Sunrise with Seamonsters (56 page)

"Calcutta's future is very dark," Professor Chatterjee told me in Calcutta one afternoon. Professor Chatterjee was an astrologer. He then told me (after a brief examination of my palm) that I would live to the age of seventy-eight, have another child (a daughter) and be given problems by people of small size.

The part about small people was certainly true. It was a small man who refused to find me a bedroll, and another small man who demanded that I double his tip, and yet another who overcharged me in a taxi, and a fourth little man who insisted that I get in touch with his brother in California to settle some family litigation that was long overdue; and four small porters squabbled so furiously over carrying my suitcases that I ended up carrying them myself in order to keep the peace.

In Calcutta I reflected on my traveling across the subcontinent by train, my going from station to station. The stations had everything—not only food and retiring rooms and human company, but also each station possessed the unique character of its city, its peculiar stinks and perfumes.

I had wanted to take a train to Assam, to Nowgong and Silchar, and then to descend into Sylhet and move sideways into Bangladesh. But this was now impossible. There was fighting in Assam, civil strife between Assamese and Bengalis, and the Nagas had never really been pacified. If I needed proof of that I had only to look at my fellow passengers on the Kamrup Express: they were men from the Indian Air Force and the Army; they had unfinished business in Assam.

Even New Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling are regarded as Disturbed Areas; foreign travelers needed a special permit to visit these places, and when it is shown at the railway station in Jalpaiguri your passport is stamped, just as it would be if you were crossing into another country.

In India there is nothing remarkable about a train that is slow—particularly one that is making a long journey through such remote provinces. But in one respect, the Kamrup Express to New Jalpaiguri was unusual: it had a dining car. For hours after we left, relays of men—only men—sat in the dining car squashing rice and
dhal
in their fists and flinging it into their mouths. Meanwhile, the kitchen staff boiled cauldrons of lentils and crouched between the cars strenuously peeling potatoes.

At dawn everything was different and serene. The landscape was dry here, but the trees were green, and not far away were the dim blue shapes of mountains to the north and northwest. We were scheduled to arrive at seven-fifteen. At seven-thirty we stopped at a tiny station near the village of Dhumdanj, which was no more than a few cows and a few families and one buffalo.

Two hours had passed. This is an aspect of train travel that must not be overlooked: the unexplained stop in the middle of nowhere; and the unexplained delay—hours during which only a dog barks, and someone shuts off a radio, and a child emerges from the tall grass beside the track to sell tea in disposable clay cups. You don't know whether you will leave in two minutes or two days, so it is unwise to stray very far from the train. The sun moves higher in the sky. A child begins to weep. Then an unexplained whistle and a few seconds later the train moves, and five hundred Indians run alongside, trying to board. We left Dhumdanj.

Everyone calls the train to Darjeeling The Toy Train. It is a narrow-gauge mountain railway, with the sort of small blue steam engines that other people put into transport museums; a real jewel, a tremendously ingenious piece of engineering—a true original. If it is inconvenient it is because in the hundred years in which it has been running it has never been improved and hardly been maintained. It was bravely built and it looks so clever and powerful that it seems an impertinence to do anything to it except ride it and let it run. It actually looks indestructible.

On this railway line dogs sleep between the tracks, and children play on the tracks and roll toys along them, and the tracks are also put to practical use by men who push huge logs along them—skidding them downhill on the rails.

The four coaches are nearly always full, if not with legitimate travelers then with joy riders—the train is part of the life of the long series of mountainsides that connect Siliguri to Darjeeling. Some people only ride a hundred yards, others are going miles. It is full of businessmen, farmers, Buddhist monks, and schoolchildren. Every ticket
is made out in duplicate, though none of them costs more than a few cents.

The train passes by the houses, a few familiar inches from the windows. It passes close enough to the shops and stalls for a train passenger to reach out and pick an onion or an apple out of a basket on the shop counter.

