by Paul Theroux
None of these. They can all be rationalized.
What sent me away finally was something simpler, but larger and inescapable. It was the sheer mass of people, the horribly thronged cities, the colossal agglomeration of elbowing and contending Indians, the billion-plus, the sight of them, the sense of their desperation and hunger, having to compete with them for space on sidewalks, on roads, everywhere—what I'd heard on the train from Amritsar: "Too many. Too many." All of them jostling for space, which made for much of life there a monotony of frotteurism, life in India being an unending experience of nonconsensual rubbing.
And not because it was India—Indians were good-humored and polite on the whole—but because it was the way of the world. The population of the United States had doubled in my lifetime, and the old simple world that I had known as a boy was gone. India was a reminder to me of what was in store for us all, a glimpse of the future. Trillions of dollars were spent to keep people breathing, to cure disease, and to extend human life, but nothing was being done to relieve the planet of overpopulation, the contending billions, like those ants on the rotting fruit.
I had not felt that way in India long ago, but I was younger then. I took the short flight over the Palk Strait to Sri Lanka, into a different world.
THE COASTAL LINE TO GALLE AND HAMBANTOTA
I STUMBLED INTO COLOMBO on my birthday. The winsome hotel clerk in the crimson sari knew this somehow. She said, "Happy birthday, sir. Please call us if you want us to come up and sing to you." That "us" made the offer sound either wickeder or more chaste.
To give the day a meaning I went for a walk, marveling at how thinly populated the city was compared to the ones I'd just left in India. The entire population of the Republic of Sri Lanka was the same as the population of the city of Mumbai: twenty million. And the placid and procrastinating Sinhalese were a reminder of how frenzied and loquacious the Indians had been, forever vexed and talkative. I found a barbershop and asked for a baldy and wound up with a crewcut. Then I had my picture taken by a sidewalk photographer. I bought a Sri Lankan notebook. The taxi driver who took me back to the hotel asked me whether I wanted to see anything special, and when I asked him what he meant by special, he gave me a fangy stare and said, "Vimmin" I said primly no. But the word stuck in my head. I remembered that Colombo had a reputation for debauchery. Perhaps I could find another taxi driver later on and indulge myself in birthday depravity among Sinhalese voluptuaries and lotus eaters.
Regarding my birthday as auspicious, and while it was still daylight, I sat in the garden of the hotel under a fragrant arbor, opened the new notebook, and began a story, "The Elephant God": something to occupy my evenings later on and a way of venting my feelings about India. Darkness fell as I was writing. The garden was empty, the hotel was empty; no one wanted to come to Sri Lanka these days. The Tamil Tiger offensive was in the news: a mine in Trincomalee the day before had exploded and killed seven people, shootings in the north had claimed four lives, and suicide bombers were expected in Colombo.
In my room, I saw that a small cake, a bottle of wine, and a birthday card were arranged on the coffee table. I yanked the cork on the wine and poured a glass. I sat down and sipped it. The room was still and hot and mostly dark. The wine was like purple ink. I drank some more of it and thought: Debauchery. Who would know? It's my birthday!
I ate a piece of the cake and was about to have more wine when my scalp shrank and my skull began to burn. I had a terrible headache from the first glass of wine. I fell asleep on the sofa, my own snores waking me around midnight, still snorting and drooling; then I pulled my clothes off and went to bed. In the morning, I woke up a year older and went in search of train tickets.
On my Railway Bazaar visit, I had wanted to see Sri Lanka's most celebrated alien, Arthur C. Clarke, who had settled here in 1956. But then, in the wake of his 2001 notoriety and the demands on his time, I hadn't managed it. Another lesson in the Tao of Travel is: wait long enough and all things are possible. This time I made a plan. I sent a message to him through a mutual friend and hoped for a favorable reply.
In the meantime, I went to the main railway station to buy a ticket to Galle, some way down the tsunami-ravaged coast.
"No advance booking," the clerk said through the barred window that made him seemed caged.
"How do I get a ticket?"
"Come before the train leaves."
"Any reserved seats?"
