Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

GHOST TRAIN TO MANDALAY

MY FIRST REACTION to Rangoon, now a sad and skeletal city renamed Yangon, was disbelief. The unreality of arriving in a distant modernized city cannot compare with the unreality of seeing one that has hardly changed at all. If a place, after decades, is the same, or worse than before, it is almost shaming to behold. Like a prayer you regret has been answered, it exists as a mirror image of yourself, the traveler, who has to admit: I'm the same too, but aged — wearier, frailer, fractured, abused, weaker, shabbier, spookier. There was a human pathos in a city that had faded in the years I'd been away, something more elderly, almost senile. So, adrift in the futility of being in a foreign city, woozy in the stifling heat, I fitted right in. After a day or so I took a horrid pleasure in being here, back in time, in the place I had remembered and had once mocked with youthful satire, a ghost town that made me feel old and ghostly.

The crumbling and neglected city seemed surreal, because the place was isolated under the Myanmar military dictatorship, and helpless and tyrannized. Soldiers were everywhere, even in the sepulchral back streets. It looked pessimistic, unlucky, and badly governed. It had no bounce. It was a city without visible ambition: no challenge, no defiance. Being young here wasn't an advantage, nor was strength any use; brains just made you unhappy and a target for the secret police. Students and journalists were hated and abused. So were democrats: win an election here and the army put you in jail. But a reign of terror is seldom terror in the true sense; it is anxious boredom and suspense, and a kind of hopeless resignation bordering on despair, like a household dominated by the pathology of drunken or nagging parents.

The Burmese I met talked frankly about their fears and the political intimidation. They had the sullen defiance of people who were constantly bullied.

"They rule with the gun. They can come to your home at any time, knock on your door, and take you." This from a taxi driver, a man of thirty or so, speaking in a whisper.

"Why would they want to take you?"

"For no reason!"

And another man, a trader in a market, said to me in the same kind of cautious whisper, "A prison sentence here is a life sentence. Many of my friends have been taken away. I know I'll never see them again."

The generals had been in power in the 1970s, when I'd been here last. They were still in power, propped up by their control of the drug trade and enabled, bankrolled, by the Chinese government, their biggest trading partner, in exotic substances such as heroin and more mundane items like watermelons. The United States and many other countries refused to do business with Myanmar for ethical reasons. It was a pariah state that had defied the democratic process by invalidating the 1990 general election and imprisoning the winner of it, Aung San Suu Kyi. Since then she has been threatened, attacked, imprisoned, persecuted, widowed, and continually put under house arrest. I arrived in Myanmar at a time when her sentence of house arrest was extended for another year, her street barricaded with roadblocks and sentries. Not even the hungriest taxi driver would dare to take me to her street, nor even speed me past it.

But so familiar was Yangon in its sameness and its smells that I easily found my way around. To get my bearings I walked to the main railway station, inquired about a ticket to Mandalay, and then strolled along the streets towards the river, marveling at the crumbling buildings, the old cracked shophouses, the hawkers squatting in the shade of the arcades selling oranges and mangoes, the beat-up cars, the stinking monsoon drains — nothing new. The pagodas were brighter, the stupas freshly gilded, the walls newly whitewashed. Frustrated by the military repression, people seemed to take refuge in Buddhism, which preached patience and compassion. Apart from the newly painted pagodas, the city was ruinous, which was unique in the reinvented Southeast Asia. Myanmar was exceptional in its decrepitude and low morale, its inefficiency almost total.

The imperial city still remained, Victorian in its long colonnades and narrow passageways. I marveled at the existence of the broad and massive buildings with their tall windows and balconies and porches, all of them preserved by being ignored. Any of Rangoon's well-known colonials would have found the place familiar. Had Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and H. H. Munro (Saki) — all former residents — walked down Dalhousie Street towards Sule Pagoda and turned into Strand Road, they would have recognized the old Sailors' Home, the General Post Office, and the Strand Hotel. And they could have negotiated the city using (as I did) an early edition of a Murray's guide.

