The Great Railway Bazaar

Chapter Fourteen

I twas raining so hard on the roof of the ticket office at Talaimannar Station that the clerk was shouting, an operatic request for excess charges, uncharacteristically loud for a Ceylonese. It was not a country where people raised their voices. They argued in whispers; catastrophe put them to sleep. They were not an excitable people – it had something to do with starvation. But these were unusual circumstances. It was like one of those pioneering talkies, the documentary in which curtains of brown rain slant into a railway platform, filling the sound track with a deafening crackle. The carriages of the Talaimannar Mail, made of thin wooden slats, amplified the rain; and the drumming on those bogie roofs, orchestrated by the wind, drowned the whinnying barks of the emaciated pariah dogs, which had been driven out of the storm. The station was rusting, the signboard had peeled into illegibility, the train was greasy, and the feeble lights above the black verandah pillars gave the streaming rain the yellow opacity of molten plastic. It was a small tropical station in the north of Ceylon, smelling of soaked jungle and erupting drains, and with that decay that passes for charm in equatorial outposts.

I asked the ticket clerk in Bookings what time the train was leaving.

'Maybe midnight!' The rain still gushed on his dingy shed, making him squint.

'What do you mean maybe?

'Maybe later

With the pariah dogs snapping at my heels, I hurried down the platform to the carriage with sleeping car lettered neatly in fading gilt script on its side. My two-berth compartment, a good example of colonial carpentry, was wood-panelled in the most complicated way to accommodate a system of hinged shelves, built-in cupboards, and a collapsible fold-out chair fitting to one wall. The rain beat against the wooden shutters and a fine mist found its way through the louvres. I went to sleep but was awakened at one in the morning by a Singhalese who dragged in three heavy crates and parked them next to my berth.

'This mine,' he said, pointing to the lower berth where Hay.

I smiled; it was the smile of placid incomprehension I had been taught by any number of Afghan stall-holders in Kabul.

'English?'

I shook my head, still smiling.

The Singhalese hooked the stepladder to the upper berth. But he did not climb it. He turned on the fan, sat on one of his crates, and began eating a stinking meal out of a piece of newspaper – the smell of his rotten onions and mildewed rice was to stay in the compartment for the remainder of the journey. At 3.15 the train pulled out of Talaimannar. I know this because when it started up I was jolted out of my berth on to the crates.

The wooden sleeping car was very light; it bounced and swayed on the uneven railroad and all night made a constant creaking – that twisting and straining of wood that enlivens the nights of passengers on old storm-driven ships. I had a panicky nightmare of the sleeping car catching fire, burning furiously as the flames were fed by the draught from its travelling. I was trapped in the compartment, unable to open the doors, which the rain had warped in their jambs. The doors were warped, and waking from the nightmare I smelled the powerful smoke from the Singhalese's cheroot. The compartment lights were on, the fan was going, and this man – I could see him in the mirror – was lying in his berth, puffing the stogie and reading the wrapping of his aromatic dinner.

At dawn, the northwest of Ceylon was a neglected garden: the rice fields had dried out and were overgrown with grass; the foliage was dense in the yards of tumbledown huts; there was evidence of former cultivation. Everywhere I looked, I saw great idleness, people in all the attitudes of repose. I had come from South India, the land of leaping Tamils. Here, the Singhalese had the ponderous stumbling and negligent attention of sleepwalkers looking for a place to drop. The food shortage was obviously acute: the proof was in the disorderly plots of cassava, the most primitive vegetable on earth, a root that grows easily but exhausts the soil in a year. It was a new crop to Ceylon; they had begun to grow it in desperation.

In second class, the Singhalese were sleeping against their children. The children were wide awake, pinned to the benches by their snoring parents. One man I met in the corridor was frankly disgusted. He was Singhalese, a teacher of English language, and said he didn't often take the train because 'I don't like these travelling companions.'

'The Singhalese?'

'The cockroaches.' He said the train was full of them, but I saw them only in the carriage marked buffet, among the peanuts, stale bread and tea that was sold as breakfast.

