Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (40 page)

Bowles had glimpsed Taprobane first from this same train in 1949 and managed to buy it a few years later. He wrote his Tangier novel,
The Spider's House,
there, but not much else. And after an unhappy stay on the island in 1954, accompanied by his wife, Jane, and his Moroccan lover, he decided to sell it. Jane had hated it: large bats hung on the trees and flapped around, beating their wings, which were a yard wide. And Bowles needed the money.

About fifteen miles farther down the coast was the town of Matara, an old railway station and the end of the line. I got out and walked to the bus terminal for the bus to Hambantota.

"This is the bus. Leaving sometime soon," a man explained to me.

He was also going to Hambantota.

He said, "This is the worst time of the year to be traveling. Everyone's going home for the Avurudu festival."

It did seem that the train had been full, and this bus was filling up. I bought a bus ticket from the conductor—the fare was about 25 cents for the fifty-mile trip.

"You speak English," I said. "Not many people do."

"They don't teach English in schools anymore. But I studied it—older people speak it."

That had happened after I'd been here; the Tamil insurgency had also happened; and as I'd seen in Colombo, both had, in their way, stunted Sri Lanka, kept tourists and investors away, while giving the island the look and feel of bygone Ceylon. But the small population and the old-fangledness were a relief: because business was terrible, the country was spared foreign exploitation and kept its soul.

The bus driver tooted his horn. Everyone got on and the bus circled the Matara clock tower and headed south along the coast. The man I'd spoken to at the station had taken a seat beside me. His name was Takil; he asked me where I was from, and when I told him he said, "I've been to Miami."

"What doing?"

"I was working for a Saudi sheik," and he told me the sheik's name. The sheik was one of the thousand or so princes but was particularly well connected: his brother was a minister in the Saudi government.

This sheik had a $25 million mansion in Golden Beach, another estate in Los Angeles, and houses elsewhere. I had never heard of Golden Beach, but Takil assured me that it was a wealthy community at the northern edge of Miami and that only billionaires lived there. Bill Gates, for one.

"He lives in Seattle, surely?"

"He kept a house in Golden Beach, near my sheik."

I had to travel to Dikwella (which we were passing through) on an old Sri Lankan bus to find out these things about my country.

"He needed a big house," Takil said. "He had three wives and lots of children. He was only twenty-eight, though."

"What did you do for him?"

"I waited on him. I served him his food."

"You're a Muslim?"

"No. Buddhist. And I don't speak Arabic. Funny, eh? He spoke to me in English. This was back in the 1980s. I was only twenty myself. He trusted me, and I was good at my job. He kept me on for four years."

"Was he a playboy?"

"Not really. He had married an actress but divorced her. He was looking for another wife."

"In Florida?"

"Anywhere. He traveled a lot. He had lots of relatives living in America. He chartered a British Airways jet for his trips."

"Oil money?"

"Yes. Lots of it—lots. But no interests. He took his children to Disney World, he took them to Los Angeles, and sightseeing. He didn't work. He did nothing."

"Prayed, I suppose."

"No. He wasn't particularly religious."

I said, "People wonder why Osama bin Laden hates the Saudi royal family and wants to punish the United States for being its ally. That sheik and people like him are the reason, and we're all paying a horrible price for it."

We had passed Tangalla—its prison figures in Woolf's
Village in the Jungle.
We were coming to a river. Takil said it was the Ambalantota, and that we'd be in Hambantota pretty soon.

The land had flattened and become scrubbier and more thinly populated. It seemed to me that the tsunami had swept through and scoured
it of its houses, but Takil said that we were looking at salt flats. For hundreds of years salt had been produced here by evaporation in the great flat enclosures and lagoons, called
lewayas.
Ondaatje explained that a century ago Leonard Woolf "revolutionized salt collection" here by introducing a payment scheme that was fair and regulated, and that was closely supervised by him.