The Strand Hotel was almost alone in having been extensively fixed up, restored to its former glory, with a palm court and ceiling fans and a spruced-up lobby, and flunkies wearing immaculate frock coats and white gloves. The Strand's fine-dining restaurant served "grilled beef tenderloin 'Mulwara' topped with foie gras" for $34. The price of that one dish fascinated me, because it so happened that in Myanmar, where education was despised and considered suspect, schoolteachers earned $34 a month. Only the army got richer; everyone else was struggling to get by, hustling and hawking and in the money-changing business — the official exchange rate was 300 kyats to the dollar, the black market rate five times that.

In this sort of tyranny, without any opposition, everyone was forced to wheedle and whine, negotiate, horse-trade, and tell lies. But if the military in Myanmar was odious, the people I met were soft-tempered and helpful, and it was perhaps the only country I passed through where I met nothing but generosity and kindness. And the Burmese were the most ill-treated, worst-governed, belittled, and persecuted of any people I met — worse off than the Turkmen, which is saying a lot.

I didn't stay at the Strand, though I had done so long ago. It was ridiculous to pay $450 a night for a single room. I found a perfectly adequate (which is to say somewhat dreary but cheap) $45-a-night hotel near the Shwe Dagon Pagoda.

"Train is full," Mr. Nay Aung, the ticket agent, had told me at the station. He suggested that I come back the next day.

I waited a day. I walked to the Shwe Dagon and around the city. I saw hardly any tourists, not much traffic, all the signs of a dictatorship: selfishness and paranoia clinging to power, epitomized by well-dressed soldiers in heavy boots, threadbare citizens in rubber flip-flops. I was full of admiration for my younger self. Yangon had been ramshackle then, but I had no money; I had succeeded by improvising, flying by the seat of my pants. One of the lessons of this second trip was that I had been a hardy traveler, and yet I knew it was not so much hardiness as a desperation to make the trip fruitful.

"You are so lucky," Mr. Nay Aung said to me the following day. "We have a cancellation."

He sold me a ticket to Mandalay: first class, but with four people in the compartment. The train would leave around one in the afternoon and arrive in Mandalay at three the next morning. This improbable schedule — only one train a day — Mr. Nay Aung could not explain.

"Yes, it is not convenient to arrive at three o'clock. It will be so dark then."

I remembered the Mandalay train as basic, the trip an ordeal. This train was in better shape, but it was no less a ghost train, a decaying relic of the past, taking me from the skeletal city haunted by the military to the northerly ghost town of Mandalay. I felt that strongly as we set off. I had no idea how accurate that vision of Mandalay was, as a city of wraiths and the living dead, of people being screamed at by demonic soldiers.

In the sleeping compartment a young Frenchman was lolling in his berth, his sinuous Thai girlfriend, in her teens, wrapped around him. I said hello and then went to the platform to buy some oranges.

A monk with a bundle slung over his shoulder was being pestered by a ragged Burmese man. The monk was speaking English and trying to give the man some money — some folded worn bills.

"No, two dollah," the Burmese man said.

"This same, these kyats," the monk said.

"Two dollah," the Burmese man said again.

I said, "What's the problem?"

The ragged man was a scooter rickshaw driver who had taken the monk to the station. He insisted, as many Burmese did of foreigners, on being paid in American dollars.

"Here," I said, giving the man the two dollars. The man took them with both hands, fingers extended, then touched them to his forehead.

"You're a stranger," the monk said. "You don't know me."

I had been reading a Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra, as background for another Indian novella I was writing, "The Gateway of India," so I was able to say, "The Diamond Sutra says that you should give and not think about anything else. You don't speak Burmese?"

"I'm from Korea." It turned out that he was on this train to Mandalay, the fourth person in my compartment. He said hello to the Frenchman and the Thai girl, and soon after, with a clang of couplings, the train started to move.

I looked out the window and marveled again, as I had on arriving in Yangon. Nothing had changed on the outskirts, either — after the decaying bungalows and creekside villages, it was just dry fields, goats cropping grass on the tracks, ducks on murky ponds, burdened women walking, looking haughty because they were balancing bundles on their heads, slender sarong-wearing Burmese, and befouled ditches.

I dozed, I woke up; the Frenchman and his girlfriend had separated and were asleep in the upper berths. The monk sat opposite me.

