The Great Railway Bazaar

Chapter Nineteen

In an early morning corner of Maymyo, a clearing beyond a pine grove, thirty people were standing at the fragrant teak pews of the Church of the Immaculate Conception and singing the 'Kyrie' from the Missa di Angelis. I had crept off the road and passed under the" dripping trees towards the sweet imploring chant, the Gregorian High Mass I had learned twenty years before in a summer of idleness and devotion. It was my own youthful voice I heard there, brave with unrisked innocence, aged twelve, asking mercy for some clumsy sin. Out of respect for this little boy I stayed for the Consecration, standing behind a poor Burmese supplicant kneeling on the hard tiles in his bicycle clips. When I left, the priest's quavering 'Pater Noster' drifted with me all the way to the road, where novice monks, children in yellow robes, shaved and barefoot, hurried to their monastery hugging black lacquer bowls.

Travellers to Lashio were converging on the station: a rattling procession of tongas and stagecoaches down the avenue of eucalyptus trees; women running with shopping bags, clenching cigars in their teeth, and men dressed as frontiersmen, in boots and black hats, dodging the plodding oxen, who pulled wagonloads of firewood (split and bright, the colour of torn flesh) in the opposite direction. I had left my camera and passport behind; I felt the legality of the trip to Gokteik was questionable and I wanted to appear as unsuspicious a traveller as possible.

Tony, the Eurasian, was waiting for me. He took my three kyats and got me a ticket to Naung-Peng, the station after Gokteik. There was nothing but a bridge at Gokteik, he said, but there was a good canteen at Naung-Peng. We walked down the muddy platform to the last car. Three soldiers in mismatched uniforms – the poor fit indicating they might have been looted in the dark from some tiny enemies – stood outside the car, passing chopped betel nut across the barrels of the rifles they carried loosely at their shoulders. Tony spoke in Burmese to the tallest one, who nodded meaningfully at me. It struck me that their dented helmets and hand-me-down uniforms gave them the grizzled, courageous look you see in embattled legionnaires – a kind of sloppiness that seemed indistinguishable from hard-won experience.

'You will be safe here,' said Tony. 'Ride in this carriage.'

Ten years of guerrilla war in the outlying states of Upper Burma, as well as the persistent depredations of dacoits who hold up trains with homemade guns, have meant that the last car on the train is traditionally reserved for a group of armed escorts. They sit in this car, their vintage Enfields thrown higgledy-piggledy on the wooden benches, their woollen earflaps swinging; they lounge, eating bananas, slicing betel nut, reddening the floor with spittle; and they hope for a shot at a rebel or a thief. I was told they seldom have any luck. The rebels are demoralized and don't show their faces; but the thieves, wise to the escorts in the last car, have learned to raid the first few cars quickly, threatening passengers noisily with daggers, and can be safely back in the jungle before the soldiers can run up the line.

Our departure whistle put the crows to flight, and we were off, bowling along the single track. The early morning fog had become fine mist, the mist drizzle, but not even the considerable amount of rain that poured through the windows persuaded any of the soldiers (eating, reading, playfully fighting) to close the shutters. The windows that admitted light admitted rain: you had to choose between that and a dry darkness on upcountry trains. I sat on the edge of my bench, regretting that I hadn't brought anything to read, wondering if it really was illegal for me to be travelling to the Gokteik Viaduct, and feeling pity for the children I saw in soaked clothes splashing through the cold puddles in their bare feet.

Then the train pulled into a siding and stopped. Up ahead was a station, a wooden shed the size of a two-car garage. Its window boxes held the orange and red blossoms the Burmese call 'Maymyo flowers'. Some men in the forward coaches got out to piss. Two small girls ran from the jungle next to the line to sell bananas from enamel basins on their heads. Ten minutes passed, and a man appeared at the window waving a piece of paper, a leaf from the kind of pad on which Tony had scribbled his Morse code messages. This paper was passed to the tall soldier with the Sten gun, who read it out loud in an announcing voice. The other soldiers listened intently; one turned, and, with a swiftness I took to be embarrassment, glanced at me. I got up and walked to the back of the carriage, but before I reached the exit the soldier studying the message – a man who had only smiled apologetically earlier when I asked him if he could speak English – said, 'Sit down please.'

I sat down. A soldier muttered. The rain increased, making a boiling sputter on the roof.

The soldier put down his Sten gun and came over to me. He showed me the message. It was written in pencil, rows and rows of Burmese script that resembled the code in the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men'. But in the middle of all the dancing men, those crooked heads and arms, those kicking legs, were two English words in capital letters: 'PASS BOOK'.

'You have pass book?'

'No pass book,' I said.

'Where you going?'

