The Great Railway Bazaar

Chapter Seventeen

At sundown in Rangoon, the crows that have been II blackening the sky all day soar to their roosts as the shrill bats waken and flap in hectic circles around the pagoda-style towers of the railway station. I arrived at this hour: the bats were tumbling past the crows, and the pale yellow sky was inked like Burmese silk with the brush marks of the black bodies. I had arrived by air in Rangoon on a Saturday night – there is no train from India – and the Burmese appetite for movies I had noticed on a previous visit was undiminished. Sule Pagoda Road, with its five theatres, was mobbed with people, dressed identically in shirt, sarong, and rubber sandals, men and women alike puffing thick green cheroots, and looking (as they waved away the smoke with slender dismissing fingers) like a royal breed, strikingly handsome in this collapsing city, a race of dispossessed princes.

I had only one objective in Burma: to take the northbound trains from Rangoon via Mandalay and Maymyo to the Gokteik Gorge in the Shan States, beyond which China sprawls. Across this gorge is a magnificent steel trestle bridge, the Gokteik Viaduct, built in 1899 by the Pennsylvania Steel Company for the British Raj. I had read about the bridge, but not in any recent book. Early in this century enthusiasm for railway travel produced a spate of optimistic books about railway travel: the French were building the Transindochinois line to Hanoi, the Russians had brought the Trans-Siberian almost to Vladivostok, the British had laid track to the very end of the Khyber Pass, and it was assumed that Burmese railways would extend in one direction to the Assam-Bengal line and in the other to the railways of China. The books had apocalyptic titles like The Railway Conquest of the World (by Frederick Talbot, 1911) and described, country by country, how the globe was to be stitched by railway track. The judgements were occasionally disagreeable. Ernest Protheroe in Railways of the World (1914) wrote: 'John Chinaman – cunning, tenacious, and virile – for centuries kept the "foreign devil" at arm's length… But, however much the Chinese hated the white man, they commenced to recognize the value of railways…' The Gokteik Viaduct, much celebrated in these books, was an important link in a line that was projected beyond the northern border town of Lashio into China. But the line had stopped at Lashio (nor were Burmese railways ever to meet Indian ones), and I had heard many rumours about this American-built bridge: one was that it had been blown up during the Second World War; another that the line had been captured by Burmese rebel forces under the command of U Nu; and another that it was off-limits to foreigners.

To avoid startling the Burmese at the ticket window of Rangoon Station I asked about the train to Mandalay. There were two men at the window. The first said there was no printed timetable I could buy. The second said, 'Yes, we have no timetable.' It seemed to be the practice in Burma to have two men at each job, the second to confirm whatever the first said. Instead of a timetable, and like Ceylon, there was a blackboard at each station with the arrivals and departures chalked on it. But both men were certain about the Mandalay train.

'Departure, seven o'clock. Morning time.'

There was one class, they said. I was to find this to be the equivalent of Indian third class – wooden seats, broken windows, no berths, no bedrolls, no dining car, none of the complex comfort of Indian Railways, involving retiring rooms, dinner coupons, bedding chits, invoice for upper-class luggage, ticket vouchers, and morning tea.

'I'd like a ticket to Mandalay.'

'Sorry, the window is closed.'

But the window was open. I mentioned this.

'Yes, it is open so to say, but it is closed for selling.'

'You come at six o'clock, morning time,' said the second man.

'Are you sure I'll get a ticket?'

'Maybe. Even much better come at five-thirty.'

'How long does it take to get to Mandalay?'

'Twelve hours. But it breaks down. You might arrive Mandalay at eight.'

'Or nine?'

They both laughed.

'Or nine, but no later!'

I walked over the bridge to the city, and I was in a large crowd of Burmese when a hand reached out and grabbed my wrist in such a powerful clamp of fingers I couldn't shake it off. It was a Buddhist monk, holding on and yapping at me. Small, monkey-faced, with a shaven head, he was half my size and seemed angry as he repeated the phrase 'Blum chyap…blum chyap.' I overcame my surprise and stopped struggling, assuming he was asking for money, and finally I fathomed that he was begging, saying, 'One kyat' (about twenty cents). This gripping seemed an extortionate way to beg, so I gave him half a kyat and when he released me to take the money I ducked into the crowd. There were other monks in the mob, looking sweet and benign as they cadged money from strangers.

Further on, a Burmese with a telescope urged me to have a look. I paid my fee of 25 pyas (five cents), but the star I saw through his instrument looked slightly smaller and less impressive than it did with the naked eye. I walked aimlessly, speeding up when a man sidled over to me and offered a Chinese girl ('Come!'), slowing down at temples where children – still awake at eleven at night – wove ropes of flowers and laughed before Bud-dhas. Older people knelt in veneration, or set up displays of fruit, balancing a melon in a hand of bananas on a temple shelf and sticking a red paper flag into the melon. Elderly women leaned against flower stalls, the smoking cheroots in their hands giving them a look of haughtiness and self-possession.