He was a Zen monk, and his name was Tapa Snim ("Snim means monk in Korean"). He had just arrived in Myanmar. He was fifty. He had shifted his small bundle; it was now in the corner of his berth. He was a slender man, slightly built, very tidy, with clean brownish robes and a neatly shaved head that gave him a gray skull. He was not the smiling evasive monk I was used to seeing, who walked several inches above the ground, but an animated and watchful man who met my gaze and answered my questions.

"How long have you been a monk?" I asked.

"I became a monk at twenty-one," Tapa Snim said. "I have been meditating for twenty-nine years, but also traveling. I have been in a monastery here in Yangon for a few days, but I want to stay in a monastery in Mandalay."

"How long will you be here?"

"Meditation for six months, then I will go to Laos and Cambodia — same, to meditate in a monastery."

"You just show up and say, 'Here I am'?"

"Yes. I show some papers to prove who I am. They are Theravada Buddhist. I am Mahayana. We believe that we can obtain full enlightenment."

"Like the Buddha?"

"We can become Buddha, totally and completely."

"Your English is very good," I said.

"I have traveled in fifteen Buddhist countries. You know something about Buddhism — you mentioned the Diamond Sutra."

"I read it recently. I like the part of it that describes what life on earth is:

A falling star, a bubble in a stream.

A flame in the wind. Frost in the sun.

A flash of lightning in a summer cloud."

"A phantom in a dream," Tapa Snim said, the line I'd forgotten. "That's the poem at the end. Have you read the Sixth Patriarch's Sutra?"

I said no, and he wrote the name in my notebook.

"All Zen Buddhists know this," he said, tapping the name.

We traveled for a while in silence. Seeing me scribbling in my notebook, the Frenchman said, "You must be a writer."

He had a box of food, mainly potato chips, pumpkin seeds, and peanuts. He shared a bag of pumpkin seeds with us.

Up the great flat plain of Pegu Province, dusty white in the sun, the wide river valley, baking in the dry season. Small simple huts and villages, temples in the distance, cows reclining in the scrappy shade of slender trees. Tall solitary stupas, some like enormous whitewashed pawns on a distant chessboard, others like oversized lamp finials, under a blue and cloudless sky.

The bamboo here had the shape of giant antlers, and here and there pigs trotted through brambles to drink at ponds filled with lotuses. It was a vision of the past, undeveloped, serene at a distance, and up close harsh and unforgiving.

Miles and miles of drained and harvested paddy fields, the rice stalks cut and rolled into bundles and propped up to await collection. No sign of a tractor or any mechanization, only a woman with a big bundle on her head, a pair of yoked oxen — remarkable sights for being so old-fashioned. And then an ox cart loaded with bales of cotton, and across a mile of paddy fields a gold stupa.

I walked to the vestibule of the train, for the exercise, and talked awhile with an old toothless man going to Taungoo. When I asked him about the past, he seemed a little vague.

"I'm fifty-two," he said, and I was reminded how poverty aged people prematurely.

When I went back to the compartment, Tapa Snim was rummaging in his bag. I watched him take out an envelope, and then he began knotting the two strands that made this simple square of cotton cloth into a sack.

"Do you have another bag?" I asked, because this one seemed improbably small for a long-distance traveler.

"No. These are all my possessions."

Everything not just for a year of travel, but everything he owned in the world, in a bag he easily slung under one arm. True, this was a warm climate, but the sack was smaller than a supermarket bag.

"May I ask you what's inside?"

Tapa Snim, tugging the knot loose, gladly showed me the entire contents.

"My bowl, very important," he said, taking out the first item. It was a small black plastic soup bowl with a close-fitting lid. He used it for begging alms, but he also used it for rice.

In a small bag: a piece of soap in a container, sunglasses, a flashlight, a tube of mosquito repellent, a tin of aspirin.

In a small plastic box: a spool of gray thread, a pair of scissors, nail clippers, Q-Tips, a thimble, needles, rubber bands, a two-inch mirror, a tube of cream to treat foot fungus, a stick of lip balm, nasal spray, and razor blades.

"Also very important," he said, showing me the razor blades. "I shave my head every fifteen days."