We went down a road of overhanging trees, lined by small villages, and were soon in the town square of Hambantota. Takil headed home to celebrate Avuruda, and I looked for a place to stay. I found nothing, but it was still only the middle of the afternoon, so I looked at the boats in the harbor and strolled through the town, then got a scooter rickshaw to take me to Woolf's government bungalow that Ondaatje had found. Throughout his book, Ondaatje repeats that the country had changed very little in the nearly one hundred years that had passed since Woolf was a colonial officer, and he quotes a Sri Lankan who, in a 2002 newspaper article, discussing the grim events and the hardships of peasant life recounted in
The Village in the Jungle,
said, "It was an era when the jungle ruled the lives of the humble peasant as it does even now in remote villages scattered across the country."

What is unusual about the novel, what gives it a weird nobility, is that, written by a young Englishman and published in 1913, its main characters are Sinhalese peasants. Its plot hinges on village marriage customs, traditional rivalries, and peculiarly Sinhalese vindictiveness, passions, and satisfactions. Rape, multiple murder, and exploitation are central to the book, which stands out in my mind as having perhaps the most violent plot and depressing ending of any novel I've ever read. Just when you think that the last surviving character represents hope and possibility, she looks out of her hut one night and sees the glinting eyes of a pig—or demon—about to devour her.

For his pains, Leonard Woolf got very little for the novel. His friend Lytton Strachey said, "I was disappointed to see that it was about nothing but blacks—whom really I don't much care for." And although it was dedicated to her, Woolf's wife Virginia was indifferent to its merits.

As a despised and overworked expatriate employed by the Singapore government as a university lecturer in the 1960s, I found Woolf's five-volume autobiography in the college's library and read it all. The second volume,
Growing,
about his years as a despised and overworked colonial officer, gave me heart and helped me to become patient and sympa
thetic. In that book he describes the necessity of being efficient—replying to letters on the day they are received, keeping accurate notes, learning to be methodical, developing an interest in the culture. Taking his advice, I followed his example and became productive and a little happier as an alien in Singapore.

"Where staying?" the scooter rickshaw driver asked me.

I had no idea. It was now late afternoon, and the light would soon be gone.

"Any hotels here?"

"Hotel there," he said and pointed up the road, east along the coast, the way I'd come.

That was how I found the small one-story hotel, salt-crusted, flecked with mildew, and sitting behind a sand dune, the pounding surf and a wild beach on the other side. A German tour group, just arrived, had already marked their territory, hogging the lounge chairs by draping towels on them—though all the chairs were unoccupied except for the towels. These Germans were perhaps the first tourists I'd seen on my trip—the first large group, anyway—and were on an Ayurvedic retreat. They were apparently unfazed by the news of land mines or talk of strife.

I stayed here a few days, made another trip into Hambantota, and continued my story "The Elephant God," writing one day about the main character:

She had come to understand what the solitary long-distance traveler eventually knows after months on the road—that, in the course of time, a trip stops being an interlude of distractions and detours, pursuing sights, looking for pleasures, and becomes a series of disconnections, giving up comfort, abandoning or being abandoned by friends, passing the time in obscure places, inured to the concept of delay, since the trip itself was a succession of delays.

Solving problems, finding meals, buying new clothes and giving away old ones, getting laundry done, buying tickets, scavenging for cheap hotels, studying maps, being alone but not lonely. It was not about happiness but safety, finding serenity, making discoveries in all this locomotion and an equal serenity when she had a place to roost, like a bird of passage migrating slowly in a sequence of flights.

"Nice and quiet," the hotel manager said, passing me one day. "You can relax here."

But I had not come all this way to relax. I told him I would be leaving the next day.

"Avurudu," he said and smiled. "Impossible. No buses."

"I'll find a car"

"No cars. Nothing. Everyone home with family. Not auspicious to travel."

He showed me a prominent item in that day's newspaper. Favorable Avurudu times were listed, including this one: "The auspicious time to leave home for work falls at 6:35
A.M.
on Thursday, April 20...Wear gold colored clothing and set off facing the North, after consuming a meal of moru and rice."

That was three days away. The whole country was shut down until then. Nothing was running, no buses, no trains.

"Where you are going, sir?" the manager asked as I checked out the next morning.

When I said Colombo, he laughed, meaning "impossible."