That night I dreamed I missed the Mandalay train. I woke up breathless at five-thirty and had breakfast, then ran to the station. Once before, on a morning like this, I had set off for Rangoon Station and a woman had jumped out of a bush, where she had been sleeping, and tried to tempt me by undoing her sarong and showing me her yellow thighs. It was before dawn; I hadn't seen her face, but her squawking echoed on the road. She had chased me all the way to the station, her feet slapping on the pavement. That was in 1970, and what I remembered of the station were the rats, hopping on the tracks to sniff and chew at wastepaper; the hawkers, selling fruit and paperbacks, putting the rats to flight and treading in the pools of excrement; the heat and flies at dawn; and Burmese boys jeering at their departing friends.

But Rangoon Station had changed. There were no rats or hawkers and the tracks were clean. There were two barbed-wire fences on the platform and barbed wire ran along each of the four tracks. The only food being sold was in lunch boxes, cardboard cartons filled with cold damp rice and pieces of sinewy chicken. The station was orderly, like the high-security prison it strongly resembled, and the barriers separated well-wishers from passengers.

I asked the conductor about the fences.

'To stop the smuggling,' he said. 'Also to stop people crossing the line. Also to stop incidents.'

'What sort of incidents?'

'Bombs. Last year some fellows threw a bomb. They threw it at the train. It was the "45-Up" – very many people. It stopped the train and there were three casualties. For these reasons the fences were put up. I think it is a good thing. Now we have no troubles.'

A Buddhist monk went by, smiling broadly. He was a fat man and he carried his umbrella like fasces, a Roman senator in an orange toga. I was glad it was not he who had twisted my arm the previous night. I bought a lunch box and two bottles of soda water and boarded. It is pleasant to leave Rangoon by rail: the train goes around the city and five minutes from the station you are in the country, a low swampy rice-growing area beside the Pazandaung Creek, where in the courtyards of the monasteries the monks are at prayer, and crossing the fields are processions of people – schoolchildren with satchels, office workers setting out in white shirts, farmers with mattocks – the early morning march in the tropics to the tune of temple bells.

There was music inside the train as well. This was new. It was piped through loudspeakers and never stopped once in thirteen hours. To a background of oriental music-hall melodies – gongs and saxophones vying with a wheezy harmonium – a reedy complaining voice gave a Burmese rendition of 'Deep Purple' and then 'Stars Fell on Alabama'. The music prevented me from reading, the cramped bench kept me from writing, and the rest of the passengers were asleep. I went to the door and watched Burmese pedalling their bikes along country roads, under giant peepul trees. The distant hills were blue with teak forests, but we were travelling along the flat plain known as the Dry Zone, moving north in a straight line through the heat that drugs the train passenger into thinking he is disappearing down Burma's gullet. At a well near the halt of Indian Fort a Burmese girl was combing her hair. She was bent forward, all her hair down – so long it nearly touched the ground – and she was drawing her comb through it and shaking it out. It was such a beautiful sight on this sunny morning -that cascade of black hair, swaying under the comb, and the posture of the girl, her feet planted apart, her arms caressing her lovely mane. Then she tossed it and looked up to see the train go past.

The whistle at the station at Toungoo is a dinner bell. Toungoo is halfway exactly, and until then no one in the train has touched his food. But when the whistle sounds, lunch boxes are thrown open and tiffin tins spread over the seats; rice tied up in palm leaves is passed through the windows with crawfish and prawns reddened with pepper, apples, pawpaws, oranges, and roasted bananas. The tea seller and water carrier appear, and the eating and drinking goes on until the whistle blows again. Then the bundles are retied, garbage is dropped on the floor, and scraps are thrown out the windows. Pariah dogs leap from nowhere to snarl over the leavings.

'Why don't they shoot those dogs?' I asked a man at Toungoo.

'Burmese think it is wrong to kill animals.'

'Why not feed them then?'

He was silent. I was questioning one of the cardinal precepts of Buddhism, the principle of neglect. Because no animals are killed all animals look as if they are starving to death, and so the rats, which are numerous in Burma, co-exist with the dogs, which have eliminated cats from the country. The Burmese – removing their shoes and socks for sacred temple floors where they will spit and flick cigar ashes – see no contradiction. How could they? Burma is a socialist country with a notorious bureaucracy. But it is a bureaucracy that is Buddhist in nature, for not only is it necessary to be a Buddhist in order to tolerate it, but the Burmese bureaucratic delays are a consistent encouragement to a kind of traditional piety – the commissar and the monk meeting as equals on the common ground of indolent and smiling unhelp-fulness. Nothing happens in Burma, but then nothing is expected to happen.

