by Paul Theroux
* Philip Larkin, "Aubade."
I kicked off my shoes and joined the line of people eager to see the Buddha's tooth, which in this temple, in its gold casket, was like a saint's relic, Saint Francis's skull, a mummy in a catacomb, a splinter from the True Cross. The story of the Buddha's tooth dates from the fourth century A.D., and there is some question as to whether this is a real canine or a replacement for the tooth (a fake one, said the Sinhalese) that the pious Portuguese burned in Goa as being wicked and idolatrous. The Portuguese who venerated splinters of the True Cross and the skulls of saints, who had all but destroyed Kandy in their time; and what remained of it when the Dutch conquered them, in the sixteenth century, the Dutch had pulled down, leaving very little for the British when they showed up in 1815.
The inner rooms of the temple were crowded and stifling, mobbed with Buddhists propitiating the impassive statues, prostrating themselves, waving lighted tapers, and making passes with their outstretched arms—as though practicing to be Christians.
I walked outside and along the lake, liking this pleasant air at 1,600 feet, and then found a curry house (plate of rice covered with highly seasoned sauce, 75 cents), and sat reading the paper, about recent Tamil Tiger actions. In the place where I'd planned to cross from India to Sri Lanka, an armada of heavily armed Tiger watercraft, camouflaged as fishing boats, had attacked some Sri Lankan navy vessels. Eleven Sri Lankan sailors were either dead or missing, and in the retaliatory action, eight rebel boats were sunk, thirty Tigers dead. And in Colombo three Tiger commandos in diving gear, setting mines, had been captured; two of them committed suicide by swallowing cyanide capsules they kept handy for that purpose.
A Sri Lankan sitting near me struck up a conversation. Seeing the article I was reading, he said, "Sixty-seven people killed in the last two weeks. And this is during a cease-fire!"
His name was Kaduwella. He had come to Kandy to see the sacred tooth. He said that the Tamil Tigers had attacked the temple.
Of course: a place of such serenity, such glitter and sanctity, it was inevitable that the Tigers would violate it. And why not? In a paragraph that reads like a historical free-for-all, Christopher Ondaatje describes the skirmishes over the Buddha's tooth going on for a thousand years, how Kublai Khan tried but failed to capture it, how the Indians succeeded in snatching it in the thirteenth century but lost it to a Sinhalese king. When the Chinese failed in their attempt to steal the tooth, they took hostages instead—members of the royal family. The Portuguese were fobbed off with a fake tooth. So the Tamil Tigers were the latest in a long list of predators, poachers, and violators of the Temple of the Tooth.
The Kaduwellas lived in Colombo. While his wife and children smiled shyly, Mr. Kaduwella invited me to his house.
"We'll have a good meal," he said with a glance at my plate, as though dismissing it, but he and his family were all eating something similar.
I asked him how to get to Peradeniya. He said it was too far to walk, and when we finished lunch he went out of his way to find me a taxi and negotiate the price. And as we parted he repeated his invitation.
In the past I might not have visited Peradeniya Botanic Gardens. More likely I would have visited the Peradeniya Bar and sat there most of the night. But these days, in travel, I seldom went out at night, and got up earlier, and often visited gardens—particularly the gardens that were devised by the British, in which many of the trees were ancient, and some of the specimens planted in the nineteenth century. I got interested in gardening only after I became a householder, and that was as a result of the windfall occasioned by the success of The Great Railway Bazaar. I used the money to buy a house, I planted shrubs, I planted flowers, and more recently have been planting various varieties of noninvasive bamboo.
The bamboo groves at Peradeniya were dense, many of the canes gigantic—even named giganteus on their labels. What happens to the clumping noninvasive bamboo after one hundred years? The clumps are twenty feet wide and the plant itself grows as tall as a three-story house. The cycads were vast and feathery, the old palms stood tall; in a place like Sri Lanka, a land of procrastination and decline, these great gardens had ripened and flourished. I was reminded of the palms and mangroves on the coast—Bowles called them "triumphant vegetation"—that had resisted the onslaught of the tidal wave and the fury of the flood, and stood, like these trees and ferns and bamboos at Peradeniya, not only unviolated but bigger and more beautiful.
