Ghost Train to the Eastern Star Read online

  Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  Paul Theroux

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  BOSTON · NEW YORK

  2008

  * * *

  BOOKS BY PAUL THEROUX

  FICTION

  Waldo

  Fong and the Indians

  Girls at Play

  Murder in Mount Holly

  Jungle Lovers

  Sinning with Annie

  Saint Jack

  The Black House

  The Family Arsenal

  The Consul's File

  A Christmas Card

  Picture Palace

  London Snow

  World's End

  The Mosquito Coast

  The London Embassy

  Half Moon Street

  O-Zone

  My Secret History

  Chicago Loop

  Millroy the Magician

  My Other Life

  Kowloon Tong

  Hotel Honolulu

  The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro

  Blinding Light

  The Elephanta Suite

  CRITICISM

  V. S. Naipaul

  NONFICTION

  The Great Railway Bazaar

  The Old Patagonian Express

  The Kingdom by the Sea

  Sailing Through China

  Sunrise with Seamonsters

  The Imperial Way

  Riding the Iron Rooster

  To the Ends of the Earth

  The Happy Isles of Oceania

  The Pillars of Hercules

  Sir Vidia's Shadow

  Fresh Air Fiend

  Dark Star Safari

  Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  * * *

  Copyright © 2008 by Paul Theroux

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from

  this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Theroux, Paul.

  Ghost train to the Eastern star : on the tracks

  of the great railway bazaar / Paul Theroux.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-618-41887-9

  1. Asia—Description and travel. 2. Theroux, Paul—

  Travel—Asia. 3. Railroad travel—Asia. i. Title.

  DS10.T42 2008 915.04'425 0 92— dc22

  2008011436

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book design by Robert Overholtzer

  Endpaper map by Jacques Chazaud

  MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The lines from "Tom O'Roughley" by W. B. Yeats are reprinted with the

  permission of AP Watt Ltd on behalf of Gráinne Yeats. The lines from

  "plato told." Copyright 1944, © 1972, 1991, by the Trustees of the E. E.

  Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings,

  edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing

  Corporation. Excerpts from "Aubade" and "Water" from Collected Poems

  by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin.

  Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  * * *

  To Sheila, with love

  * * *

  That feeling about trains, for instance. Of course he had

  long outgrown the boyish glamour of the steam engine.

  Yet there was something that had an appeal for him in

  trains, especially in night trains, which always put queer,

  vaguely improper notions into his head.

  GEORGES SIMENON

  The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By

  "I'd much rather go by train," said Connie.

  D. H. LAWRENCE

  Lady Chatterley's Lover

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  1. The Eurostar 1

  2. The Other Orient Express 14

  3. The Ferry to Besiktas 40

  4. Night Train to Ankara 59

  5. Night Train to Tbilisi 68

  6. Night Train to Baku: The Trans-Caucasian 88

  7. Night Train from Ashgabat to Mary 103

  8. Night Train to Tashkent 136

  9. The Shan-e-Punjab Express to Delhi 146

  10. Night Train to Jodhpur: The Mandore Express 164

  11. Night Train to Jaipur 182

  12. Night Train to Mumbai: The "Superfast" Express 193

  13. Night Train to Bangalore: The Udyan Express 210

  14. The Shatabdi Express to Chennai 225

  15. The Coastal Line to Galle and Hambantota 237

  16. The Slow Train to Kandy 258

  17. Ghost Train to Mandalay 265

  18. The Train to Pyin-Oo-Lwin 283

  19. Night Train to Nong Khai 295

  20. Night Train to Hat Yai Junction: Special Express 309

  21. Night Train to Singapore: The Lankawi Express 316

  22. The Slow Train to the Eastern Star 341

  23. The Boat Sontepheap to Phnom Penh 351

  24. The Mekong Express 367

  25. Night Train to Hue 376

  26. The Day Train to Hanoi 387

  27. Tokyo Andaguraundo 400

  28. Night Train to Hokkaido: Hayate Super Express 422

  29. The Limited Express: Sarobetsu to Wakkanai 428

  30. Night Train to Kyoto: The Twilight Express 440

  31. The Trans-Siberian Express 460

  32. Night Train to Berlin and Beyond 493

  THE EUROSTAR

  YOU THINK of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy—being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

  Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome.

  Of course, it's much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where's the book in that? Better the boastful charade of pretending to be an adventurer:

  Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,

  Crouch in the fo'c'sle

  Stubbly with goodness,

  in a lusty "Look-at-me!" in exotic landscapes.

