by Paul Theroux
‘Yes, but I’m a Catholic,’ he said. He was from Mangalore on the Malabar Coast and his name was Llewellyn. We smoked my Trichinopoly cigars on the deck, until Talaimannar appeared, a row of lights dimmed to faint sequins by what Llewellyn said was the first rain of the monsoon.
14. The Talaimannar Mail
IT was raining so hard on the roof of the ticket office at Talaimannar Station that the clerk was shouting, an operatic request for excess charges, uncharacteristically loud for a Singhalese. It was not a country where people raised their voices. They argued in whispers; catastrophe put them to sleep. They were not an excitable people – it had something to do with starvation. But these were unusual circumstances. It was like one of those pioneering talkies, the documentary in which curtains of brown rain slant into a railway platform, filling the sound track with a deafening crackle. The carriages of the Talaimannar Mail, made of thin wooden slats, amplified the rain; and the drumming on those bogie roofs, orchestrated by the wind, drowned the whinnying barks of the emaciated pariah dogs, which had been driven out of the storm. The station was rusting, the signboard had peeled into illegibility, the train was greasy, and the feeble lights above the black verandah pillars gave the streaming rain the yellow opacity of molten plastic. It was a small tropical station in the north of Ceylon, smelling of soaked jungle and erupting drains, and with that decay that passes for charm in equatorial outposts.
I asked the ticket clerk in Bookings what time the train was leaving.
‘Maybe midnight!’ The rain still gushed on his dingy shed, making him squint.
‘What do you mean maybe?’
‘Maybe later!’
With the pariah dogs snapping at my heels, I hurried down the platform to the carriage with SLEEPING CAR lettered neatly in fading gilt script on its side. My two-berth compartment, a good example of colonial carpentry, was wood-panelled in the most complicated way to accommodate a system of hinged shelves, built-in cupboards, and a collapsible fold-out chair fitting to one wall. The rain beat against the wooden shutters and a fine mist found its way through the louvres. I went to sleep but was awakened at one in the morning by a Singhalese who dragged in three heavy crates and parked them next to my berth.
‘This mine,’ he said, pointing to the lower berth where I lay.
I smiled; it was the smile of placid incomprehension I had been taught by any number of Afghan stall-holders in Kabul.
‘English?’
I shook my head, still smiling.
The Singhalese hooked the stepladder to the upper berth. But he did not climb it. He turned on the fan, sat on one of his crates, and began eating a stinking meal out of a piece of newspaper – the smell of his rotten onions and mildewed rice was to stay in the compartment for the remainder of the journey. At 3.15 the train pulled out of Talaimannar. I know this because when it started up I was jolted out of my berth on to the crates.
The wooden sleeping car was very light; it bounced and swayed on the uneven roadbed and all night made a constant creaking – that twisting and straining of wood that enlivens the nights of passengers on old storm-driven ships. I had a panicky nightmare of the sleeping car catching fire, burning furiously as the flames were fed by the draught from its travelling. I was trapped in the compartment, unable to open the doors, which the rain had warped in their jambs. The doors were warped, and waking from the nightmare I smelled the powerful smoke from the Singhalese’s cheroot. The compartment lights were on, the fan was going, and this man – I could see him in the mirror – was lying in his berth, puffing the stogie and reading the wrapping of his aromatic dinner.
At dawn, the northwest of Ceylon was a neglected garden: the rice fields had dried out and were overgrown with grass; the foliage was dense in the yards of tumbledown huts; there was evidence of former cultivation. Everywhere I looked, I saw great idleness, people in all the attitudes of repose. I had come from South India, the land of leaping Tamils. Here, the Singhalese had the ponderous stumbling and negligent attention of sleepwalkers looking for a place to drop. The food shortage was obviously acute: the proof was in the disorderly plots of cassava, the most primitive vegetable on earth, a root that grows easily but exhausts the soil in a year. It was a new crop to Ceylon; they had begun to grow it in desperation.