Neatly folded, one thin wool sweater, a shawl he called a kasaya, a change of clothes. In a document pouch he had a notebook and some papers, a photograph showing him posed with a dozen other monks ("to introduce myself"), and a large document in Chinese characters he called his bhikkhu certificate, the official proof he was a monk, with signatures and seals and brushwork. He also had a Sharp electronic dictionary, which allowed him to translate from many languages, and a string of beads—108 beads, the spiritual number.

As I was writing down the list, he said, "And this" — his straw hat— "and this" — his fan.

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing."

"What about money?"

"That's my secret."

And then carefully he placed the objects on the opened cloth and drew the cloth together into a sack, everything he owned on earth.

"Tell me how you meditate."

"You know the Japanese word koan" he said. It wasn't a question. "For example, in ancient China, a student asked an important Zen monk, 'What is Buddha?' The monk answered, 'One pinecone tree in front of a garden.'"

Out the train window I could see a village set in a bower of dense trees, offering shade, scattered groves of banana and coconut, more lotus ponds, people on bikes. And here before me the shaven-headed and gently smiling Tapa Snim.

"I meditate on that. 'One pinecone tree in front of a garden.' It is a particular tree."

"How long have you been using this koan?"

"Years. Years. Years." He smiled again. "Twelve hours a day."

"Is it working?"

"I will understand eventually. Everyone has Buddha-spirit in their mind. By reason of sufferings and desires and anger we can't find it." He rocked a little on the seat and went on. "If we get rid of suffering and desire and anger, we can become a Buddha."

"How do I get rid of them?"

"Meditate. Empty your mind — your mind must be vacant. Non-mind is the deepest stage of the deep stage." He asked to borrow my pen and the little notebook I'd been using. He said, "Every night I have a serious question in my head — every day and night. Look."

He set down six Chinese characters, inscribing them slowly, each slash and dot. Then he poked at each of them, translating.

"Sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha," he said. "For twenty-six years I have thought about this. If I solve this, I will know truth. It is my destination, my whole life, to solve this problem."

"But how did you happen to choose these images?"

"One day, a famous monk, Ma Tsou, was asked, 'How are you?' This was his reply."

"Why did you come here to meditate? You could have stayed in Korea."

He said, "Buddha traveled! So I travel. I am looking for enlightenment."

"What do you think about Burma?"

He laughed and told me that on the day of his arrival he had gone to the railway station but the ticket window was closed. So he waited on a bench and, waiting there, had fallen asleep. When he woke up he discovered that the pouch at his waist had been razored open — literally, by a cutpurse — and some of his money stolen.

"But small money! Big money is in a secret place."

"You've been to India?"

"India can be dangerous," he said. "But I have a theory about India." He sat forward, eager to explain. "I see many poor people there, and I think, What is their karma? They are the poorest people in the world. Why do they receive this big suffering? Eh?"

I said I had no idea, and that the people here — right out the window — seemed miserably poor, living in bamboo huts and steadying wooden plows pulled by oxen, and laboring under the load of heavy bales.

"India is worse," he said. "This is my ridiculous thought. I know it is silly, but…"By" but" he implied that it was not ridiculous at all and that I should not be too quick to judge him. "Indian people have many bad karmas. In their history, they created violence; they destroyed Buddhist stupas and persecuted monks. They all the time blame Muslims, but Hindus have been just as bad. In my Indian travel I think this is the deep reason for the suffering there."

"What about Korea — any suffering?"

"Suffering everywhere! In Korea we have mad crazy Christians, because we are under the influence of the United States."

"Reverend Moon?"

"Many people like him!" Tapa Snim said. "I am glad to be here."

In the setting sun, the muted pinks and browns, the subdued light, the long shadows of the laboring bent-over harvesters. And in the dusk, the unmistakable sign of rural poverty: no lights in the villages, only the lamp-glow in small huts or the small flare of cooking fires at ground level, the smell of woodsmoke. All the train windows were open to insects and smoke and, passing a swamp or a pond, a dampness in the air, the malodorous uprush of the hum of stagnant water.

The last discernible station before darkness fell was Taungoo, a kind of boundary — it was all Upper Burma after this. While I'd been talking to Tapa Snim, the young Frenchman and his girlfriend had crept out. I asked Tapa Snim to watch my bag and walked through three or four carriages to the dining car.