'Gokteik, Naung-Peng,' I said. 'Just for the ride. Who wants to know?'

He thought a moment; then folded the paper over and with the stub of a pencil wrote very carefully in a wobbly column, Name, Number, Country, and Pass book. He handed me the paper. I gave him the information, while the rest of the soldiers – there were six altogether -gathered around. One peered over my shoulder, sucked his teeth, and said 'American'. The others verified this, putting their heads close and breathing on to my hand.

The message was taken to the wooden shed. I stood up. One of the soldiers said, 'Sit down.'

Two hours passed, the coach dripped, the roof boiled in the downpour, and the soldiers who had been speaking in whispers, perhaps fearing that I knew Burmese, resumed their eating, shelling peanuts, peeling bananas, slicing betel nuts. I don't think time can pass more slowly than in a railway carriage parked in the rain between two low walls of jungle in Upper Burma. There was not even the diversion of hawkers, or the desperate antics of pariah dogs; there were no houses; the jungle was without texture or light; there was no landscape. I sat chilled to the bone watching raindrop rings widen in a pool of water next to the track, and I tried to imagine what had gone wrong. I had no doubt that I was the cause of the delay – there was an objection to my being on the train; I had been seen boarding in May my o. I would be sent back; or I might be arrested for violating security regulations, thrown into jail. The effort of getting so far seemed wasted; and, really, had I come all that way to find a jail, as people travel in the greatest discomfort to the farthest ends of the earth, through jungles and bad weather for weeks and weeks, to hurry into a doomed plane or step into the path of a bullet? It is ignominious when a person travels a great distance to die.

It wasn't death that worried me – they wouldn't be silly enough to kill me. But they could inconvenience me. Already they had. It was past ten o'clock, and I was on the point of resigning. If the sun had been out I would have volunteered to walk back to May my o, turning the whole fiasco into a hike. But it was raining too hard to do anything but sit and wait.

Finally the tall soldier with the Sten gun returned. He was accompanied by a small fellow, rather young, in a wet jacket and wet hat, who mopped his face with a handkerchief when he got inside the carriage. He said, 'You are Mister Paul?'

'Yes. Who are you?'

'Security Officer U Sit Aye,' he said, and went on to ask when I had entered Burma, and why, and for how long. Then he asked, 'You are a tourist?'

'Yes.'

He thought a moment, tilting his head, narrowing his hooded eyes, and said, 'Then where is your camera?'

'I left it behind,' I said. 'I ran out of film.'

'Yes, we have no film in Burma.' He sighed. 'No foreign exchange.'

As he spoke another train drew up beside the one we were in.

'We will get in that train.'

In the last armed coach of this second train, sitting with a new batch of soldiers, U Sit Aye said he was in charge of railway security; he had three children; he hated the rainy season. He said no more. I assumed he was my escort, and, though I had no idea why we had changed trains, we were on the move, travelling in the direction of Gokteik.

A haggard Burmese man in a woollen cap took a seat across from us and began emptying a filtertip cigarette on to a small square of paper. It was the sort of activity that occupied the foreign residents of Afghanistan hotels, a prelude to filling the empty tube with hashish grains and tobacco. But this man didn't have hashish. His drug, in a small phial, was white powder, which he tapped into the tube, alternating it with layers of tobacco. He stuffed the tube with great care, packing it tight, smoothing and tapping it.

'What's he doing?'

'I do not know,' said U Sit Aye.

The man peered into his cigarette. It was nearly full; he poked it down with a match.

'He's putting something inside.'

'I can see,' said U Sit Aye.

'But it's not ganja.'

'No.'

Now the man was finished. He emptied the last of the powder and threw the phial out of the window.

I said, 'I think it's opium.'

The man looked up and grinned. 'You are right!'

His English, clear as a bell, startled me. U Sit Aye said nothing, and as he was not wearing a uniform the man had no way of knowing he was making an opium cigarette under the nose of a security officer.

'Have a puff,' said the man. He twisted the top and licked the whole cigarette so that it would burn slowly. He offered it to me.

'No thanks.'

He looked surprised. 'Why not?'

'Opium gives me a headache.'

'No! Very good! I like it – ' He winked at U Sit Aye. ' – I like it for nice daydreamings!' He smoked the cigarette to the filter, rolled up his jacket, and put it behind his head. He stretched out on the seat and went to sleep with a smile on his face. He was perfectly composed, the happiest man on that cold rattling train.

U Sit Aye said, 'We don't arrest them unless they have a lot. It's so much trouble. We put the chap in jail. We then send a sample to Rangoon for tests – but his is number three; I can tell by the colour – and after two or three weeks they send the report back. You need a lot of opium for the tests – enough for lots of experiments.'

