In Mandalay
COLIN THUBRON (born London, 1939) is a travel writer and novelist. His first books were about the Middle East – Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled by car into the Soviet Union, a journey recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books on China, Russia and Central Asia: Behind the Wall: a Journey through China, The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia, Shadow of the Silk Road and most recently, To a Mountain in Tibet. He has won many prizes and awards. In 2010 he became President of the Royal Society of Literature.
It is thirty-five years ago now, and the time has faded to a sepia strangeness, lit by a few sharp surviving details: a man’s pained smile, a shelf of mouldering books. It was a time when Myanmar – old British Burma – was even more constrictive than now. Travellers were permitted seven days in the country, and in that tense span might attempt the gruelling 450-mile railway journey from Rangoon to Mandalay, returning down the Irrawaddy by steamer past the long-ruined capital of Pagan.
I had driven out from Europe through countries which were less dangerous then – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir – and across northern India. But the Burmese border was where the overland journey had always stopped dead. I ditched my car in Calcutta and flew south-east, bypassing the jungled tribal hills of northern Myanmar, to land at last in a sequestered Rangoon.
I remember the city in grand decline: shrubs sprouting through the Victorian stone, a black market thriving among people who lived by a private economy, the otherworldly beauty of worshippers processing round the Shwedagon pagoda, as if nothing for centuries had changed. It was a land and people whose infinite appeal to the camera barely softened a harsh poverty. The junta of General Ne Win looked set to rule forever. The democratic heroine Aung San Suu Kyi was still a wife in Oxford. The country lay in a time-warp, charming the fleeting foreigner, who knew nothing.
The only domestic air flights had been commandeered by the army, so it was by the steam-train that I laboured north to Mandalay. I cannot remember how long it took, or how often it broke down. The train was so crowded that people clung to its foot-rails and squatted on its roofs. For an interminable night I sat wedged among betel-spitting farmers above the clanking buffers linking two carriages. Whenever we stopped, the villagers waiting on country platforms stormed through the windows (the glass had long ago gone) or charged through the jammed doors; while those inside – already half suffocated – slammed down the window shutters and fought to keep them out.
IT IS EVENING, in my memory, as we grind to a halt in Mandalay station. Mandalay! It was the last royal capital of the Burmese kings, the city of Kipling and Orwell. In 1885 its heart – the royal palace – had been looted by the invading British, and its library burnt to the ground. Then the Japanese occupied it in World War II, and the allies bombed it to a wasteland.
Pandemonium broke out in the station as the bleary passengers descended. A horde of bicycle rickshaw drivers was waiting to transport us through the city, and I was encircled by bellowing cries for custom. I remember no faces at all, only the clamour of these voices rising in a raucous plea from men whose lives might last only as long as their stringy bodies held up.
Suddenly, at the back of the crowd, a quaintly pedantic suggestion floated: ‘Excuse me, sir, would you care for a rickshaw?’ I hunted for the source of this, and saw a face whose gentle features were inexplicable among those around him: the hair curly and barbered, the bones more delicate. He bowed slightly. ‘My name is Tun.’
He pedalled me out into the city whose markets and monasteries seemed scattered at the end of the world. Mine was the only white face. Tun recounted the town’s history in soft, studious English. He wore an immaculate sarong and a skimpy vest. I felt guilty for using him.
Beyond the moated palace – brick palisades pierced by flimsy gates and turrets – lay the wasteland left by the British. It looked pathetically vulnerable – a medieval world levelled by aircraft. I wandered through it with uneasy fascination at what had been lost. Some weed-glazed canals survived among the overgrown terraces, where humps and ridges marked the course of vanished passageways and rooms. A harmless-looking cannon pointed at nothing. I remembered illustrations of Burmese soldiers in quilted armour and leather helmets. But Tun spoke only with hardy irony that he and I – Burmese and British – should be walking here at peace. ‘Things were different then. Those were cruel times.’