"No. Just push"
"How much does it cost to Galle?"
He made a face. "A hundred-something for any ticket."
A dollar to go anywhere on the train.
The next day, I had a message that Sir Arthur would meet me. His secretary said that he was not strong, that he was suffering from what she called post-polio syndrome, but that I could stop by tomorrow. This meant hanging around Colombo for another day. I was eager to meet him. Sir Arthur pops up in all sorts of contexts: sci-fi and real science, pulp magazines and scientific journals, astronomy and astrophysics and paranormal mumbo-jumbo, the earliest satellites, a pedophilia scandal (in which he was libeled), the space program, Stanley Kubrick, celebrities, as a booster of Sri Lankan culture, as an early ecologist, a maker of documentaries, and a TV pundit. He was a speechifier and a prognosticator and a prolific writer. He had been at it so long, many people (including ones I met in Sri Lanka) wondered whether he was still alive. But he was, nearing eighty-nine.
The Tamil Tiger secessionist war had had the effect of turning Colombo into a very quiet place, with few visitors and no tourists to speak of. There were not even many Sri Lankans on the sidewalks, except in the bazaar near the main railway station. A "speak only Sinhalese" policy, which had been established in schools by the government in the 1970s, meant that so few Sri Lankans spoke English, they were unemployable by foreign companies looking for cheap labor in the IT industries. (On one occasion in the 1990s, three thousand college-educated Sri Lankans showed up for call center jobs; fewer than one hundred spoke English.)
Rebuffed by the high-tech employers, they were instead hired to make polo shirts and jeans and T-shirts and sneakers in Sri Lankan sweatshops. The economy was in terrible shape, the war was picking up, the government was stumbling; but like many poverty-stricken tropical countries with an incompetent government and its army under fire in the provinces, Sri Lanka was old-fashioned and, except for the war zones, rather sedate, or at least quiet, like a place holding its breath.
I had lunch with a diplomat who filled me in on the Tamil Tigers. He told me that the secession-minded Tamils in Sri Lanka had been calling for their own state for the past thirty years. And not just giving speeches but fighting. The Tigers fought with single-minded savagery. At one time there had been dozens of Tamil organizations intent on secession—groups of all persuasions, some moderate, some conciliatory, and some not fighting at all, but open to debate and compromise.
One by one, the leaders of these groups had been killed by the Tigers, their members ambushed, huts burned, women raped, soldiers scattered; now only the Tigers remained. I had been told in Trichy by a boasting Tamil that the Tigers pioneered the suicide bomb.
My diplomat friend said this was true.
When I challenged him, he said, "Suicide bomb vest"—in other words, they invented the concealed bomb.
Not really. Just such a sinister device is described in Joseph Conrad's novel of London bombers, The Secret Agent (1907), in which a suicide bomb is worn by a cynical pest known as the Professor, who boasts that he can blow himself up whenever he feels like it. He regards it as a liberating contraption. He has a habit of "keeping his hand in the left pocket of his trousers, grasping lightly the India rubber ball, the supreme guarantee of his sinister freedom"—a hard squeeze and the bomb explodes and Paradise Now. As one of his terrorist colleagues says later in the novel, "You carry in your pocket enough stuff to send yourself and, say, twenty other people into eternity."
But (so I was told) the Tamil Tigers—or rather the Black Tige
r Suicide Squad, its subgroup of zealots, wearers of the self-destructing vest—hold the world record for suicide bombings. The official figure is 1,680 in the twenty years between 1980 and 2000, far more than Hamas and Hezbollah combined. One of the better-known Tiger victims was Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was blown up in Chennai in 1991 by a young Black Tiger woman, one of many Tigers who objected to Indian soldiers' joining the Sri Lankan army in ridding Sri Lanka of this ethnic violence.