Towards noon we were in the environs of Gokteik. The mist was heavy and noisy waterfalls splashed down through pipe thickets of green bamboo. We crawled around the upper edges of hills, hooting at each curve, but out the windows there was only the whiteness of mist, shifted by a strong wind to reveal the more intense whiteness of cloud. It was like travelling in a slow plane with the windows open, and I envied the opium-smoker his repose.

'The views are clouded,' said U Sit Aye.

We climbed to nearly 4,000 feet and then began descending into the gorge where, below, boat-shaped wisps of cloud moved quickly across from hillside to hillside and other lengths of vapour depended in the gorge with only the barest motion, like veils of threadbare silk. The viaduct, a monster of silver geometry in all the ragged rock and jungle, came into view and then slipped behind an outcrop of rock. It appeared again at intervals, growing larger, less silver, more imposing. Its presence there was bizarre, this manmade thing in so remote a place, competing with the grandeur of the enormous gorge and yet seeming more grand than its surroundings, which were hardly negligible – the water rushing through the girder legs and falling on the tops of trees, the flights of birds through the swirling clouds and the blackness of the tunnels beyond the viaduct. We approached it slowly, stopping briefly at Gokteik Station, where hill people, tattooed Shans and straggling Chinese, had taken up residence in unused railway cars – freight cars and sheds. They came to the doors to watch the Lashio Mail go past.

There were wincing sentries at the entrance to the viaduct with rifles on their shoulders; the wind blew through their wall-less shelters and the drizzle continued.

I asked U Sit Aye if I could hang out the window. He said it was all right with him, 'but don't fall.' The train wheels banged on the steel spans and the plunging water roared the birds out of their nests a thousand feet down. The long delay in the cold had depressed me, and the journey had been unremarkable, but this lifted my spirits, crossing the long bridge in the rain, from one steep hill to another, over a jungly deepness, bursting with a river to which the monsoon had given a hectoring voice, and the engine whistling again and again, the echo carrying down the gorge to China.

The tunnels began, and they were cavernous, smelling of bat shit and sodden plants, with just enough light to illuminate the water rushing down the walls and the odd night-blooming flowers growing amid fountains of creepers and leaves in the twisted stone. When we emerged from the last tunnel we were far from the Gokteik Viaduct, and Naung-Peng, an hour more of steady travelling, was the end of the line for me. This was a collection of wooden shacks and grass-roofed shelters. The 'canteen' Tony had told me about was one of these grass-roofed huts: inside was a long table with tureens of green and yellow stew, and Burmese, thinly clad for such a cold place, were warming themselves beside cauldrons of rice bubbling over braziers. It looked like the field kitchen of some Mongolian tribe retreating after a terrible battle: the cooks were old Chinese women with black teeth, and the eaters were that mixed breed of people with a salad of genes drawn from China and Burma, whose only racial clue is their dress, sarong or trousers, parasol coolie hat or woollen cap, damp and shapeless as a mitten. The cooks ladled the stews on to large palm leaves and plopped down a fistful of rice; this the travellers ate with cups of hot weak tea. The rain beat on the roof and crackled on the mud outside, and Burmese hurried to the train with chickens bound so tightly in feather bundles, they looked like a peculiar kind of native handicraft. I bought a two-cent cigar, found a stool near a brazier, and sat and smoked until the next train came.

The train I had taken to Naung-Peng didn't leave for Lashio until the 'down' train from Lashio arrived. Then the escort from Maymyo and the more heavily armed escort from Lashio changed trains in order to return to the places they had set out from that morning. Each train, I noticed, had an armoured van coupled just behind the engine; this was a steel box with gun slits, simplified almost to crudity, like a child's drawing of a tank, but it was empty because all the soldiers were at the end of the train, nine coaches away. How they would fight their way, under fire, eighty yards up the train during a raid, I do not know, nor did U Sit Aye supply an explanation. It was clear why the soldiers didn't travel in the iron armoured van: it was a cruelly uncomfortable thing, and very dark since the gun slits were so small.

The return to Maymyo, downhill most of the way, was quick, and there was a continuous intake of food at small stations. U Sit Aye explained that the soldiers wired ahead for the food, and it was true, for at the smallest station a boy would rush up to the train as soon as it drew in, and with a bow this child with rain on his face would present a parcel of food at the door of the soldiers' coach. Nearer to Maymyo they wired ahead for flowers, so when we arrived each soldier stepped out with curry stains on his shirt, a plug of betel in his mouth, and a bouquet of flowers, which he clutched with greater care than his rifle.

'Can I go now?' I said to U Sit Aye. I still didn't know whether I was going to be arrested for going through forbidden territory.

'You can go,' he said, and smiled. 'But you must not take the train to Gokteik again. If you do there will be trouble.'