Eight hours had passed since we left Rangoon, and the conductor, who on any other train would be seeing to the tickets or getting someone to sweep the littered coaches, remained seated in a little booth near the vile-smelling toilet, feeding cassettes into the tape recorder. There was no water on the train; the doors were loose and banging; the fans were broken; and the aisle was a trough of chicken bones, prawn shells, and sticky palm leaves. But the amplifying system worked with a vengeance, pouring out raucous music all the way to Mandalay.

Towards the end of the afternoon the engine kept breaking down. The man next to me, a policeman with exemplary patience, said, 'The oil is hot. They are waiting for it to cool.' He was obviously pained by my questions and assured me the train would arrive at seven: 'If not at seven, then definitely at eight.'

'It is a slow train,' he said at Thazi, where the train broke down for the fourth time. 'Dirty and old – old coaches, old engines. We have no foreign exchange.'

'But it doesn't take much foreign exchange to buy a broom.'

'That may be so.'

I wandered around the station and heard flutes, gongs, and the rattle of a snare drum, and there on the road next to the track a little procession appeared, weirdly lit by a sky layered red. It marched to the fence beside the track and made a semi-circle for a small girl, no more than ten years old. She had tucked up her sarong in a way that allowed her movement and she wore a delicate beaded cap on her head. The music stopped, then started, blaring and chiming, and, crooking her hands, the girl began to dance; she bent her knees, lifting one leg, then the other, in a jerky motion the swiftness made graceful.

The passengers turned to watch, puffing cheroots from the windows of the stalled train and strolling closer along the platform. The dance was for them; there was no talking – only this tinkling music and the dancing child in that empty place. It continued for perhaps ten minutes, then stopped abruptly, and the procession trailed off, the flute still warbling, the drum sounding. It was part of the Burmese sequence: the breakdown and delay softened by sweet music, a lovely sky, a dancing child, and then the unexpected resuming of the train.

We travelled the rest of the way to Mandalay in darkness, arriving at eight-thirty at a station enlivened by celebrants of the Kathin festival, frenzied drummers and pretty dancers jammed tight in a crowd of welcoming relatives leaping to embrace passengers. I fought my way to the stationmaster's office, to be greeted warmly by an old man in a peaked cap who seemed to be expecting me. He asked for my passport and laboriously copied out my name and asked me my destination.

'There is a train to Maymyo at seven tomorrow morning,' he said. In a country where all trains leave at seven, a printed timetable was superfluous. *

'I'd like to buy a ticket.'

'Ticket office is closed. Come at six. What is your final destination?'

'After Maymyo I want to go to Gokteik. To see the viaduct.'

'It is forbidden for foreign tourists to see the viaduct.'

He might have been cautioning me against defilement of a sacred shrine.

'Then l'll go to Lashio.'

'It is forbidden. Lashio is a security area. There are rebellions.'

'Then you mean I have to stay in Maymyo?'

'Maymyo is a nice place. All foreigners like Maymyo.'

'I wanted to go to Gokteik.'

'Too bad. Why don't you go to Pagan?'

'I've been to Pagan.'

'Or Inle Lake. They have a hotel.'

'I wanted to take a train.'

'Why not take the train back to Rangoon?' said the stationmaster.

He shook my hand and showed me to the door. Outside was Mandalay. It is a low city of immense size, so dusty at night the lanterns on the pony carts and the headlights of wooden buses shine as if through thick fog. The city is large but without interest; the fort is off-limits, the monasteries have burned down, and the temple at the top of Mandalay Hill is recent and unattractive. Mandalay is a magic name, but little more than that. What of Kipling's poem then? Well, the fact is Kipling never set foot in the place, and his experience of Burma was limited to a few days in 1889, when his ship stopped in Rangoon.

Mandalay has two hotels, one cheap, the other expensive. Both are uncomfortable, so I chose the cheap one. The manager said he had no rooms. He was frowning with fatigue and anxious for me to go. I said, 'But where will I sleep?' He considered the question and then showed me to a room, complaining as he did so about a leprosy conference meeting at his hotel ('They want this, they want that – '). I asked for food. He said he had none and proved it by showing me the empty kitchen. I ate a banana I had bought in Thazi, and thanked him for the room. He was a good Burmese. He could not turn me away, though he did not want me to stay. He allowed me a little shelter but no food, treating me, literally, the way he would a pariah, with a kind of grudging reverence.