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.
Chapter Eighteen
Asia washes with spirited soapy violence in the l morning. The early train takes you past people discovered laundering like felons rehearsing – Pakistanis charging their sodden clothes with sticks, Indians trying to break rocks (this is Mark Twain's definition of a Hindu) by slapping them with wet dhotis, grimacing Ceylonese wringing out their lungis. In Upper Burma, women squat in conspiratorial groups at bubbly streams, whacking their laundry flat with broad wooden paddles, children totter knee-deep in rock pools, and small-breasted girls, chastely covered by sarongs to their armpits, dump buckets of water over their heads. It was dull and cloudy, starting to mist, as we left Mandalay, and the old man next to me with a neat cloth bundle on his knees watched one of these bathing girls.
Steeping tresses in the tank
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
– Can't I see his dead eye glow
Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?
(That is, if he'd let it show!)
Briefly, I thought of leaping from the train, proposing marriage, and throwing my life away on one of these nymphs. But I stayed in my seat.
The full streams, whitened by peaks of froth, told of heavy rains farther on; we had left the rancid heat and dusty palms of Mandalay and were climbing sideways through pine forests, where the gold-tipped pagodas, repeating the shape of pine tops, rose above the deep green trees. A dirigible of white cloud had settled against one station; we emerged from it to a view of hardier, muddier people carrying buckets on yokes. A light rain began to fall, and the train was moving so slowly I could hear the patter of raindrops on the leaves that grew beside the track.
At the early sloping stations, women with trays were selling breakfast to the passengers: oranges, sliced pawpaws, fried cakes, peanuts and bananas. One had a dark shining assortment of beady objects on her tray. I beckoned her over and had a look. They were fat insects skewered on sticks – fried locusts. I asked the old man next to me if he'd like some. He said politely that he had had breakfast already, and anyway he never ate insects. 'But the local people are quite fond of them.'
The sight of the locusts took away my appetite, but an hour later, in a thunderstorm, my hunger came back. I was standing near the door and struck up a conversation with a Burmese man on his way to Lashio to see his family. He was hungry too. He said we would be arriving at a station soon where we could buy food.
'I'd like some tea,' I said.
'It is a short stop – a few minutes, not more.'
'Look, why don't you get the food and I'll get something to drink? It'll save time.'
He agreed, accepted my three kyats, and when the train stopped we leaped out – he to the food stall, I t.o an enclosure where there were bottles on display. The hawker explained with apologetic smiles that I couldn't remove his teacups, so I had a cup of tea there and bought two bottles of soda water. Back on the train I couldn't find the Burmese man, and it was not until after the train pulled away that he appeared, out of breath, with two palm-leaf parcels, bound with a knotted vine. We uncapped the bottles on the door hinge, and, elbow to elbow at the end of the coach, opened the palm leaves. There was something familiar in the contents, a wooden skewer with three blackened things on it – lumps of burned meat. It wasn't that they were irregularly shaped, but rather that they were irregular in exactly the same way. The skewers lay half-buried in beds of rice.