  This was more or less my mood as I was packing to leave home. I also thought: But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, "An aimless joy is a pure joy."

  And there are dreams: one, the dream of a foreign land that I enjoy at home, staring east into space at imagined temples, crowded bazaars, and what V. S. Pritchett called "human architecture," lovely women in gauzy clothes, old trains clattering on mountainsides, the mirage of happiness; two, the dream state of travel itself. Often on a tr
ip, I seem to be alive in a hallucinatory vision of difference, the highly colored unreality of foreignness, where I am vividly aware (as in most dreams) that I don't belong; yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter stranger. When you're strange, as the song goes, no one remembers your name.

  Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial, like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people, wandering, listening while remaining unseen. Being invisible—the usual condition of the older traveler—is much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you are ignored. Such a traveler isn't in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bum. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel's slow tempo.

  Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness—traveling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating. And this ghostliness, I was to find, was also an effect of the journey I had chosen, returning to places I had known many years ago. It is almost impossible to return to an early scene in your traveling life and not feel like a specter. And many places I saw were themselves sad and spectral, others big and hectic, while I was the haunting presence, the eavesdropping shadow on the ghost train.

  ***

  LONG AFTER I TOOK the trip I wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar I went on thinking how I'd gone overland, changing trains across Asia, improvising my trip, rubbing against the world. And reflecting on what I'd seen—the way the unrevisited past is always looping in your dreams. Memory is a ghost train too. Ages later, you still ponder the beautiful face you once glimpsed in a distant country. Or the sight of a noble tree, or a country road, or a happy table in a café, or some angry boys armed with rusty spears shrieking, "Run you life, dim-dim!"—or the sound of a train at night, striking that precise musical note of train whistles, a diminished third, into the darkness, as you lie in the train, moving through the world as travelers do, "inside the whale."

  Thirty-three years went by. I was then twice as old as the person who had ridden those trains, most of them pulled by steam locomotives, boiling across the hinterland of Turkey and India. I loved the symmetry in the time difference. Time passing had become something serious to me, embodied in the process of my growing old. As a young man I regarded the earth as a fixed and trustworthy thing that would see me into my old age; but older, I began to understand transformation as a natural law, something emotional in an undependable world that was visibly spoiled. It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay, the epiphany of Wordsworth, the wisdom of wabi-sabi: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts.

  "Without change there can be no nostalgia," a friend once said to me, and I realized that what I began to witness was not just change and decay, but imminent extinction. Had my long-ago itinerary changed as much as me? I had the idea of taking the same trip again, traveling in my own footsteps—a serious enterprise, but the sort of trip that younger, opportunistic punks often take to make a book and get famous.*

  *The list is very long and includes travelers' books in the footsteps of Graham Greene, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Leonard Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Mr. Kurtz, H. M. Stanley, Leopold Bloom, Saint Paul, Basho, Jesus, and Buddha.

  The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life. Travel also holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home. In a distant place no one knows you—nearly always a plus. And you can pretend, in travel, to be different from the person you are, unattached, enigmatic, younger, richer or poorer, anyone you choose to be, the rebirth that many travelers experience if they go far enough.

  The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous but irresistible, not as a search for lost time but for the grotesquerie of what happened since. In most cases it is like meeting an old lover years later and hardly recognizing the object of desire in this pinched and bruised old fruit. We all live with fantasies of transformation. Live long enough and you see them enacted—the young made old, the road improved, houses where there were once fields; and their opposites, a good school turned into a ruin, a river poisoned, a pond shrunk and filled with trash, and dismal reports: "He's dead," "She's huge," "She committed suicide," "He's now prime minister," "He's in jail," "You can't go there anymore."

  A great satisfaction in growing old—one of many—is assuming the role of a witness to the wobbling of the world and seeing irreversible changes. The downside, besides the tedium of listening to the delusions of the young, is hearing the same hackneyed opinions over and over, not just those of callow youth but, much worse and seemingly criminal, the opinions of even callower people who ought to know better, all the lies about war and fear and progress and the enemy—the world as a wheel of repetition. They—I should say "we"—are bored by things we've heard a million times before, books we've dismissed, the discoveries that are not new, the proposed solutions that will solve nothing. "I can tell that I am growing old," says the narrator in Borges's story "The Congress." "One unmistakable sign is the fact that I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising, perhaps because I see nothing essentially new in it—it's little more than timid variations on what's already been."