I walked to the road and hitchhiked. An overcrowded van took me almost to Matara. I had to crouch in an uncomfortable position, with passengers' elbows in my kidneys. Finally, after more than four hours, I could stand it no longer. I got out, hitchhiking again, and after half an hour a man in a small car picked me up. Near Galle, at a bend in the road, I saw a large painted banner:
Warm Welcome for US-Sri Lanka Friendship,
and a great crowd of excited people awaiting their American visitors, on whom they would lavish Avurudu hospitality, garlands of flowers and baskets of fruit.

I saw no sign of the Americans nearby, but farther down the road I heard the unmistakable
yak-yak-yak
of a helicopter settling to earth, somewhere out of sight in the jungle. Later I found out that the helicopter contained three U.S. senators and their wives, who had come to visit a tsunami refugee camp. A junket: politicians picking up a family vacation, being personally thanked and rewarded for their country's generosity. There was no better example of official travel and unofficial travel: the swoop and buzz of the senatorial chopper overhead as I stood on the narrow road, bumming a ride.

O
NE OF THE HAPPIER
and more helpful delusions of travel is that one is on a quest. At the end of Avurudu, when the auspicious day for work, for travel, arrived, the one determined by the astrologers and soothsayers, I took the train to Kandy, the capital of the former kingdom, at the center of the island, sitting at a high altitude, where in a famous temple a tooth of the Buddha was enshrined in a gold casket. It was a place of pilgrimage.

All the trains I took in Sri Lanka were small and slow, possibly the same rolling stock as those I'd taken long ago, but dirtier. Yet the routes were so dramatic, by the blue sea or the green hills, I hardly noticed the condition of the railway cars or my hard bench. And it was only seventy-five miles to Kandy, the line rising from the coast, passing through the gardens and villages on the slopes, the rice terraces full of still, silvery water and mirroring the sky, the rock temples hacked out of cliffs, the monasteries at the higher elevations. Coconut plantations, vegetable farms, pineapple fields, markets overflowing with blossoms: the way to Kandy was strewn with flowers.

Into the cooler air and taller trees, past Ambepussa Station and Polgahawela Junction, with its Buddhist monastery and temple. In the middle of the steep ascent that began at a place called Rambukkana, it began to rain—the first rain I'd seen since Bokhara, over a month before. The train's windows were open, the rain spattered in, but there weren't many passengers, and there was enough room so that we could move to the drier seats.

An older man with a tightly rolled umbrella and a wide-brimmed hat and a briefcase made room for me on one of the benches.

"You are welcome."

His name was Mr. Kumara. He had been a clerk in the Department of Health and was now retired, living on a pension.

"And I have so many other interests." He had a confident manner, and his hat, his umbrella, and his briefcase gave him a look of authority. His calm smile seemed to invite questions.

"What sort of interests?"

"Palmistry and numerology. I make predictions."

"What was your best prediction?"

"That Franklin Roosevelt would be assassinated," he said, and before I could challenge this, he added, "And that a certain woman would leave her husband—and she did."

He asked me for some of my dates, of numbers related to my life. He took out a pad and did some calculations based on my birth date, covering the page with obscure mathematics and crossings-out until he arrived at a single number, which he circled.

"Your number is two," he said. "You look younger than your age. You will have a good sun line. I can tell you that without looking at your palm." He then made a new page of calculations. "Here are the years that fate has decided for you—the significant years. When you were twenty-three, thirty-two, forty-one, and fifty."

I considered these and thought: Africa, Railway Bazaar, disastrous affair, divorce—fateful years. Mr. Kumara was looking at my palm.

"Sun line is there! See, I told you!"

Now, without anything to do except hold on to the stanchions and the straps, the other passengers took an interest and leaned over, as though to double-check the lines on my palm.

"Here is lifeline. You could live to eighty-two or eighty-five," he said, manipulating my thumb flesh. "This is Mount of Jupiter. You are stubborn, self-made man. Determined. Don't bend to anyone. You brook no interference from anyone. You live life by your own self. You are flirtatious, but not good at satisfying your sexual appetite."