. Such a small bag you had." We were in the room—spacious, with a fireplace and a view of the gardens. "I saw you writing at the table here."

So, at last, a witness to my long-ago misery, my loneliness, my scribbling. I said, "Your father—what happened to him?"

"Dead, sir. Some years ago." But he began to smile again. "He read your book! A guest brought him a copy. He was so happy to read about himself. Everyone knew about it. He became quite well known. Because of what you wrote in your book, many people came here. They mentioned you."

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.

In a country of slender, soft-voiced beauties with creamy skin, the loveliest smiles, and the gentlest manner, the rest of the Bernard brothers had remained stubbornly single. This baffled me. Apart from Margaret, the sisters, too, had chosen spinsterhood. The better I got to know them, the more I felt that this was a comment on their happy household, the mutually supportive family Mr. Bernard had fathered, and maybe an indication of how they had lived in Upper Burma, in a closed culture, Catholics of Indian descent among Buddhist Burmans. Pictures of Jesus, of Mary, of saints, were hung on the walls of the parlor. On the mantelpiece a gold chalice glittered among devotional tokens.

Their mother, Theresa Bernard, had been beloved and doted on; she'd died only a few years before, also at the age of ninety. It was as though they were all so content they couldn't bear to leave the serenity of the homestead. Margaret had left the country. Jane had recently visited her in Germany, and reported that she was happy in Berlin. Of the others, none had left Myanmar. They continued to live the provincial life of the small town, with occasional visits to Mandalay.

"I'm still waiting for my lucky day," Vincent said of his marriage prospects. He was a powerfully built man who, with a Dutch partner, managed two thousand acres of maize some distance from Pyin-Oo-Lwin.

John, whose nickname was Sunny, was a thin, watchful man. He sat sideways on a straight-backed chair, tremulous in the early stages of Parkinson's disease. He said, "I remember you so well, Mr. Paul. You were in the corner room. You talked to us."

"Your father was proud of you," I said.

"You wrote our names in your book!" Vincent said.

"Was your father strict?"

"He beat me twice a week," Sunny said without rancor, smiling, widening his eyes.

Peter agreed: I had described their father's interesting career as a colonial servant, but I hadn't mentioned his severity. Well, how was I to know? Their father had been punctual, methodical, demanding, an early riser. Candacraig had been his entire responsibility, and the burden had come at the end of his career. He had supervised the place until his retirement. And, though it had been owned by the government, he had turned it into a family enterprise: all the children had worked here at one time or another.

Vincent said, "People came holding your book, wanting to meet my father. Tourists from Britain. From America. Aussies, too. My father met them and talked to them and told them his stories."

"He was eighty-one when he retired," Peter said.

"Later, when they came, we informed them he was dead," Sunny said. "Some of them cried. They went away sad."

They showed me family albums, memorabilia, a large studio portrait of their father, looking owlish in horn-rimmed glasses. And so I sat there, and drank tea, and was happy. It was a homecoming I had not expected, like a visit to generous grateful relatives I had not seen in decades. Nothing like this had ever happened to me among my own family. Was this a motivation, the embrace of strangers, in my becoming a traveler? It was all positive and pleasurable, the men I had remembered as eager polite boys; the women who'd just been names. The wonderful part was the continuity of it all, that life had gone on. Without daring to anticipate such an event, it was the sort of reunion I had hoped for when I set out to repeat my trip.

I looked at the bazaar and the Christian churches—Gothic in red brick—and spent a day at Kandawgyi, botanical gardens that dated from the first serious settlement of the town, when the railway had been finished in 1900. It was a beautifully landscaped area of more than four hundred acres, with a pond and bamboo groves and endangered deer and a research center devoted to growing mulberry trees for silkworms, as well as the raising of silkworms themselves. Walking along the flower-bordered paths I was reminded that at an earlier time I would have directed the rickshaw driver to pass the Kandawgyi Gardens and asked him to stop at the Kandawgyi Bar, if such a place could be found, and I would have stayed there, getting half drunk and homesick.

The night before I left, I did get half drunk at the Aung Padamyar, an Indian restaurant that Vincent recommended. It was run by one of his female cousins, for Mr. Bernard's brother was also an old-time resident of Maymyo.

Dennis Bernard, another cousin, introduced himself. Another genial wraith from the distant past, he said, "Remember me? I set the table for you at Candacraig."

He was also in his fifties, semi-retired. He said that he had worked for Mr. Bernard as a waiter and a cleaner.

"It wasn't easy," he said. "We had to get up at four in the morning to clean the dining room and set the tables. Empty the ashtrays. Sweep. Uncle Bernard insisted that we get there at that time. 'Be very quiet, the guests are sleeping.' He was so strict. He checked each table. 'Don't hurry,' he said. 'Do it all correctly.' And he could get really angry."

"What made him angry?"

"If we left the spoon out of the sugar bowl."

***

I WENT BACK TO MANDALAY. It was then that I searched for and found Oo Nawng and gave him the money. He said, "I'm happy."

Before I left, I made a visit to the Irrawaddy, just to see the river and the boats and the landing stage. It was too far for Oo Nawng to go in his bicycle rickshaw, so I took a taxi. On the way, we passed a big bold sign: The Tatmadaw Will Never Betray the National Cause.

"What's the Tatmadaw?"

"Damadaw," the driver said, giving it the correct pronunciation. "Is the army."

"Yes?"

"Stupid army."