Sitting there, drinking a tall bottle of Myanmar beer, I felt the kind of wordless bliss I'd experienced in Sri Lanka, at the little guesthouse in Galle, as though I'd come all this way to be uplifted by the night air, the breeze rushing through the train windows, tearing at the grubby curtains, the slopped and food-splashed tables where Burmese, propped on their elbows, were slurping fried rice and noodles, laughing and drinking, the darkness outside broken only by the occasional lantern or burst of fire or candle flame, illuminating nothing but itself, but "a candle is enough to light the world." Apart from that, nothing to report. I felt lucky to have met Tapa Snim, and I was thinking, Glad I came.

"May I sit here?"

I said yes, of course, there were very few empty seats in the car. He was a smiling man of forty or so, Oo Mindon. He said he was a merchant.

"I sell biscuits, noodles, cigarettes," he said. "Children's clothes."

He owned a stall in the Myoma bazaar in Ye-u, a town northwest of Mandalay. It was a 150-mile journey, six hours by bus from there on bad roads, he said. All overland travel in Myanmar was slow and dirty, but though he did not complain about the difficulty, he clucked as he described the distances and the road conditions.

After the usual questions — country? wife? children? job? — he laughed and said, "I like democracy."

He was a stallholder in a small bazaar in a benighted corner of the country, north-central Myanmar, and he launched into a long denunciation of the government, the generals, the roads, the disrepair of the trains and the buildings. He traveled quite a lot, supplying outlying towns with biscuits and noodles, and he said the situation was terrible. He used all the old names: Burma, Rangoon instead of Yangon, Maymyo instead of Pyin-Oo-Lwin.

"The army is no good. They make trouble."

"What's the answer?"

"We want elections," he said.

"Didn't Aung San Suu Kyi win the last one?"

"Yes. She is good. She should be in the government. We like her."

To bait him I said, "Why do you want democracy?"

"Because life will be better. We will have development — not this, what you see, rich soldiers and poor people."

A big boy joined us at the table, Oo Mindon's son, who was sixteen. He did not speak a word of English, though he was in high school. This was the next generation, the one that the generals had intimidated and shortchanged by limiting their education. Oo Mindon himself had studied English and had a high school education.

"What does he do?" I asked Oo Mindon, of his son.

"He likes to play video games," he said, and furiously manipulated his thumbs to illustrate the obsession.

I'd had no lunch, yet, hungry as I was, I did not want to risk the fried rice being jogged and swilled in a blackened wok by the churning wooden paddle of the chef in his sweat-soaked undershirt, a cigarette dangling from his lips — or was it the sight of the plates being dunked in the sludgy water of the washbasin?

Back in the compartment, seeing me hunched over my notebook, the Frenchman said again, "You must be a writer" — the only words he spoke to me in fifteen hours.

Tapa Snim, the Zen Buddhist, was quietly sleeping in a small compact way, wrapped in his robes and pillowing his head on his bundle of possessions. I dozed but could not stay asleep. The problem was the over-bright fluorescent lights on the compartment ceiling that could not be turned off, which kept waking me from hectic dreams of persecution.

***

TOWARDS FOUR IN THE MORNING, lights flashed outside the train, the marshaling yards of Mandalay. My memory of the city was of air so dense that at twilight it resembled the fog of a London particular: furious dust clouding orangy bulbs, dimming them; air that had made me gag; a nebulous nightmare of swirling murk.

The air was just as thick with choking dust as I lingered on the station platform to say goodbye to Tapa Snim. And then I hurried out to the street, hounded by rickshaw drivers. I had the name of an inexpensive hotel. I singled out an elderly driver with a weary face and got in the back of his scooter rickshaw, and he drove me into the darkness.

The back streets of Mandalay were unpaved, rutted, and irregular. There were no streetlights, the shops were shut, though some houses had glaring spotlights for security purposes. The air was foul, the night hot, the darkness oppressive. The invisible city stank, and even after fifteen or twenty minutes the old man was still jogging along, humping and bumping on the bad surface. It was four in the morning.

