OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  She shook her head sadly. ‘Everyone like to dream.’

  ‘I thought you said you fell down.’

  Kadali shrugged. ‘Fell down, get pushed by driver in hurry for me to get in airport. Same thing. Fell. Hurt eye.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

  The attendant was leaning over me again. ‘Everything okay?’

  I looked at Kadali.

  She bobbed her head. ‘Fully okay.’

  Kadali watched the attendant walk away. ‘Now on, Padma stay home,’ she said. ‘If Padma cook, for family. If clean, for family. No crazy madam stealing money then calling Padma stealer. Enough! Maybe less money, okay. Even no money, okay. Sell chickens. Sell goat. Something.’

  ‘Good for you,’ I said, meaning it. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kadali smiled. ‘But not required. Going home.’

  * 500 dirhams is about £85.

  The Monk’s Luggage

  PAUL THEROUX (born Medford, MA, USA 1941) worked as a Peace Corps teacher in Malawi and as a university lecturer in Uganda and Singapore before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of more than forty books, including the novels A Dead Hand and The Mosquito Coast, and the travel books The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star – from which he has adapted ‘The Monk’s Luggage’. His latest book is The Tao of Travel – ‘a distillation of travellers’ visions and pleasures’. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod. www.paultheroux.com

  The Monk’s Luggage

  PAUL THEROUX

  I remembered from long ago 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 Rangoon, the skeletal city still 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, and people being screamed at by the demonic soldiers.

  In the sleeping compartment a young Frenchman was lolling in his berth, his sinuous Thai girlfriend, still 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 ragged 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 a story I was calling ‘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.’ And it turned out that he too 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 marvelled again, as I had on arriving in Yangon. Nothing had changed in the outskirts, either – after the decaying bungalows and the 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 dozed in the upper berths. The monk sat opposite me.

  He was a Zen monk, his name was Tapa Snim (‘snim means monk in Korean’). He had just arrived in Myanmar. He was fifty years old. 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 grey 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 travelling, 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 travelled 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 travelled 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 oversize 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 mechanisation – 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.

  I walked to the vestibule of the train, for the exercise, and talked a while with an old toothless man going to Taungoo. When I asked him about the past he seemed a little vague.

  ‘I’m fifty-two,’ he said, and I was reminded how poverty aged people prematurely.

  When I came back to the compartment, Tapa Snim was rummaging in his bag. I watched him take out an envelope, and then he began knotting the two strands that made this simple square of cotton cloth into a bag.

  ‘Do you have another bag?’ I asked, because the smallness of this one seemed an improbable size for a long-distance traveller.

  ‘No. These are all my possessions.’

  Everything, not just for a year of travel, but everything he owned in the world, in a bag he easily slung under one arm. True, this was a warm climate, but the bag was smaller than a supermarket shopping bag.

  ‘May I ask you what’s inside?’


  Tapa Snim, tugging the knot loose, gladly showed me the entire contents.

  ‘My bowl, very important,’ he said, taking out the first item. It was a small black plastic soup bowl with a close-fitting lid. He used it for begging alms, but he also used it for rice.

  In a small bag: a piece of soap in a container, sunglasses, a flashlight, a tube of mosquito repellent, a tin of aspirin.

  In a small plastic box: a spool of grey thread, a pair of scissors, nail clippers, Q-tips, a thimble, needles, rubber bands, a two inch mirror, a tube of cream to prevent foot fungus, ChapStick, nasal spray, and razor blades.

  ‘Also very important,’ he said, showing me the razor blades. ‘I shave my head every fifteen days.’

  Neatly folded, one thin wool sweater, a shawl he called a kasaya, a change of clothes. In a document pouch, he had a notebook and some papers, a photograph showing him posed with a dozen other monks (‘to introduce myself’) and a large certificate in Chinese characters he called his bikkhu_certificate, the official proof he was a monk, with signatures and seals and brushwork.

  And a Sharp electronic dictionary that allowed him to translate from many languages; and a string of beads – 108 beads, the spiritual number.

  As I was writing down the list, he said, ‘And this’ – his straw hat – ‘and this’ – his fan.