The Tigers were tenacious and disinclined to bargain; when their leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was described as "ruthless and elusive," I took this to mean stupid and stubborn, the sort of qualities that fuel the village fanatic's monomania. He was a grade school dropout with a fifth-grade education, famously unreasonable, impervious to logic, unmoved by sending children to their death. A more literate or imaginative man would have given up or compromised long ago. He almost never showed his face. He had emerged in 1972, when he was just eighteen, energized the Tigers, and committed his first murder in 1975—shooting a Tamil political leader for being too moderate. In the rare photographs of him, Prabhakaran was a tubby, mustached little man in too tight, too clean khaki fatigues who looked indistinguishable from any toothy bristling stallholder in the dry-goods section of the Chennai bazaar. All that was known of him was that he suffered from hypertension and high blood pressure, that he lived in an underground bunker in the north, and that he had never been to Colombo in his life.
"What are his beliefs?"
"Just Tamil, Tamil, Tamil," my friend said.
Prabakharan had no political philosophy, no economic ideas, and he stood for nothing except Tamil sovereignty and secession. The Tigers were well armed and well funded. The largest Tamil community outside India can be found in Toronto, and Canadian Tamils (and American and Australian Tamils too) are assessed a "liberation tax" by collectors from the old country. Some are coerced, with threats to their families, but most pay happily, in the same spirit that the Irish in America gave money to Noraid, to pay for the bombs that blew up women and children in Ulster in the 1970s and '80s.
The Tamil convulsion, and all the deaths, had occurred after I had last visited, and because the violence had retarded Sri Lanka, I instantly recognized the place. It had hardly changed. Colombo was a forgotten city with little foreign investment and a failing economy, so while it was visibly faltering, it was not cursed with meretricious modernity. Because of the indifference of the money men and the speculators, Colombo's colonial buildings remained intact. No one could afford to pull them down or replace them. The sculpted stone on the shop fronts and emporiums of timeworn Victorian and Edwardian Colombo still stood, the wooden floors inside still creaked, the dust-coated ceiling fans still turned. The city was pretty much the one I'd seen three decades ago, and I spent my days before meeting Arthur C. Clarke walking its streets and browsing its arcades and applying for onward visas.
I called Sir Arthur's secretary the following morning, as I'd been directed to.
"Sir Arthur will see you."
I easily found his house. I'd been near it the day before, looking for a visa to Myanmar—the Myanmar embassy was down a nearby lane, and Sir Arthur's neighbors were the Iraqi embassy and a Sai Baba ashram. This quiet district was distinguished by its high walls and well-patrolled gates and security cameras and the occasional splash of someone diving into a pool I could not see.
Sir Arthur lived behind ten-foot walls, with wire mesh on top of them, in a big squarish house that was comfortable and spacious rather than luxurious. I announced myself, the gate swung open, and I was directed to a stairwell, its windows playfully decorated with bumper stickers from NASA, and one with a large vertical arrow and the message Mars: 35,000,000 miles. I entered the working wing of the house, a lobby, the secretary's office with its file drawers and paraphernalia—fax machine, computer, phones. Documents framed and hung on the wall certified that Sir Arthur had become a member of one society or another, or had won a prize—lots of these; and plaques, trophies, ceremo nial knickknacks inscribed to him. His was a well-rewarded career. He was a serious scientist as well as an ambitious and imaginative writer, anticipating possible futures. It was an old tradition. Writing enthusiastically about Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, Borges claimed that Ludovico Ariosto and Johannes Kepler were early sci-fi dreamers and practitioners. In her memoirs, Doris Lessing (herself a science-fiction writer at times) praised science-fiction writers as visionaries.
"Hello!"
Sir Arthur appeared in a wheelchair, the familiar, smiling, bespectacled man; upright, balding, but rather frail, even in this heat with a blanket over his skinny legs. He looked like the sort of alien he had described in his prose fantasies. Men of a certain age, and some women too, often have the watchfulness, the pop-eyed almost reptilian stare, the glowing dome, and the bone structure we attribute to extraterrestrials.
He had that elderly and slightly unearthly appearance. The apparatus of his state-of-the-art wheelchair only emphasized his Martian look. He'd had polio about twelve years before and was suffering the serious aftermath that afflicts some polio victims years later—muscle weakness, poor breathing, cell degeneration. That too made him alien-looking, because he was cheery and welcoming.