This knowledge that I was completely in the hands of a stranger was not something new. It had happened many times on my trip. A man representing himself as a driver offered me a ride in his jalopy several times in Turkey; again in Georgia; memorably, on the border of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan I'd had to crawl through the passengerside window before I was bounced to Bokhara; in India a number of times, by rickshaw wallahs. And there was my humbling hitchhiking experience in Sri Lanka, the rattletraps of Yangon, and now this, the scooter rickshaw in Mandalay darkness, no one awake. All these modes of transport counted as the Orient Express.

But this was the ghostliest experience I'd yet seen. The night-black streets of risen thickened dust, the dim lights, the smell of dead fires and cooling embers, the chatter and flap of the scooter, the stranger riding with his back turned to me — all of this filled me with the same surrealistic sense of being borne into the darkness by a skinny old man in rags, spirited into his world. I thought: I don't know who he is. I don't know where I am or where I'm going. I could not read a single sign, and there wasn't a soul around.

I was alone and apprehensive, with the traveler's awareness of having made a leap in the dark. This heightened my senses and gave a sharpness to every moment that passed, every smell, every flash of light. Afterwards, when I thought about my traveling in Upper Burma, my first memory was of this night ride in the darkness, the heat in my face. The reason is probably simple: I was alone, I was with a stranger, I had no idea where I was going, I was moving through inspissated blackness. It summed up what was most vivid in my traveling life, but especially on this ghostly revisit — rattling into the night in this phantom rickshaw.

The slowness of the scooter rickshaw exaggerated the distance, but even half an hour in the darkness of such a place was suspenseful.

I was surprised when I saw the hotel ahead, just off the road, the driver having kept his word. Before I paid him, I made sure a room was available. The building was locked, the door chained, but I woke the night watchman, and he unchained the door and brought me to a desk. A man lying supine on a blanket behind the desk had heard the knock and was waking and yawning.

***

ON THE SUNNY DAYS that followed — only the nights were befogged — I saw that Mandalay hadn't changed much either. It had more hotels, in cluding a luxurious one, Singapore-owned, within walking distance of mine, that seemed empty. But there was no other prosperity or newness in the great flat city on its grid of streets. One of the blessings of such poverty was the absence of traffic. Just a few cars, many motorbikes and scooters, lots of bicycles, and that relic of the old Burma, the bicycle rickshaw, or pedicab.

The beauty of the bicycle rickshaw is the breeze in your face, fresh air and a placid journey, traveling at almost a walking pace through the deep sand of the back lanes of Mandalay. I found a man to take me to Maha Muni Temple, less for the temple experience than to travel from the southeast corner of the fort, through the populous part of the city, to the complex of temples and the monasteries of the southwest.

The driver, a slender but sturdy older man, spoke English well. He said life was awful, and like many other Burmese who told me this, he spoke in a whisper and often looked around.

"I look back," he said, turning his head, "because someone might be listening."

At Maha Muni a group of pretty girls beckoned me over to where they crouched in the temple garden under a tree. One of them held on her knees a basket of shivering sparrows.

"Good luck. You let one go. Five hundred kyat."

For twenty-five cents I could give a bird its freedom. I gave her a dollar and she handed me one stupefied bird at a time, and off each one went, chirping as they soared away.

The sights of Mandalay — the gold temples, the multilevel Zegyo bazaar, the carved teak of Shwe Nandaw Palace, the busy monasteries, the fort with its ramparts and its moat filled with lilies, the hill to the north with more temples — none of these held my attention as strongly as the driver.

His name was Oo Nawng, and he had the broad, kindly-seeming Polynesian face of many Burmese. He was exactly my age. He had spent his working life, almost forty years, as a primary school teacher in a small town outside Mandalay, and had retired at the age of sixty-two. He had two daughters; one of them, married to a carpenter, had five children and lived in a village on the road to Pyin-Oo-Lwin. The other daughter was a tailor, a seamstress, who was in her late thirties. Oo Nawng had urged her to get married, but (although some men had expressed a romantic interest) she refused, saying, "I can't get married. I have to look after my poor father and mother."