  Older people are perceived as cynics and misanthropes—but no, they are simply people who have at last heard the still, sad music of humanity played by an inferior rock band howling for fame. Going back and retracing my footsteps—a glib, debunking effort for a shallower, younger, impressionable writer—would be for me a way of seeing who I was, where I went, and what subsequently happened to the places I had seen.

  Since I will never write the autobiography I once envisioned—volume one, Who I Was; volume two, I Told You So—writing about travel has become a way of making sense of my life, the nearest I will come to autobiography—as the novel is, the short story, and the essay. As Pedro Almodóvar once remarked, "Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism."

  The thing to avoid while in my own footsteps would be the tedious reminiscences of better days, the twittering of the nostalgia bore, whose message is usually I was there and you weren't. "I remember when you could get four of those for a dollar." "There was a big tree in a field where that building is now." "In my day..."

  Oh, shut up!

  ***

  WHAT TRAVELER BACKTRACKED to take the great trip again? None of the good ones that I know. Greene never returned to the Liberian bush, nor to Mexico, nor to Vietnam. In his late fifties, Waugh dismissed modern travel altogether as mere tourism and a waste of time. After 1948, Thesiger did not return to Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter of Arabia. Burton did not mount another expedition to Utah, or to substantiate the source of the Nile—at my age he was living in Trieste, immersed in erotica. Darwin never went to sea again. Neither did Joseph Conrad, who ended up hating the prospect of seafaring. Eric Newby went down the Ganges once, Jonathan Raban down the Mississippi once, and Jan Morris climbed Everest once. Robert Byron did not take the road to Oxiana again, Cherry-Garrard made only one trip to Antarctica, Chatwin never returned to Patagonia, nor did Doughty go back to Arabia Deserta, nor Wallace to the Malay Archipelago, nor Waterton to the Amazon, nor Trollope to the West Indies, nor Edward Lear to Corsica, nor Stevenson to the Cévennes, nor Chekhov to Sakhalin, nor Gide to the Congo, nor Canetti to Marrakesh, nor Jack London to the Solomon Islands, nor Mark Twain to Hawaii. So much for some of my favorite authors.

  You could ask, "Why should they bother?" but the fact is that each of these travelers, grown older, would have discovered what the heroic traveler Henry Morton Stanley found when he recrossed Africa from west to east ten years after his first successful crossing from east to west from 1874 to 1877—a different place, with ominous changes, and a new book. Richard Henry Dana added a chastened epilogue to Two Yea
rs Before the Mast when, twenty-four years after its publication in 1840, he returned to San Francisco (but no longer traveling in the forecastle) and found that it had changed from a gloomy Spanish mission station with a few shacks to an American boom town that had been transformed by the Gold Rush. Dana was scrupulous about reacquainting himself with people he'd met on his first visit and sizing up the altered landscape, completing, as he put it, "acts of pious remembrance."

  Certain poets, notably Wordsworth and Yeats, enlarged their vision and found enlightenment in returning to an earlier landscape of their lives. They set the standard in the literature of revisitation. If it is a writer's lot to repeat the past, writing it in his or her own way, this return journey might be my own prosaic version of "The Wild Swans at Coole" or "Tintern Abbey."

  My proposed trip to retrace the itinerary of The Great Railway Bazaar was mainly curiosity on my part, and the usual idleness, with a hankering to be away; but this had been the case thirty-three years before, and it had yielded results. All writing is launching yourself into the darkness, and hoping for light and a soft landing.

  "I'm going to do a lot of knitting while you're away," my wife said. That was welcome news. I needed Penelope this time.

  Though I had pretended to be jolly in the published narrative, the first trip had not gone as planned.

  "I don't want you to go," my first wife had said in 1973—not in a sentimental way, but as an angry demand.

  Yet I had just finished a book and was out of ideas. I had no income, no idea for a new novel, and—though I didn't know what I was in for—I hoped that this trip might be a way of finding a subject. I had to go. Sailors went to sea, soldiers went to war, fishermen went fishing, I told her. Writers sometimes had to leave home. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

  She resented my leaving. And though I did not write about it, I was miserable when I set off from London, saying goodbye to this demoralized woman and our two small children.

  It was the age of aerograms and postcards and big black unreliable telephones. I wrote home often. But I succeeded in making only two phone calls, one from New Delhi and another from Tokyo, both of them futile. And why did my endearments sound unwelcome? I was homesick the whole way—four and a half months of it—and wondered if I was being missed. That was my first melancholy experience of the traveler's long lonely evenings. I was at my wits' end on the trip. I felt insane when I got home. I had not been missed. I had been replaced.