Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

SPECIAL EXPRESS

AN ENORMOUS MULTICOLORED portrait of Rama V, the great innovating King Chulalongkorn, hung above the waiting room at Bangkok Central—Hua Lamphong Station, built in 1910, the year the much-loved king died. He was the moving force behind the modernization of Thailand, introducing political reform, improving education and roads and the railway too, in 1891. He was also the king portrayed in the book that inspired the plonking musical The King and I, both book and musical loathed by all Thais, who see them as insulting falsifications poking fun at their revered monarch. Thais regard the king as semi-divine and Rama V (rightly) as especially benevolent and far-seeing, not to be spoken about casually, much less demeaned or criticized as a risible Siamese royal, waltzing or dallying with an intrusive farang.

On my previous trip I had asked an idle question about the present king. I had been in a sampan with a young Thai man and a Thai woman, the man a photographer, the woman a journalist. The man was teaching me how to scull with one oar, like a gondolier. We were in a klong, a canal sixty feet wide, not near any other boat or person. My harmless question produced a silence so deep it was as though I had not spoken at all.

Then the Thai woman looked down at the deck of the long boat and made a chirruping sound in her pretty nose. It meant uh-oh!

"You say one word about the king," the Thai man said to me, in a voice more fearful than censorious, "and it's your neck."

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."

Then I guessed she was a procuress, and wanted to talk to her more, but the next time I passed their compartment the door was shut.

Darkness dropped quickly, as it does on the equator, and in the morning I woke to golden clouds, a pinky blue sky, and jungle interspersed with rice fields like water meadows—the deep south of Thailand, near the Malaysian border, lush, deep green, thinly populated, and some of it under siege.

At Hat Yai Junction I got out and was directed to a booth to buy an onward ticket, then I reboarded; only the front half of the train would go to Butterworth and the border. I looked for the procuress and her two girls but couldn't see them anywhere. Most of the seats were empty. I chose one in the open compartment and dozed. I woke twenty minutes later when the train got under way, passing among sudden boulder-shaped hills.

Two young women—English, from their voices—each with an enormous bulging backpack, sat across the aisle from me. Both were engrossed in books, the dark one reading a John Irving, the skinny head-scratching one The Mosquito Coast. For a pleasant hour or so I watched this second one, rapt—or nearly so—chewing her lips as she read.

From time to time they looked up and spoke.

"Seen the bog?" the first one said.

"Toilets are rank!"

"Should we wait till later?"

"Wrong question!"

"Bound to be loos at the border."

"Tidy loos? Here? I don't think so!"

They went back to their reading. After a while the first one yawned and twisted the John Irving in her hands and said, "This book is so dense!"

I waited for a response, but the second one didn't volunteer anything about me. She was near the end. I waited until she finished the book, and when she did, she placed it on her lap and took a deep breath.

"What do you think?" I asked.

"The book?" She made a face. "Wasn't what I was expecting."

She handled the paperback as if to grasp at a thought. "All the bugs. All the jungle. It reminded me of when we were in Vietnam."

"But the family in it," I said, "did they convince you, or is it just another story?"

She nodded hard and said, "I'm like way convinced. Way, way."

Satisfied, I revealed myself as the author.

"Was this a trip you took?" she said, tapping the book.

"No. It's a novel. It's a story. It's, um, fiction."

She was smiling, as though she'd learned my secret. She said, "So I guess—what?—writing's your hobby?"

This threw me, but I was also smiling.

She said, "What do you do the rest of the time?"

"That's pretty much it. Scribble, scribble."

The other girl said, "Were you influenced by The Poisonwood Bible?"

"No. See, my book was published in 1981."

"I wasn't even born then," the first one said.

"I can't believe you're sitting right there," the second one said. "Hey, Doug!"

A young man a few seats away turned around and then came over. He was short, compact, and looked portable and somewhat satirical, being introduced by the pretty girls to this guy who wrote this book he had never heard of. She waved the beat-up paperback she said she'd stolen from a shelf in a youth hostel in Phuket. Doug had a small bag and wore sun-faded clothes and sandals. He said he had been traveling for three months. Apart from that he was noncommittal.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said. He looked me in the eye. "Going nowhere."

I liked him for his vagueness. The pen in his shirt pocket said something. He reminded me of the person I had been all those years ago, on this train from Bangkok to Penang.

He wasn't talking, and the backpackers just had questions, so I excused myself, and passing down the car saw Lily, the procuress, and her two girls in the last seat. The girls, on her right and left, were asleep, and she slumped to pillow their heads as if they were a pair of kittens.

"Baw," Lily said and gestured for me to take the seat opposite. "Sit here." After I sat down she said, "What kind business?"

"Book business."

"That good!" She smiled. She had gold teeth to match her jewelry. "What you country, Baw?"

I told her.

"America good!" She hugged the girls. "You like them?"

"Yes," I said.

"They sleep so much!"

It was true. I had seen them awake only once, the night before, in the train's corridor.

"Pretty, huh? Cue, huh?"

"Very cute."

One of them stirred and yawned. The woman squeezed the girl's cheeks affectionately, and her eyes briefly opened.

"He business," Lily said. The girl wrinkled her nose and went back to sleep. Then she winked at me. "Penang nice place. Baw, you come visit me?"

Later in the morning we halted at the frontier station. It was the ideal border post, a long platform, Thailand at one end, Malaysia at the other. About twenty passengers entered, presented their passports to be stamped at each country's desk, and went through the last turnstile.

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.