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What about money?’

  ‘That’s my secret.’ And then carefully he placed it all on the opened cloth, and drew the cloth together into a sack, everything he owned on earth.

  ‘Tell me how you meditate.’

  ‘You know the Japanese word koan,’ he said. It wasn’t a question. ‘For example, in ancient China, a student asked an important Zen monk, “What is Buddha?” The monk answered, “One pine-cone tree in front of a garden.”’

  Out the train window I could see a village set in a bower of dense trees, offering shade, scattered groves of bananas and coconut, more lotus ponds, people on bikes. And here before me the shaven-headed and gently smiling Tapa Snim.

  ‘I meditate on that. “One pine-cone tree in front of a garden.” It is a particular tree.’

  ‘How long have you been using this koan?’

  ‘Years. Years. Years.’ He smiled again. ‘Twelve hours a day.’

  ‘Is it working?’

  ‘I will understand eventually. Everyone has Buddha-spirit in their mind. By reason of sufferings and desires and anger we can’t find it.’ He rocked a little on the seat, and then went on. ‘If we get rid of suffering and desire and anger, we can become a Buddha.’

  ‘How do I get rid of them?’

  ‘Meditate. Empty your mind – your mind must be vacant. Non-mind is the deepest stage of the deep stage.’ He asked to borrow my pen, and the little notebook I’d been using. He said, ‘Every night I have a serious question in my head – every day and night. Look.’

  He set down six Chinese characters, inscribing them slowly, each slash and dot. Then he poked at them, translating.

  ‘Sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha,’ he said. ‘For twenty-six years I have thought about this. If I solve this I will know truth. It is my destination, my whole life, to solve this problem.’

  ‘But how did you happen to choose these images?’

  ‘One day, a famous monk, Ma Tsou, was asked, “How are you?” This was his reply.’

  ‘Why did you come here to meditate? You could have stayed in Korea.’

  He said, ‘Buddha travelled! So I travel. I am looking for enlightenment.’

  ‘What do you think about Burma?’

  He laughed and told me that on the day of his arrival he had gone to the railway station, but the ticket window was closed. So he waited on a bench and, waiting there, had fallen asleep. When he woke up he discovered that the pouch at his waist had been razored open by – literally, a cutpurse – and some of his money stolen.

  ‘But small money! Big money is in a secret place.’

  ‘You’ve been to India?’

  ‘India can be dangerous,’ he said. ‘But I have a theory about India.’ He sat forward, eager to explain. ‘I see many poor people there, and I think, What is their karma? They are the poorest people in the world. Why do they receive this big suffering? Eh?’

  I said I had no idea, and that the people here – right out the window – seemed miserably poor, living in bamboo huts and steadying wooden ploughs pulled by oxen, and labouring under the load of heavy bales.

  ‘India is worse,’ he said. ‘This is my ridiculous thought. I know it is silly, but…’ But, he implied that it was not ridiculous at all and that I should not be too quick to judge him. ‘Indian people have many bad karmas. In their history, they created violence, they destroyed Buddhist stupas and persecuted monks. They all the time blame Muslims, but Hindus have been just as bad. In my Indian travel I think this is the deep reason for the suffering there.’

  ‘What about Korea – any suffering?’

  ‘Suffering everywhere! In Korea we have mad crazy Christians, because we are under the influence of the United States.’

  ‘Reverend Moon?’

  ‘Many people like him!’ Tapa Snim said. ‘I am glad to be here.’

  In the setting sun, the muted pinks and browns, the subdued light, the long shadows of the labouring bent-over harvesters. And in the dusk, the unmistakable sign of rural poverty – no lights in the villages, only the lampglow in small huts, or the small flare of cooking fires at ground level, the smell of woodsmoke. All the train windows were open to insects and smoke and, passing a swamp or a pond, a dampness in the air, the malodorous uprush of the hum of stagnant water.