The valleys and these hillsides are open to the distant plains, and so the traveler on the toy train has a view which seems almost unnatural it is so dramatic. At Sonada it is like standing at the heights of a gigantic outdoor amphitheatre and looking down and seeing the plains and the rivers, roads and crops printed upon it and flattened by the yellow heat. There are wisps and whorls of cloud down there, too. But up here it is dark green and wet-hill country, where nearly everyone has rosy cheeks.

After Sonada we came to Jor Bungalow Station and then Ghoom, the highest railway station in Asia at 7,407 feet (2,257 meters). The mist shifts slightly and farther along, towards Darjeeling, it is possible on a clear day to see the long irregular ridge of rock—Kanchenjunga, massively white in the great folds of snow-covered rock.

The so-called "Batasia Loop" is the famous descent in which the train appears to be tying itself into a knot while at the same time whistling to clear its own caboose out of the way, and after three or four curves it continues on its way, gliding into Darjeeling, still following the main road and bumping past the shops and sharing the thoroughfare with the Buddhist monks and the bullock carts.

Darjeeling is unlike Simla. It is not an Indian resort but rather a Nepali town. It is a solemn place, full of schools and convents and monasteries. It is barer than Simla, not as populous; it is muddier, friendlier, very oriental looking and rather un-Indian in aspect. Simla has visitors, Darjeeling has residents; Simla is Anglo-Indian, but Darjeeling is Oriental. It is not posh. It is a hospitable place.

The curse of the town is its traffic—an endless procession of honking jeeps and trucks. It seemed to me that most of Darjeeling's problems would probably be solved with a modern version of the train, which was finished just a hundred years ago. It was a great solution then, and it still serves the town, for many people commute from places like Ghoom to jobs in Darjeeling—to the shops, to the government offices, and even to the stranger occupations in Darjeeling such as the carver of yak bones and the clerk who stands under the sign "Licensed Vendor for Ganja & Bhang." Ten grams of ganja (marijuana) cost thirty cents.

The railway needs to be improved, yet the wonder of it—like the wonder of much else in India—is that it still operates. India is a complex place. The phones seldom work, the mail is unreliable, the electricity is subject to sudden stoppages. There are numerous natural disasters and there are eight hundred million people. It seems almost inconceivable that
this country is still viable, and yet there are times when one gets glimpses of its greatness. Towards the end of my Indian journey I decided that India runs primarily because of the railway. It is an old-fashioned solution, but India has old-fashioned problems.

India's relations with Bangladesh have never been cordial, but perhaps on the theory propounded by Robert Frost that good fences make good neighbors, India has recently announced its plan to secure its national boundary with Bangladesh with a two-thousand-mile barbed-wire fence. Trains have not crossed the border for some time. I flew to Dhaka and took the Ulka Express south.

This train was on the world news the day I boarded it: it was the only link between Dhaka and Chittagong—every other road was under five feet of water, and scores of people had drowned in the torrential rains. But the monsoon comes every year to Bangladesh, and it is always severe. Its damage comes so regularly it is not remarkable. The feeling on the Ulka Express was that Bangladesh was having another unlucky week.

It was not immediately obvious that the rain was a disaster. Today the sun was shining, and this whole southern part of Bangladesh had been turned into a spectacular lake—hundreds of miles of floodwater. And the only things showing in all that water were the long straight rails of the railway track.

The Ulka Express, fifteen coaches long—one was First Class—was pulled by a Diesel engine. I would have gone Second but I would not have found a seat, and I was not prepared to stand for nine hours.

At Tongi Junction I saw another train pull in. There were perhaps fifty people clinging to the sides of the engine and hanging from the carriages and sitting and standing on the coach roofs. These seemingly magnetized people had the effect of making the train look small. They completely covered it and of course the paying passengers were jammed inside.

It made me curious about seating arrangements on the Ulka Express. I leaned out the window and saw that, apart from my coach, the whole train was exactly the same—people everywhere, holding on to the sides, the engine, and crowding the roofs. To the sound of a young beggar boy's flute, the train rattled south.

