The Great Railway Bazaar

Chapter Fifteen

It struck me as practically insane in a country that was starving to death that thirty people should choose to attend a three-day seminar on American literature, at which I would be the principal speaker. American literature is fine, but I feel it to be an irrelevance in a disaster area. I had not counted on the resourcefulness of the American embassy; when the seminar got under way I saw my alarm was pointless. The clever man who supervised the seminar had assured me there would be 100 per cent attendance, and his method was not very different from that of the family planner in India who gives a new transistor radio to every male who agrees to a vasectomy. Here, on the hungry island of Ceylon, the American literature seminar included three huge meals, high tea, a free room in the New Orient Hotel in Galle, and all the whisky you could drink. Little wonder it was well attended. After a mammoth four-course breakfast, the bloated delegates met in an upstairs room and dozed through my inoffensive lecture, waking at noon to rush downstairs to a spectacular lunch. The afternoon meeting was short, truncated by tea, and the main event of the day was dinner, a leisurely good-humoured affair, followed by a movie that put everyone to sleep. The first day's meals were frenzied sessions of gourmandizing, but after that things settled down; the delegates padded back and forth from dining room to seminar room, to meals and their justification. In between they stoked themselves with cookies, occasionally finding it necessary to absent themselves with indigestion, and they were often so stupefied with food, they began to look like victims of some dropsical illness, the chief symptom of which was prolonged slumber interrupted by attacks of furious belching. Some of the delegates gave me books they had written. The gravy stains on the covers will continue to remind me of that weekend, and I shall always remember the unanimous hoot that went up at the end of the seminar when the American organizer said, 'Shall we leave at ten o'clock, or after lunch?'

One night I left the eructating delegates at the hotel and went in search of a snooker game. I found the Gymkhana Club, but several members had locked themselves in the snooker room where they were secretly listening to a fizzling short-wave radio. It was the latest racing news on the BBC Overseas Service, and the men, who were bookies, scribbled on tote-sheets as the plummy voice said, 'At Doncaster today, in a seven-furlong race on a slow track, Bertha's Pill came in at twenty to one, and Gallant Falcon, Safety Match, and Sub Rosa – ' Racing is banned in Ceylon, so the Ceylonese bet on races in Epsom, Doncaster, and Kemp-ton Park. The bookies said I could use the table as soon as the broadcast was over.

The Public Services Club was right across the road. The snooker table was free, and the members said they had no objection to my playing, but added that it might be difficult because the billiard boy had to catch his bus. I was a bit puzzled by this explanation, but after a while I saw in the billiard boy a clue to the unspeakable idleness in Ceylon.

I began to play one of the gasconading Singhalese, and after a few balls were potted there was some muttering.

'Billiard boy will get later bus.'

The billiard boy, a shiny clerical Buddhist named Fernando, carried the bridge with the confident authority of a bishop with crook. The game depended on him. He kept score; he passed the bridge when it was needed; he spotted the balls; he chalked the cues; he reminded the players of the rules; once when I was in doubt about a shot he told me the best one to take, sucking his teeth when I missed. None of his tasks was especially strenuous, but they had the effect of ruining my concentration. The singular virtue of snooker and pool is that they are played in complete silence. Fernando's panting attentions violated this silence. I was glad to hear my opponent say – after about forty minutes – 'Billiard boy must go.'

'Good,' I said. 'Let him go.'

Fernando racked his bridge and sped out of the room.

'I beat you by one point.'

'No you didn't,' I said. 'The game's not over.'

'Game is over.'

I pointed out that there were still four balls on the table.

'But no billiard boy,' said the Singhalese. 'So the game is over. I win.'

Was it any wonder that in this fertile country – so fertile the fence posts and telephone poles had taken root and sprouted branches (and what a shame they didn't bear fruit) – people were faint with hunger? They had driven out the Tamils, who had done all the planting; they had forgotten how to scatter seeds on the ground -this scattering would have given them a harvest. Galle was a beautiful place, garlanded with red hibiscus and smelling of the palm-scented ocean, possessing cool Dutch interiors and ringed by forests of bamboo. The sunset's luminous curtains patterned the sky in rufous gold for an hour and a half every evening, and all night the waves crashed on the ramparts of the fort. But the famished faces of the sleepwalkers and the deprivation in that idyllic port made its beauty almost unbearable.

The train from Galle winds along the coast north towards Colombo, so close to the shoreline that the spray flung by the heavy rollers from Africa reaches the broken windows of the battered wooden carriages. I was going third class, and for the early part of the trip sat in a dark overcrowded compartment with people who, as soon as I became friendly, asked me for money. They were not begging with any urgency; indeed, they didn't look as if they needed money, but rather seemed to be taking the position that whatever they succeeded in wheedling out of me might come in handy at some future date. It happened fairly often. In the middle of a conversation a man would gently ask me if I had any appliance I could give him. 'What sort of appliance?' 'Razor blades.' I would say no and the conversation would continue

After nearly an hour of this I crawled out of the compartment to stand by the door and watch the rain dropping out of a dark layer of high clouds just off the coast – the distant rain like majestic pillars of granite. To the right the sun was setting, and in the foreground were children, purpling in the sunset and skipping along the sand. That was on the ocean side of the train. On the jungle side it had already begun to pour heavily, and at each station the signalman covered himself with his flags, making the red one into a kerchief, the green one into a skirt, flapping the green when the train approached and quickly using it to keep the rain off when the train had passed.