I asked the teacher if there was any future for the English language in Ceylon. (I should add that although the official name for the island is now Sri Lanka no one I met there called it anything but Ceylon: it had been changed too recently for people to overcome the habit of giving it the former name.)

'Funny you should ask,' he said. 'As a matter of fact we're being investigated.'

I asked him why.

'Our lessons are subversive.' He smoked and smiled coyly; he was clearly dying for me to pump him.

'Give me an example.'

'Oh, we have drill sentences. Five thousand of them. The government says they're subversive.'

'Drill sentences for English lessons?'

'Yes. We wrote them. One was "Mrs Bandaranaike has three children."'

'How many children does she have?'

'Three.'

'So what's the difficulty?'

'I'm giving you an example,' he said. 'There was another one: "Mrs B. is a woman."'

'She is, isn't she?'

'Yes. But they objected. Maybe you could call it harmful to her personality cult.'

'I see.'

'Also, "Mrs B. had an operation on nineteen September nineteen sixty-one."'

They didn't like that?'

'Oh no! An inquiry is in the pipeline. As for me, I find the whole matter very amusing.'

I said he would probably lose his job. He said that was all right as long as he didn't go to jail. As a university teacher he earned $25 a week, before taxes.

At Kurunegala, about fifty miles north of Colombo, I bought a papaya and the Ceylon Daily Mirror. Starvation, which had turned the Indians into makers of the foolproof rubber-lugged sprocket and vendors of the fish-meal cutlet and vegetable chop, had made the Ceylonese religious fanatics. According to the Mirror there was a renewed interest in St Jude, who is popularly known as 'the patron saint of hopeless cases'. A shrine to him in Colombo was besieged by pilgrims, even Buddhists and Hindus. 'It is truly remarkable,' the article ran, 'how people of all faiths and communities continue to flock to this hallowed shrine.' On the feast day of St Jude, 28 October, hundreds of thousands of Ceylonese were expected to go to the shrine to pray.

The devotees are multiplying. Letters pour in to the Parish Priest testifying to the wonderful favours granted by invocation to the Saint. Many of them have been those who, tangled in a seemingly hopeless web of bureaucratic red tape, and who invoked St Jude who has helped them find a solution. The Parish Priest receives regular remittances from those who, prior to leaving the island on some business visit or scholarship, were tied down by regulations and unsympathetic officialdom and who overcame these after prayer to St Jude.

In the same edition of the paper, food riots were reported in several towns after the rice ration had been cut (for the third time, said the teacher – it was now a quarter of what it had been five months previous). The current harvest was a failure, chillies were unobtainable, and from the train I could see bread lines – hundreds of listless people in misshapen queues, waiting with empty baskets. At the stations, children stood champing on sticks of raw cassava, and pariah dogs fought over the discarded peels, tearing with narrow fishlike jaws that were all teeth. The teacher said there were hunger marchers in Colombo, and a story was circulating that a military coup was imminent. The government had vigorously denied the coup story. There was no food shortage, really, said the minister of agriculture – many people were successfully growing yams and cassava in their gardens. There was plenty of food in Ceylon, he said, but some people didn't want to eat it: all these people had to do was to change their diet from the loaves of bread they craved. This American-style bread, introduced as an emergency measure during the war, has become a staple of the Ceylonese diet. The catch is that not a single grain of wheat is grown in Ceylon, which makes bread as inconvenient a staple on that lovely island as water chestnuts would be in Nevada. The minister heaped scorn on Singapore's Straits Times, which had printed a story about the Ceylonese army's being so starved it was eating grass. But the outraged denials only seemed to confirm that the food situation was desperate. At Colombo Fort I was approached separately by three piratical Singhalese. 'Anything to sell?' said the first; 'Chinese girl?' said the second; 'Give me a shirt,' said the third, not mincing his words – though he offered to carry my suitcase in exchange for it. Saint Jude seemed to have his work cut out for him, and the preparations for his feast day were perfectly understandable in the land no longer known as Serendip.