In ragged shorts, a faded shirt, and a woven bamboo pith helmet, Oo Nawng was poor in a vivid and easily explainable way. After he had retired from teaching, he lost the hut that went with the job. His pension was the equivalent of $2 a month. He had found a hut to rent on Mandalay's outskirts, "a small bamboo house." The rent was $4 a month. One of the reasons for his retirement was his kidney ailment, which required hospitalization. The cost of his medicine had emptied his savings, and though his daughter's sewing helped, he was struggling to get by.

The bicycle rickshaw on which he sat with dignity was the last resort. He was too old to get any other kind of job. He owned the bike, but the rickshaw itself, the seat, the wheel, the footrest, which was fastened to the bike by a clamp, was rented, 25 cents a day.

I found out all this, and more, by traipsing around Mandalay with him, because he knew the sights, he knew where good food could be found, he was openhearted and candid. I wanted to find the fish soup I remembered from long ago, spiced and creamy, with noodles. It was called mohingas, he reminded me, and took me to a place that served it. He had some too. He took me to a Muslim trader named Soe Moe, to a trader who sold old opium weights, to a Burmese man who made long trips into Nagaland — not the Naga Christians who were numerous on the Indian side, but animists, monkey worshipers and fetishists, living traditional lives in jungle clearings. The Burmese man had piles of weird artifacts: necklaces of monkey skulls and bison teeth and hornbill casques, antlers, masks, bone armlets, knives, swords, spears, and textiles. In trade, the man gave medicines to the Naga people, because no government agencies ever went up the rivers and into the jungles that bordered India.

When I talked to Oo Nawng about the future, he laughed and said, "What future? I'm old!"

"You're my age."

Oo Nawng wrinkled his nose and said, "I don't want to live a long time."

"Because of your kidney problem?"

"No. Because I have no money. How long can I pedal a bike? Maybe two years more. If I get some money, I'd like to live a long time. But if not, I would prefer to die."

All his years of studying, homework, and teaching had allowed him to make this fatalistic statement in perfect English. That's what it came to: his intelligence and fluency gave him the ability to pronounce his own mournful epitaph.

He was one of the millions who didn't matter. He was old, he couldn't fight, couldn't work, wasn't important to the economy — a drain on available resources. The military men who ran Myanmar would have said that Oo Nawng was better off dead. Oo Nawng himself agreed. After a working life of educating children, he was a pauper.

At a fruit juice stand he said, "Eighty-five percent of people are against the government." He sipped his juice. He said, "The other fifteen percent are government relatives. And Chinese."

I had come across this hatred for the Chinese on my first trip. I heard much more of it this time, because the local Chinese were now able to make deals with the bureaucrats and traders in the People's Republic. They were in the gem trade, the drug trade, in food and wood export. The mansions of Mandalay, in walled compounds, were mainly owned by Chinese merchants. The Sinocentric Singapore government, the People's Republic, and India were supporters of the Myanmar military dictatorship, propping up the regime and its arrest and imprisonment of people for political crimes. A number of Burmese told me in whispers that the country was full of collaborators, informers, and spies. Defying all the twenty-first-century trends of liberalization, Myanmar was going sideways and backwards.

The government that had held on for forty years was determined to go on holding on. Quite a lot of money was at stake, because as a well-educated Burmese man told me in Mandalay, "The government is making a lot of money on drugs — on the opium trade. The generals here are all involved with the world drug cartels."

I heard lots of praise for the United States in distancing itself from the regime, and lots of blame for China and Russia and Singapore in supporting it — China especially. But China's prosperity, its need for oil and wood and food, had created a new dynamic. China had no interest in any country's developing democratic institutions; on the contrary, it was a natural ally of repressive regimes. When the World Bank withheld funds from an African country because it was corrupt and tyrannous, demanding that it hold an election before it could qualify for aid, China would appear with money—"rogue aid," with no strings attached, and got the teak, the food, and the drugs.

"We could have an internal coup, but it wouldn't change much," one man told me. "There are no liberals in this government."

This man too had been reduced. "My family had a Mercedes when you were here before. Now all I have is a Chinese motorbike."

"What will come?" Oo Nawng said. "More of the same."

He said there weren't enough tourists, and the ones who visited were not interested in taking a bicycle rickshaw. They wanted a taxi. They spent money at the hotels. He was glad that I had hired him three days in a row, but I would go, and what then?