A Chinese man and his Singhalese wife had boarded the train in Galle with their fat dark baby. They were the Wongs, off to Colombo for a little holiday. Mr Wong said he was a dentist; he had learned the trade from his father, who had come to Ceylon from Shanghai in 1937. Mr Wong didn't like the train and said he usually went to Colombo on his motorcycle except during the monsoon. He also had a helmet and goggles. If I ever went back to Galle he would show them to me. He told me how much they cost.

'Can you speak Chinese?'

'Humbwa - go, mingwa – come. That's all. I speak Singhalese and English. Chinese very hard.' He pressed his temples with his knuckles.

Simla had been full of Chinese dentists, with signboards showing horrible cross-sections of the human mouth and trays of white toothcaps in the window. I asked him why so many Chinese I had seen were dentists.

'Chinese are very good dentists!' he said. His breath was spiced with coconut. 'I'm good!'

'Can you give me a filling?'

'No, no stoppings.'

'Do you clean teeth?'

'No.'

'Can you pull them?'

'You want estraction? I give you name of a good estractionist.'

'What kind of dentist are you, Mr Wong?'

'Tooth mechanics,' he said. 'Chinese are the best ones for tooth mechanics.'

Tooth mechanics is this: you have a shop with a shelf of English putty, a pink semiliquid; you also have drawers filled with teeth in various sizes. A person comes in who has had two front teeth knocked out in a food riot or a quarrel over a coconut. You fill his mouth with pink putty and make a mould of his gums. A plate is made from this, and when it is trimmed, two Japanese fangs are stuck to it. Unfortunately, these plastic dentures are valueless for chewing food with and must be removed at mealtime. Mr Wong said business was excellent and he was taking in between iooo and 1400 rupees a month, which is more than a professor gets at Colombo University.

Inside the train the passengers were banging the windows shut to keep the rain out. The sunset's fire was tangled in leaden clouds, and the pillars of rain supporting the toppling thunderheads were very close; the fishermen were fighting their catamarans ashore through high surf. The train had begun to smell awful; Mr Wong apologized for the stink. People were jammed in the compartments and pressed in the corridors. I was at the door and could see the more nimble ones clinging to the steel ladders, balanced on the coupling. When the rain increased – and now it was really coming down – they fought their way into the carriages and slammed the doors and stood in the darkness while the rain hit the metal doors like hail.

My door was still open, and I was against the wall, while blurred gusts of rain beat past me.

'At least you can breathe here.'

The man who had spoken knotted a handkerchief on his head and stood with me. He had a briefcase. He whispered that he was a jeweller, down from Calcutta to take advantage of the market. Previously Indians were smuggling gems out of Ceylon to sell in India. Now the price in Ceylon was five times what it had been a few months ago, so the Indians were smuggling the gems back into Ceylon to sell at inflated prices.

'It's a funny situation,' he said.

'It's a pretty desperate country.'

'How many people in Ceylon – you know?'

I said I thought it was about twelve million.

'That's right,' he said, 'twelve million or so. And they can't feed them. You know how many people we have in Calcutta, in Calcutta alone"? Eight million!'

'Can you feed them?'

'Of course not. But we don't talk all the rubbish they talk. You hear the rubbish? Grow More Food Campaign, plant some yams, revolutionary rubbish, political rubbish, this and that.'

'The bread queues are the worst I've ever seen.'

'You call those bread queues? In Calcutta we have bread queues twice as long as that. Bread queues, rice queues, even milk queues. You name it, we've got a queue for it. This is nothing.'

The rain let up, and in the village of grass huts with steeply pitched roofs the lime kilns were sending clouds of smoke into the palm groves. It was another example of Ceylonese improvidence. They dynamite coral from reefs and burn it to make lime. But the broken reef lets in the sea to erode the shore. The government had begun a programme to cement the reefs, but the paradox is that cement is made with lime, and, as no cement can be imported, the reefs that are dynamited for the lime to mend others must themselves be replaced. They call it the cement-industry; it is an industry that is entirely self-consuming: nothing is achieved.

Normally in such a train – in India, for example – the people would be eating or reading to pass the time. But there was little food and the shortage of newsprint had drastically reduced the newspapers. So the passengers on the 16.25 from Galle to Colombo were sitting; in the early part of the trip they were sitting in the light from the glorious sunset, and now they were sitting in the storm's darkness. The train rattled; the waves crashed on the shore. Nearer Colombo, the monks in the last carriage (for clergy, said the sign over the door) serenely watched the sun go down; second class held a school outing, gaping in starched uniforms; in third, where I was, nearly everyone sat silently in the dark shuttered compartments. By six it was much lighter outside – the storm had let up and the sun cut through the haze – but no one bothered to open the shutters. At Mount Lavinia, when someone did unlatch a shutter and fling it down, the sun had disappeared.