  Blood Diamonds

  PETER GODWIN (born Zimbabwe, 1957) is the author of The Fear (from which ‘Blood Diamonds’ is adapted), When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, and Mukiwa. Raised in Zimbabwe, he was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and became a foreign correspondent, reporting for the Sunday Times, and the BBC, from more than sixty countries. Since moving to New York, he has written for National Geographic, the New York Times magazine and Vanity Fair. He has taught at Princeton and Columbia, and is a recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship. www.petergodwin.com

  Blood Diamonds

  PETER GODWIN

  Georgina and I are waiting outside Meikles Park in the town of Mutare early on Saturday morning, waiting to meet the Hon. Lynette Kore-Karenyi, another of the new crop of opposition MPs. She thinks she may be able to sneak us into the Marange diamond fields. Control of these diamond fields is now the key to Zimbabwe’s future. With the economy shattered, the farms looted, and the death of the Zimbabwe dollar snuffing out the black market in foreign currency, diamonds – ngoda – are one of the very few remaining sources of wealth. Robert Mugabe and his men need to keep control of them to finance their political machine.

  The granite obelisk in the centre of the park is plastered with AIDS sensitivity posters, part of the ‘Zimbabwe National Behavioural Change Strategy: 2006–2010’. I rummage beneath the accretion of posters, to find the original carved inscription, ‘For King and Empire 1914–1918’. Above us, the Bvumba Mountains are still wreathed with cool morning guti. Yet, here, along the central island of Herbert Chitepo Avenue, deferential ilala palms sough softly in the sunny breeze. Georgina is window-shopping across the road in the tragically under-stocked Meikles Department Store. Behind the glass, frozen in time, stand naked white mannequins under twirling yellow smiley-faced cardboard discs declaring, ‘Going Summer!’

  A soldier strolls down the road and stops at the bus stop. He is tall and straight-backed, in his early thirties, wearing a sharply ironed one-piece camouflage jump suit with the insignia of a Zimbabwe bird within a laurel wreath looped through his epaulettes.

  ‘How are things in the army, Major?’ I ask tentatively.

  ‘We are happy since yesterday’ – he grins – ‘when we were paid for the first time in USAhs. We got US$100 each.’

  He has trekked all the way
from Harare to give some of his hard-currency bounty to his grandmother, who lives in Zimunya, the arid communal land at the foot of the Bvumba. In Harare, he is in charge of a Yugoslav-made artillery battery. ‘It has forty missiles,’ he says proudly, ‘with a range of twenty kilometres.’

  Lynette’s husband drops her off, and we drive south, past Sakubva township. Its roadside market, where mounds of donated clothes end up for sale, is just cranking up. We drop down into Zimunya. On the left, freshly painted, is the New Cannibal Inn and Butchery. ‘What kind of flesh do you think they sell?’ Georgina asks Lynette, and she giggles.

  LYNETTE IS THIRTY-FOUR and wears cork wedges, a calf-length brown corduroy skirt, glasses, and straightened hair. Georgina is complaining to her about the sexist policies of the Mutare Club, where women are banned from the bar.

  ‘Shona men have a saying,’ replies Lynette. ‘Mhamba inonaka navamai mudhuze. It means “Beer tastes better with a woman by your side”.’

  Lynette was educated at a Catholic mission school, St Patrick’s, Nyanyadzi, worked as a doctor’s PA and, in 2003, became the opposition Movement for Democratic Change’s first woman local councillor. It was Roy Bennett, the MDC’s fiery treasurer, who suggested she stand for national office. She comes from a political family – her mother had worked for Ndabaningi Sithole’s party, for years the sole opposition voice in parliament, but still, she had reservations about Lynette’s candidature, ‘in case I lost, and people laughed at me’. But Lynette didn’t lose, and she was reelected in the recent elections.

  She’s had a tough time of it, though. As well as fighting various recounts and court challenges, she’s been arrested four times, and beaten up by the police. She’s had to send her three kids – the youngest, a girl of eight – away to boarding school, for their own safety. ‘They’re proud of me becoming an MP,’ she says, ‘but scared that I will be killed.’ The last time she visited her fourteen-year-old son at school, he said it was lovely to see her, but he’d rather she didn’t come in her official MDC vehicle, in case he got into trouble.