In the hot, stricken country the only thing that moved was the railway. But there was no panic. At Akhaura ("Change Here For Sylhet") a man stood up to his waist in a flooded field thoughtfully washing his cow, and farther on boats had penetrated to villages—the large boats were beamy, like old Portuguese frigates, and the smaller ones were gracefully shaped like Persian slippers.

"You will see where President Zia was assassinated in Chittagong," Mr Shahid said as we rolled along. It was as if he was passing on a piece of tourist information. He did say that I should have taken the Karnafuli
Express—it did not stop often and therefore fewer people clung to its sides.

At Comilla I met a young man who had just opened an office to encourage Bangladeshis to enroll in a Voluntary Sterilization program.

"They need incentives..."

What sort? I wondered.

"We have tried money and clothes as a sort of reward, but it is not enough. We need something more substantial. There is no problem with middle-class people. I have two children myself and I think that is a good number. The problem is with the poor. But this is a democratic country, and so we do not make sterilization compulsory."

Was he making any progress?

"Very slow progress," he said.

The worst of the floods were south of Comilla, at the town of Feni. With a kind of gloomy resignation some people resolutely bailed out their houses and fields, and others took baths. The children in the area were swimming and diving and having a wonderful time. The floods had also brought fish to these hungry people, and where the banks of rivers had been breached fishermen were enthusiastically using nets, scoops, lines, buckets, and ancient-looking fish traps.

The day continued hot, but the flood did not abate. Chittagong lay just ahead, simmering under the sun.

Jungle Lovers
was the result of my departure from Africa. In 1968, after five years in Malawi and Uganda, I decided to leave for good. I had a definite reason. There was a political demonstration in Uganda's capital, Kampala, where I was teaching at Makerere University. Violent demonstrations were not new to me—but I had never been the focus of the violence. Today the issue was white-controlled Rhodesia, and I happened to be driving into town and was taken by surprise. The Africans parading on the main street saw me—and my pregnant wife next to me—and attacked the car while we were seated in it. All the windows were broken and the steelwork hammered and dented by iron bars. An Indian helped us to safety and we hid in his shop while the Africans set about damaging the car. Later, we sneaked home, and I noticed there was broken glass all over the city.

Many of the Africans who had set upon us were my students—so they said on Monday morning. They were not apologetic. They simply said that Africans were being persecuted in Rhodesia, and that whites ... And here I stopped their explanation. Was I a white man to them, just a color, nothing more? They looked sheepish and did not reply. They had that morning prepared essays on something—perhaps a Shakespeare sonnet or a Hemingway short story. They wanted to get on with the class. I could not see the point of it. I wanted to discuss mob violence. They said it was over with—and could they please read their essays? Didn't I realize they had an exam to take?

I could not see the point of their exam. I could not understand their hurry. I disliked being a white man—after five years that was what it had come to! I decided there and then to quit my job and, as soon as our baby was born, to leave Africa. I had lost my confidence in these students. I needed different students and a new country. I remember thinking:
I have no business to be here.

Late in 1968 I got a job teaching at the University of Singapore. The Singapore authorities had got wind of the fact that I had published three novels and, taking the philistine view that writers were troublemakers, they insisted that I sign a paper saying that I would not write or publish
anything about Singapore while I was under contract. They also put me on the lowest salary scale. I wondered what they were trying to hide.

I discovered: nothing—or very little. Singapore was a small, humid island-city that called itself a republic. It was dominated by puritanical Chinese who were getting rich on the Vietnam war. My students said they wanted to emigrate to Australia. I taught courses in Jacobean literature, seventeenth century revenge-tragedies. Again I questioned whether I was cut out to be a teacher in the tropics. Of course, I wasn't, and I saw writing as liberation.

I could not write about Singapore, so I wrote about Africa—this novel. The weather was very hot, I could only work at night or on weekends, I kept my writing a secret from my employers, and in the middle of this book I contracted dengue fever: it took me more than two years to finish the novel. No novel before or since took me that long. But I had to keep at it, I had nothing else to write—and I was forbidden to write about Singapore. At last I finished it and sent it off, and it appeared in Britain and the United States at about the time I left Singapore (and teaching) to write my Singapore novel,
Saint Jack.