Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (37 page)

Sundrum said, "There are boats to Sri Lanka. The Tigers run them. They have their own transport system. They can take you across."

But this would mean finding someone in the Rameswaram immigration office to bribe, so I could get an exit stamp in my passport. And then crossing the Palk Strait, which was heavily patrolled because of the recent killings and bombings. On the other side, I would be safe in Tamil-occupied territory, but entering Sri Lankan territory (picking my way through the land mines), I'd have to seek out a Sri Lankan immigration officer and bribe
him
for a stamp, because I had entered the country illegally. I expected the crossing to be a lot of trouble, but the danger of being killed was something else.

"It wasn't like this before," I said.

"Fighting is there," Sundrum said. "Why don't you go to Chennai and look at the call centers and the new developments in IT? Trichy is nothing. Chennai is a leader."

"I've done that. I want to take the ferry."

Sundrum was rather proud of the fact that the Tigers were in control of the Palk Strait, that they ran a rudimentary ferry service. In their hearts all the Tamils I met wanted the Tigers to succeed, though they were a murderous lot who had blown up an Indian prime minister, assassinated Sri Lankans, displaced tens of thousands of people—Tamil and Sinhala alike—violated peace agreements, and raised hell.

For the time being I stayed in Trichy, caught up with my notes, visited the temples. I liked walking in the town, which was not populous but covered a broad area, on both banks of the Cauvery River, wide and waterless in this dry season. And even in this heat, being a pedestrian was enjoyable most of the time.

Temples attracted beggars. I had seen this my first day in India, in Amritsar—the grovelers at the Golden Temple. But it had been true since Turkey: wherever there was a mosque, there were beggars; they hung around churches, they lined up at temples. I had seen them again in Tbilisi, in Ashgabat, in Bokhara and Tashkent. They were a feature of Indian temples, grizzling for rupees, whining, sometimes demanding; everywhere I'd gone they'd thrown themselves at my feet or pawed my sleeve. I'd usually surrendered something. Indians were instinctive givers, especially the pilgrims and penitents, who built up good karma by giving.

Because of Trichy's ancient and well-preserved temples, many pilgrims visited, and consequently so did many beggars. The beseeching poor were part of the Indian scene: the lame and the halt, the blind, the
limbless, with outstretched palms or begging bowls, sometimes displaying a limp or a drooling infant, an ashen-faced tot with the pox.

I did not harden my heart against them. I handed over some rupees and moved on, pondering the Indian miracle.

A smiling boy in a school uniform approached me.

"Good afternoon, sir. Where do you come from?"

I told him, and complimented him on his fluency.

"I speak English well because I study it at school," he said.

He was sturdy, about twelve or thirteen, his uniform spotless, though he wore no shoes. I asked him his name.

"My name is Murugam. India is my country."

I thanked him and walked towards the temple gate.

"Give me ten rupees," he said.

"Not today."

"Buy me a Coca-Cola."

"Sorry."

"All right, give me five rupees."

"Tell me why."

"I come from a big family. Give me one rupee. Give me something. Give me your ball pen."

He said that because I was writing in my small notebook:
Boy. Uniform. Murugam.

As I walked away he began hissing curses at me, and he became loudly abusive when he saw me give some money to a crippled old woman who lay in a heap with her hand extended, palm upward.

Beggars I saw as part of life in India. How could you have 1.3 billion people and not have beggars? They went with the temples, they were part of the landscape—they weren't even the worst part. But they got me down. You could live a long time in India if you stayed indoors, bossing the servants, but I was outside most of the time, usually in the role of a pedestrian, and many other people were outside too.

My time was up: I had to move on to Sri Lanka. I admitted to myself that I was spooked and needed relief.

One day I saw a round rotted fruit by the side of the road. It was crawling with insects, alive with big ants, blackened by them. Was it a coconut or a durian? Whatever, it represented a little world of hunger obscured by its eaters.

I finally left Trichy, and India. What sent me away was not the poverty,
though it was pathetic and there was plenty of it. It wasn't the dirt, though it sometimes seemed to me that nothing in India was clean. It wasn't the pantheon of grotesque gods, some like monkeys, some like elephants, some wearing skulls as ornaments, some in a posture of repose under the hood of a rearing cobra—terrifying or benign to the believers propitiating them with flowers. It was not the widow-burning or the child marriages or the crowds of the cringing and the limbless, the one-eyed, the stumblers, the silent ones who hardly lifted their eyes. An experience of India could be like entering a painting by Hieronymus Bosch—among the deformed, the fish-faced, the crawling, the flapping, the beaked, the scaly, the screaming, the armless, and the web-footed.

Not the heat, either, though every day in the south it was in the high 90s. Not the boasting and booming Indians and their foreign partners screwing the poor and the underpaid for profit. Not the roads, though the roads were hideous and impassable in places. Not the fear of disease or the horror of the obscenely wealthy, though the sight of the superrich in India could be more disquieting than the sight of the most wretched beggar.

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.

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 Tiger 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.