Leonard Woolf had walked here, so Ondaatje said. He had spent a year in Kandy, at the law court, fascinated by the convoluted murder cases and the complex marriage disputes. He had so impressed his overlords he got a better post in Hambantota, where, so he claimed, he would have been happy to spend the rest of his life.
It was easy to see how Sri Lanka could capture your heart, as it had Sir Arthur's. It was especially pleasant to be in a place where not much changed. Yet it was a violated place—the war, the tsunami, had held it back, kept it from improving in any way. The war of Tamil secession had probably had the greatest effect. War is weird in that way: time stops, no one thinks of the future but only of survival or escape.
I left Kandy. And a few days after I left Colombo, just down the street from my hotel, near a park I'd passed many times for its being so pleasant, a large group of pregnant women had lined up to be examined at a prenatal clinic, the weekly "maternity day" offered by the Sri Lankan army. Without warning, one of the women, a member of the Black Tiger Suicide Squad, pretending to be pregnant (her maternity dress bulged with a bomb), blew herself up and took six people with her into oblivion.
GHOST TRAIN TO MANDALAY
MY FIRST REACTION to Rangoon, now a sad and skeletal city renamed Yangon, was disbelief. The unreality of arriving in a distant modernized city cannot compare with the unreality of seeing one that has hardly changed at all. If a place, after decades, is the same, or worse than before, it is almost shaming to behold. Like a prayer you regret has been answered, it exists as a mirror image of yourself, the traveler, who has to admit: I'm the same too, but aged—wearier, frailer, fractured, abused, weaker, shabbier, spookier. There was a human pathos in a city that had faded in the years I'd been away, something more elderly, almost senile. So, adrift in the futility of being in a foreign city, woozy in the stifling heat, I fitted right in. After a day or so I took a horrid pleasure in being here, back in time, in the place I had remembered and had once mocked with youthful satire, a ghost town that made me feel old and ghostly.
The crumbling and neglected city seemed surreal, because the place was isolated under the Myanmar military dictatorship, and helpless and tyrannized. Soldiers were everywhere, even in the sepulchral back streets. It looked pessimistic, unlucky, and badly governed. It had no bounce. It was a city without visible ambition: no challenge, no defiance. Being young here wasn't an advantage, nor was strength any use; brains just made you unhappy and a target for the secret police. Students and journalists were hated and abused. So were democrats: win an election here and the army put you in jail. But a reign of terror is seldom terror in the true sense; it is anxious boredom and suspense, and a kind of hopeless resignation bordering on despair, like a household dominated by the pathology of drunken or nagging parents.
The Burmese I met talked frankly about their fears and the political intimidation. They had the sullen defiance of people who were constantly bullied.
"They rule with the gun. They can come to your home at any time, knock on your door, and take you." This from a taxi driver, a man of thirty or so, speaking in a whisper.
"Why would they want to take you?"
"For no reason!"
And another man, a trader in a market, said to me in the same kind of cautious whisper, "A prison sentence here is a life sentence. Many of my friends have been taken away. I know I'll never see them again."
The generals had been in power in the 1970s, when I'd been here last. They were still in power, propped up by their control of the drug trade and enabled, bankrolled, b
y the Chinese government, their biggest trading partner, in exotic substances such as heroin and more mundane items like watermelons. The United States and many other countries refused to do business with Myanmar for ethical reasons. It was a pariah state that had defied the democratic process by invalidating the 1990 general election and imprisoning the winner of it, Aung San Suu Kyi. Since then she has been threatened, attacked, imprisoned, persecuted, widowed, and continually put under house arrest. I arrived in Myanmar at a time when her sentence of house arrest was extended for another year, her street barricaded with roadblocks and sentries. Not even the hungriest taxi driver would dare to take me to her street, nor even speed me past it.