"I meditate twice a day," he said, as though explaining how he made life bearable. He woke at four-thirty in the morning and sat for an hour. After dinner, he did the same. "My koan is 'Buddha meditates monk.' I pray and" — he shut his eyes and spoke with intensity—"Buddha sits on my head."

It was too complicated to explain, he said. Most of Oo Nawng's teeth were missing, and he was down to one good front tooth.

He seemed to represent the melancholy I felt in this return. He wasn't downhearted. He was realistic. He did not want to live well, only to have the meager rent for his bamboo hut and some money for food. What was the point of living if you had no food?

He seemed to find it mildly amusing that I was shocked by his saying he'd rather die.

Oo Nawng preyed on my mind. Thinking about him, I could not sleep. I had visions of him in his battered pith helmet of sun-darkened bamboo, pedaling his rickshaw along the ruts of Mandalay's back streets. The little skinny man with his rusted bike and his rented rickshaw and his notebook. Like me, he too was a ghost — invisible, aging, just looking on, a kind of helpless haunter.

People gave money to children in the Third World, to orphanages, to empower women, to clinics, to schools, to governments, but they never gave money to people who were simply old so they could live a little longer and die in dignity. Oo Nawng wasn't old — he was my age — but in Burma this counted as elderly.

The day before I was to leave for a trip to the north, a sentimental journey to Pyin-Oo-Lwin, I looked for him on his usual street corner, under the big shade tree. No sign of him.

I took the trip to Pyin-Oo-Lwin. On my return, I looked for Oo Nawng again on his street corner. The other rickshaw drivers said they hadn't seen him. I thought I might find him in the market, where a trader might know where he was — Oo Nawng had brought me here to look at tribal tattoo implements, little stilettos the Karen people used as finials for their tattooing needles. I asked Soe Moe, the Muslim trader I'd met earlier (his real name was Hajji Ali; the Burmese name was fanciful), whether he'd seen Oo Nawng.

"That old man who brought you here? No." Then, without any prompting from me, he said, "He is so poor."

"I've been thinking about him."

"He's a good man," Soe Moe said. "He has a good heart. He brings people here. I give him a little."

Soe Moe meant that if a person bought something, he'd give him a tip.

That night I thought of Oo Nawng again, as a superior ghost, a nat, a Burmese guardian figure dressed in a long gold tunic, smiling, obliging, radiating goodness and protection. He reminded me of my father, the soul of kindness. And the following morning I went to Oo Nawng's street corner again and waited. No one had seen him. This seemed odd, given his punctuality. One man said, "He's not coming today. It's Saturday."

I went away, fearing that he was dead. Later in the morning I looked again — no Oo Nawng. I walked down a side street where men were selling oranges out of wheelbarrows, and others hawking onions and bananas. I kept walking in the noon heat, the sun beating on my head, thinking of Oo Nawng's battered pith helmet.

After forty-five minutes of useless kicking through the sand piles and gravel of these streets, I turned and — as in my dreams — saw Oo Nawng pedaling towards me, smiling.

"Get on, sir."

I got onto the seat of the rickshaw.

"Where to today?"

"Take me to a quiet place where no one can see us."

He pedaled awhile, then stopped in the shade of a banyan tree at the opening to an alley.

"Quiet enough?"

"Perfect." I then gave him an unsealed envelope.

He looked in. He did not seem surprised, though he touched the contents to his forehead. Then he frowned and said, "We must go change it. You change it. They won't believe me — they'll say I stole it."

So we went to a moneychanger, and the fat envelope of dollars was swapped for a big dirty brick of Myanmar kyats, secured by rubber bands.

"Let's get a drink."

We drank lemonade, and he told me his full name, Oo Ng Nawng. He wrote his address, and after that, trishaw driver, chair man. As though thinking out loud, he said, "I will pay my rent for a year, maybe two years. I will buy a secondhand rickshaw. Later, I can sell it. Yes, yes."

"Good."

"I'm happy," he said. His smile, too, was almost unearthly, beatific, a ghost smile of reassurance. "Now where do you want to go, Mister Baw?"