In second class, the Singhalese were sleeping against their children. The children were wide awake, pinned to the benches by their snoring parents. One man I met in the corridor was frankly disgusted. He was Singhalese, a teacher of English language, and said he didn’t often take the train because ‘I don’t like these travelling companions.’
‘The Singhalese?’
‘The cockroaches.’ He said the train was full of them, but I saw them only in the carriage marked BUFFET, among the peanuts, stale bread, and tea that was sold as breakfast.
I asked the teacher if there was any future for the English language in Ceylon. (I should add that although the official name for the island is now Sri Lanka no one I met there called it anything but Ceylon: it had been changed too recently for people to overcome the habit of giving it the former name.)
‘Funny you should ask,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact we’re being investigated.’
I asked him why.
‘Our lessons are subversive.’ He smoked and smiled coyly; he was clearly dying for me to pump him.
‘Give me an example.’
‘Oh, we have drill sentences. Five thousand of them. The government says they’re subversive.’
‘Drill sentences for English lessons?’
‘Yes. We wrote them. One was “Mrs Bandaranaike has three children.” ’
‘How many children does she have?’
‘Three.’
‘So what’s the difficulty?’
‘I’m giving you an example,’ he said. ‘There was another one: “Mrs B. is a woman.” ’
‘She is, isn’t she?’
‘Yes. But they objected. Maybe you could call it harmful to her personality cult.’
‘I see.’
‘Also, “Mrs B. had an operation on nineteen September nineteen sixty-one.” ’
‘They didn’t like that?’
‘Oh no! An inquiry is in the pipeline. As for me, I find the whole matter very amusing.’
I said he would probably lose his job. He said that was all right as long as he didn’t go to jail. As a university teacher he earned $25 a week, before taxes.
At Kurunegala, about fifty miles north of Colombo, I bought a papaya and the Ceylon Daily Mirror. Starvation, which had turned the Indians into makers of the foolproof rubber-lugged sprocket and vendors of the fishmeal cutlet and vegetable chop, had made the Singhalese religious fanatics. According to the Mirror there was a renewed interest in St Jude, who is popularly known as ‘the patron saint of hopeless cases’. A shrine to him in Colombo was beseiged by pilgrims, even Buddhists and Hindus. ‘It is truly remarkable,’ the article ran, ‘how people of all faiths and communities continue to flock to this hallowed shrine.’ On the feast day of St Jude, 28 October, hundreds of thousands of Singhalese were expected to go to the shrine and pray.
The devotees are multiplying. Letters pour in to the Parish Priest testifying to the wonderful favours granted by invocation to the Saint. Many of them have been those who, tangled in a seemingly hopeless web of bureaucratic red tape, and who invoked St Jude who has helped them find a solution. The Parish Priest receives regular remittances from abroad from those who, prior to leaving the island on some business visit or scholarship, were tied down by regulations and unsympathetic officialdom and who overcame these after prayer to St Jude.
In the same edition of the paper, food riots were reported in several towns after the rice ration had been cut (for the third time, said the teacher – it was now a quarter of what it had been five months previous). The current harvest was a failure, chillies were unobtainable, and from the train I could see bread lines – hundreds of listless people in misshapen queues, waiting with empty baskets. At the
stations, children stood champing on sticks of raw cassava, and pariah dogs fought over the discarded peels, tearing with narrow fishlike jaws that were all teeth. The teacher said there were hunger marchers in Colombo, and a story was circulating that a military coup was imminent. The government had vigorously denied the coup story. There was no food shortage, really, said the minister of agriculture – many people were successfully growing yams and cassava in their gardens. There was plenty of food in Ceylon, he said, but some people didn’t want to eat it: all these people had to do was to change their diet from the loaves of bread they craved. This American-style bread, introduced as an emergency measure during the war, had become a staple of the Singhalese diet. The catch is that not a single grain of wheat is grown in Ceylon, which makes bread as inconvenient a staple on that lovely island as water chestnuts would be in Nevada. The minister heaped scorn on Singapore’s Straits Times, which had printed a story about the Singhalese army’s being so starved it was eating grass. But the outraged denials only seemed to confirm that the food situation was desperate. At Colombo Fort I was approached separately by three piratical Singhalese. ‘Anything to sell?’ said the first; ‘Chinese girl?’ said the second; ‘Give me a shirt,’ said the third, not mincing his words – though he offered to carry my suitcase in exchange for it. Saint Jude seemed to have his work cut out for him, and the preparations for his feast day were perfectly understandable in the land no longer known as Serendip.