But so familiar was Yangon in its sameness and its smells that I easily found my way around. To get my bearings I walked to the main railway station, inquired about a ticket to Mandalay, and then strolled along the streets towards the river, marveling at the crumbling buildings, the old cracked shophouses, the hawkers squatting in the shade of the arcades selling oranges and mangoes, the beat-up cars, the stinking monsoon drains—nothing new. The pagodas were brighter, the stupas freshly gilded, the walls newly whitewashed. Frustrated by the military repression, people seemed to take refuge in Buddhism, which preached patience and compassion. Apart from the newly painted pagodas, the city was ruinous, which was unique in the reinvented Southeast Asia. Myanmar was exceptional in its decrepitude and low morale, its inefficiency almost total.
The imperial city still remained, Victorian in its long colonnades and narrow passageways. I marveled at the existence of the broad and massive buildings with their tall windows and balconies and porches, all of them preserved by being ignored. Any of Rangoon's well-known colonials would have found the place familiar. Had Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and H. H. Munro (Saki)—all former residents—walked down Dalhousie Street towards Sule Pagoda and turned into Strand Road, they would have recognized the old Sailors' Home, the General Post Office, and the Strand Hotel. And they could have negotiated the city using (as I did) an early edition of a Murray's guide.
The Strand Hotel was almost alone in having been extensively fixed up, restored to its former glory, with a palm court and ceiling fans and a spruced-up lobby, and flunkies wearing immaculate frock coats and white gloves. The Strand's fine-dining restaurant served "grilled beef tenderloin 'Mulwara' topped with foie gras" for $34. The price of that one dish fascinated me, because it so happened that in Myanmar, where education was despised and considered suspect, schoolteachers earned $34 a month. Only the army got richer; everyone else was struggling to get by, hustling and hawking and in the money-changing business—the official exchange rate was 300 kyats to the dollar, the black market rate five times that.
In this sort of tyranny, without any opposition, everyone was forced to wheedle and whine, negotiate, horse-trade, and tell lies. But if the military in Myanmar was odious, the people I met were soft-tempered and helpful, and it was perhaps the only country I passed through where I met nothing but generosity and kindness. And the Burmese were the most ill-treated, worst-governed, belittled, and persecuted of any people I met—worse off than the Turkmen, which is saying a lot.
I didn't stay at the Strand, though I had done so long ago. It was ridiculous to pay $450 a night for a single room. I found a perfectly adequate (which is to say somewhat dreary but cheap) $45-a-night hotel near the Shwe Dagon Pagoda.
"Train is full," Mr. Nay Aung, the ticket agent, had told me at the station. He suggested that I come back the next day.
I waited a day. I walked to the Shwe Dagon and around the city. I saw hardly any tourists, not much traffic, all the signs of a dictatorship: selfishness and paranoia clinging to power, epitomized by well-dressed soldiers in heavy boots, threadbare citizens in rubber flip-flops. I was full of admiration for my younger self. Yangon had been ramshackle then, but I had no money; I had succeeded by improvising, flying by the seat of my pants. One of the lessons of this second trip was that I had been a hardy traveler, and yet I knew it was not so much hardiness as a desperation to make the trip fruitful.
"You are so lucky," Mr. Nay Aung said to me the following day. "We have a cancellation."
He sold me a ticket to Mandalay: first class, but with four people in the compartment. The train would leave around one in the afternoon and arrive in Mandalay at three the next morning. This improbable schedule—only one train a day—Mr. Nay Aung could not explain.
"Yes, it is not convenient to arrive at three o'clock. It will be so dark then."
I remembered the Mandalay train as basic, the trip an ordeal. This train was in better shape, but it was no less a ghost train, a decaying relic of the past, taking me from the skeletal city haunted by the military to the northerly ghost town of Mandalay. I felt that strongly as we set off. I had no idea how accurate that vision of Mandalay was, as a city of wraiths and the living dead, of people being screamed at by demonic soldiers.
In the sleeping compartment a young Frenchman was lolling in his berth, his sinuous Thai girlfriend, in her teens, wrapped around him. I said hello and then went to the platform to buy some oranges.
A monk with a bundle slung over his shoulder was being pestered by a ragged Burmese man. The monk was speaking English and trying to give the man some money—some folded worn bills.