"I'm feeling a bit cloud-nine-ish," he said as he was wheeled into his study, where there were many more plaques and trophies, framed letters from heads of state, and signed photographs—surely that beauty was Elizabeth Taylor, and wasn't that beaming fatty the late pope?
Sir Arthur's lopsided lips and slightly chewed pronunciation of the word "cloud" was from the west of England. I asked him if he was from those parts. He said he'd been born in Minehead, on the Somerset shore.
"A lovely coast—long beaches, very pretty," he said. He spoke slowly, a voice that was also whimsical and vague, with fluttery hands and an expressive frown that suggested memory loss. "How'd you get to Sri Lanka?" he asked.
"I traveled through India," I said, to spare him the details of Georgia and Turkmenistan. He didn't say anything, so I said, "Do you have any thoughts on India?"
"India. Reaching critical mass."
"Population, you mean?"
"Out of control. Too many," he said.
He pulled out a diary as wide as a ledger, opened to the day's date. April 12 was underlined, and beneath it, in a child's scrawl in big letters, Titanic sank 1912.
"Today is an important day," he said and tapped the page of the diary with the yellow nail of a skinny finger. The Titanic was on his mind. "Terrible thing! But is this the right day?"
"We can check," I said. But of course he was an expert on the sinking: fifteen years before, he'd written a novel, The Ghost from the Grand Banks, about two expeditions competing to raise the wreck.
"Look at this," he said and pushed a small silver tray across his desk. It was filled with little glass vials. He picked one up. "Look." The vial was labeled Moon Dust. "Can you see it?"
It was pale grit, like the residue of stale celery salt in a spice jar. He chose another one.
"Look." This one was labeled Rusticle—Titanic. A small dark scab of fungoid iron that had been scraped from the hull and presented to Sir Arthur.
"What is this?" he asked me, lifting another vial, containing a whitish blob.
"Looks like a piece of popcorn."
"It's a Styrofoam cup from the dive! Crushed by the pressure. Look how small it is."
He smiled at the silver tray and sorted the other vials and defied me to identify their contents. They were filled with rare gravel and floating organisms and crumbled souvenirs from expeditions.
"What are you writing, Sir Arthur?"
"Nothing. A few notes. I've destroyed enough trees."
"What about memoirs?"
"Done plenty of those," he said. "All my friends are gone. Look"—and he gestured to the wall of photographs.
This gave me a chance to rise and look at pictures and examine the signatures and inscriptions: a warm salutation from Liz Taylor, a scr
awl from the pope, scribbles from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, from smooth-faced smilers who might have been actors, from Stanley Kubrick and others, including Darth Vader.
"Wernher von Braun," I said.
But he had gone back to tapping his diary. "You see, the Titanic represented triumph and disaster."
"Hubris, I suppose."
"What's that?"
When I repeated it, he said in a quoting and declamatory voice, "'Not even God can sink this ship!' Heh-heh-heh"
Now I could see the whole message on the T-shirt he was wearing under a warmer shirt. It said, I invented the satellite and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. It was true that he had envisaged and described satellites circling the Earth long before they were made and blasted into orbit.
"You know Metropolis? Lovely film," he said suddenly—by now I was getting used to his style of conversation, a kind of alienspeak: little bursts of talk, inspirational impulses, staticky delivery, and explosive memories. "What is it? 1930s? The image of a man holding the hands of a clock. Think of it—what that image says."
"Oh, yes, I remember," I said. I'd never seen it, but that didn't matter. He wasn't really listening; he kept talking. And he was still toying with the silver tray, squinting at the vials.
"One of the greatest films ever. I want to see it again."
"Were you influenced by any films when you wrote the script for 2001?"
"Loved films. Kubrick! I wrote the film, yes. Kubrick was all right."
"Wasn't he difficult?"
"I don't recall any blood on the carpet," he said. "We had disagreements, but they were amicable. Did he die? I can't remember."
"He died a few years ago."
"Is Conrad Hilton alive?" Now he was tapping the vial of moon dust.
"I believe Conrad Hilton is dead."