15. The 16.25 from Galle
IT struck me as practically insane in a country that was starving to death that thirty people should choose to attend a three-day seminar on American literature, at which I would be the principal speaker. American literature is fine, but I feel it to be an irrelevance in a disaster area. I had not counted on the resourcefulness of the American embassy; when the seminar got underway I saw my alarm was pointless. The clever man who supervised the seminar had assured me there would be 100 per cent attendance, and his method was not very different from that of the family planner in India who gives a new transistor radio to every male who agrees to a vasectomy. Here, on the hungry island of Ceylon, the American literature seminar included three huge meals, high tea, a free room in the New Orient Hotel in Galle, and all the whisky you could drink. Little wonder it was well attended. After a mammoth four-course breakfast, the bloated delegates met in an upstairs room and dozed through my inoffensive lecture, waking at noon to rush downstairs to a spectacular lunch. The afternoon meeting was short, truncated by tea, and the main event of the day was dinner, a leisurely good-humoured affair, followed by a movie that put everyone to sleep. The first day’s meals were frenzied sessions of gourmandizing, but after that things settled down; the delegates padded back and forth from dining room to seminar room, to meals and their justification. In between they stoked themselves with cookies, occasionally finding it necessary to absent themselves with indigestion, and they were often so stupefied with food, they began to look like victims of some dropsical illness, the chief symptom of which was prolonged slumber interrupted by attacks of furious belching. Some of the delegates gave me books they had written. The gravy stains on the covers will continue to remind me of that weekend, and I shall always remember the unanimous hoot that went up at the end of the seminar when the American organizer said, ‘Shall we leave at ten o’clock, or after lunch?’
One night I left the eructating delegates at the hotel and went in search of a snooker game. I found the Gymkhana Club, but several members had locked themselves in the snooker room where they were secretly listening to a fizzling short-wave radio. It was the latest racing news on the BBC Overseas Service, and the men, who were bookies, scribbled on tote-sheets as the plummy voice said, ‘At Doncaster today, in a seven-furlong race on a slow track, Bertha’s Pill came in at twenty to one, and Gallant Falcon, Safety Match, and Sub Rosa – ’ Racing is banned in Ceylon, so the Singhalese bet on races in Epsom, Doncaster, and Kempton Park. The bookies said I could use the table as soon as the broadcast was over.
The Public Services Club was right across the road. The snooker table was free, and the members said they had no objection to my playing, but added that it might be difficult because the billiard boy had to catch his bus. I was a bit puzzled by this explanation, but after a while I saw in the billiard boy a clue to the unspeakable idleness in Ceylon.
I began to play one of the gasconading Singhalese, and after a few balls were potted there was some muttering.
‘Billiard boy will get later bus.’
The billiard boy, a shiny clerical Buddhist named Fernando, carried the bridge with the confident authority of a bishop with crook. The game depended on him. He kept score; he passed the bridge when it was needed; he spotted the balls; he chalked the cues; he reminded the players of the rules; once when I was in doubt about a shot he told me the best one to take, sucking his teeth when I missed. None of his tasks was especially strenuous, but they had the effect of ruining my concentration. The singular virtue of snooker and pool is that they are played in complete silence. Fernando’s panting attentions violated this silence. I was glad to hear my opponent say – after about forty minutes – ‘Billiard boy must go.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Let him go.’
Fernando racked his bridge and sped out of the room.