"No, two dollah," the Burmese man said.
"This same, these kyats," the monk said.
"Two dollah," the Burmese man said again.
I said, "What's the problem?"
The ragged man was a scooter rickshaw driver who had taken the monk to the station. He insisted, as many Burmese did of foreigners, on being paid in American dollars.
"Here," I said, giving the man the two dollars. The man took them with both hands, fingers extended, then touched them to his forehead.
"You're a stranger," the monk said. "You don't know me."
I had been reading a Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra, as background for another Indian novella I was writing, "The Gateway of India," so I was able to say, "The Diamond Sutra says that you should give and not think about anything else. You don't speak Burmese?"
"I'm from Korea." It turned out that he was on this train to Mandalay, the fourth person in my compartment. He said hello to the Frenchman and the Thai girl, and soon after, with a clang of couplings, the train started to move.
I looked out the window and marveled again, as I had on arriving in Yangon. Nothing had changed on the outskirts, either—after the decaying bungalows and creekside villages, it was just dry fields, goats cropping grass on the tracks, ducks on murky ponds, burdened women walking, looking haughty because they were balancing bundles on their heads, slender sarong-wearing Burmese, and befouled ditches.
I dozed, I woke up; the Frenchman and his girlfriend had separated and were asleep in the upper berths. The monk sat opposite me.
He was a Zen monk, and his name was Tapa Snim ("Snim means monk in Korean"). He had just arrived in Myanmar. He was fifty. He had shifted his small bundle; it was now in the corner of his berth. He was a slender man, slightly built, very tidy, with clean brownish robes and a neatly shaved head that gave him a gray skull. He was not the smiling evasive monk I was used to seeing, who walked several inches above the ground, but an animated and watchful man who met my gaze and answered my questions.
"How long have you been a monk?" I asked.
"I became a monk at twenty-one," Tapa Snim said. "I have been meditating for twenty-nine years, but also traveling. I have been in a monastery here in Yangon for a few days, but I want to stay in a monastery in Mandalay."
"How long will you be here?"
"Meditation for six months, then I will go to Laos and Cambodia—same, to meditate in a monastery."
"You just show up and say, 'Here I am'?"
"Yes. I show some papers to prove who I am. They are Theravada Buddhist. I am Mahayana. We believe that we can obtain full enlightenment."
"Like the Buddha?"
"We can become Buddha, totally
and completely."
"Your English is very good," I said.
"I have traveled in fifteen Buddhist countries. You know something about Buddhism—you mentioned the Diamond Sutra."
"I read it recently. I like the part of it that describes what life on earth is:
A falling star, a bubble in a stream.
A flame in the wind. Frost in the sun.
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud."
"A phantom in a dream," Tapa Snim said, the line I'd forgotten. "That's the poem at the end. Have you read the Sixth Patriarch's Sutra?"
I said no, and he wrote the name in my notebook.
"All Zen Buddhists know this," he said, tapping the name.
We traveled for a while in silence. Seeing me scribbling in my notebook, the Frenchman said, "You must be a writer."
He had a box of food, mainly potato chips, pumpkin seeds, and peanuts. He shared a bag of pumpkin seeds with us.
Up the great flat plain of Pegu Province, dusty white in the sun, the wide river valley, baking in the dry season. Small simple huts and villages, temples in the distance, cows reclining in the scrappy shade of slender trees. Tall solitary stupas, some like enormous whitewashed pawns on a distant chessboard, others like oversized lamp finials, under a blue and cloudless sky.
The bamboo here had the shape of giant antlers, and here and there pigs trotted through brambles to drink at ponds filled with lotuses. It was a vision of the past, undeveloped, serene at a distance, and up close harsh and unforgiving.
Miles and miles of drained and harvested paddy fields, the rice stalks cut and rolled into bundles and propped up to await collection. No sign of a tractor or any mechanization, only a woman with a big bundle on her head, a pair of yoked oxen—remarkable sights for being so old-fashioned. And then an ox cart loaded with bales of cotton, and across a mile of paddy fields a gold stupa.