‘I beat you by one point.’
‘No you didn’t,’ I said. ‘The game’s not over.’
‘Game is over.’
I pointed out that there were still four balls on the table.
‘But no billiard boy,’ said the Singhalese. ‘So the game is over. I win.’
Was it any wonder that in this fertile country – so fertile the fence posts and telephone poles had taken root and sprouted branches (and what a shame they didn’t bear fruit) – people were faint with hunger? They had driven out the Tamils, who had done all the planting; they had forgotten how to scatter seeds on the ground – this scattering would have given them a harvest. Galle was a beautiful place, garlanded with red hibiscus and smelling of the palm-scented ocean, possessing cool Dutch interiors and ringed by forests of bamboo. The sunset’s luminous curtains patterned the sky in rufous gold for an hour and a half every evening, and all night the waves crashed on the ramparts of the fort. But the famished faces of the sleepwalkers and the deprivation in that idyllic port made its beauty almost unbearable.
The train from Galle winds along the coast north towards Colombo, so close to the shoreline that the spray flung by the heavy rollers from Africa reaches the broken windows of the battered wooden carriages. I was going third class, and for the early part of the trip sat in a dark overcrowded compartment with people who, as soon as I became friendly, asked me for money. They were not begging with any urgency; indeed, they didn’t look as if they needed money, but rather seemed to be taking the position that whatever they succeeded in wheedling out of me might come in handy at some future date. It happened fairly often. In the middle of a conversation a man would gently ask me if I had any appliance I could give him. ‘What sort of appliance?’ ‘Razor blades.’ I would say no and the conversation would continue.
After nearly an hour of this I crawled out of the compartment to stand by the door and watch the rain dropping out of a dark layer of high clouds just off the coast – the distant rain like majestic pillars of granite. To the right the sun was setting, and in the foreground were children, purpling in the sunset and skipping along the sand. That was on the ocean side of the train. On the jungle side it had already begun to pour heavily, and at each station the signalman covered himself with his flags, making the red one into a kerchief, the green one into a skirt, flapping the green when the train approached and quickly using it to keep the rain off when the train had passed.
A Chinese man and his Singhalese wife had boarded the train in Galle with their fat dark baby. They were the Wongs, off to Colombo for a little holiday. Mr Wong said he was a dentist; he had learned the trade from his father, who had come to Ceylon from Shanghai in 1937. Mr Wong did
n’t like the train and said he usually went to Colombo on his motorcycle except during the monsoon. He also had a helmet and goggles. If I ever went back to Galle he would show them to me. He told me how much they cost.
‘Can you speak Chinese?’
‘Humbwa – go, mingwa – come. That’s all. I speak Singhalese and English. Chinese very hard.’ He pressed his temples with his knuckles.
Simla had been full of Chinese dentists, with signboards showing horrible cross-sections of the human mouth and trays of white toothcaps in the window. I asked him why so many Chinese I had seen were dentists.
‘Chinese are very good dentists!’ he said. His breath was spiced with coconut. ‘I’m good!’
‘Can you give me a filling?’
‘No, no stoppings.’
‘Do you clean teeth?’
‘No.’
‘Can you pull them?’
‘You want estraction? I give you name of a good estractionist.’
‘What kind of dentist are you, Mr Wong?’
‘Tooth mechanics,’ he said. ‘Chinese are the best ones for tooth mechanics.’
Tooth mechanics is this: you have a shop with a shelf of English putty, a pink semiliquid; you also have drawers filled with teeth in various sizes. A person comes in who has had two front teeth knocked out in a food riot or a quarrel over a coconut. You fill his mouth with pink putty and make a mould of his gums. A plate is made from this, and when it is trimmed, two Japanese fangs are stuck to it. Unfortunately, these plastic dentures are valueless for chewing food with and must be removed at mealtime. Mr Wong said business was excellent and he was taking in between 1000 and 1400 rupees a month, which is more than a professor gets at Colombo University.