I thought: but he is still living in such times. His government was a tyranny. His city was poor and decaying, its infrastructure collapsed. Its streets were tracks. Yet he retained this curious refinement. As we emerged through one of the toy-like gates and over the moat, he said: ‘Will you come home with me? I will learn good English.’
‘You already have good English.’
I was waiting for him to explain why – was he a disgraced teacher, a journalist? – but he only said: ‘It’s too long forgotten.’
HIS HOME LAY behind a stockade spiked with palm trees: a wooden house with a flaking white balcony and a roof of falling tiles. Three small, fat children sat in its entrance, dressed comfortably in woollen jumpers, cramming their mouths with rice out of an aluminium bowl. Their sleepy eyes looked at me in mute bewilderment. Their mother might have belonged to another race from Tun’s. Her furious cheekbones and jutting teeth gave her a look of inadvertent wildness. She smiled an artless welcome at me.
Their home held almost nothing. A watchdog crouched under the steps. The inner walls were woven palm leaves. The bed where I slept that night was a wooden frame clouded by mosquitoes. A single shelf held mildewed books, which might have been salvaged from somewhere grander. I noticed Dickens’ novels, Alistair Maclean’s The Dark Crusader and the stories of Rudyard Kipling.
No, Tun said, his wife did not read. She was illiterate. ‘She is not very clever, but she is very good.’ After a while he said: ‘Will you meet my other relatives?’
I imagined them living as he did, in modest suburban poverty. Instead, to my astonishment, he bicycled me to a ponderous Edwardian mansion. Without knocking, we entered dust-filled rooms lined with teak furniture, where his aunt and uncle – inscrutably old and courteous – rocked in padded chairs and mewed out greetings.
Walking in their garden, lost under honeysuckle and weeds, my pent-up curiosity at last spilled over. Why was Tun not living like them? What had happened to him?
Momentarily he winced, then settled into a story that filled him with self-wonder, as if he were talking of somebody else, or of somebody long ago.
He came from a good family, he said, old Burmese aristocrats. Some years ago he had started his career as a soldier, and was one of a handful selected to go to England for officers’ training. There, with his quick ear, he had picked up the language.
‘After I came back I was a favoured cadet, of course, and in time I found myself serving as a captain on our north-east frontier. In those days it was filled with Chinese bandits, and we were trying to eliminate them.’ These bandits, he explained, were the remains of Chinese Nationalist armies who had fled the Communist victory of 1949. At first they had lingered on the frontier, hoping to reoccupy their homeland, but were each time repulsed. So at last they became little more than outlaws and drug traffickers, and the Burmese army moved against them.
‘I was young then. I was in charge of a platoon dug in above a ridge near the Chinese positions. I confess I was frightened.’ He was walking fast along the weed-sown paths, almost marching. ‘One night our sentries had fallen asleep. But I was still awake, reading an Alistair MacLean novel in the moonlight. It was very bright. Suddenly I heard a clink in the silence, and I looked up to see the slope below swarming with Chinese. They were climbing towards us and already so close that I could see their teeth gleaming in the moonlight, smiling.’
His expression on me was one of faded horror. He said: ‘I managed to wake up my platoon in time. Then we mowed them down. All of them. It seemed like hundreds. We were concealed above them and they didn’t stand a chance.’
I said lamely: ‘So you did your duty.’
He shook his head. ‘Then something happened inside me. Something I don’t understand. In those days officers wore long swords. I pulled mine out and climbed down the slope.’ He lifted a ghostly sabre. ‘Then I went mad. I started hacking at the dead and wounded, the dying. I couldn’t stop. It was a kind of frenzy. On and on, in their blood. Slashing …’
We had arrived back at the gate now, where his rickshaw stood comfortingly with its twin wheels and padded carriage.
‘After that I wasn’t the same. I was revolted at myself.’ He turned towards me. ‘Was this myself? I decided to leave the army. I tried to resign. But they had spent too much money on me, and wouldn’t let me go. It was only later that General Ne Win demanded all army officers sign an oath of allegiance to him. I took my opportunity and refused, so they sacked me. And no other employer would touch me then, of course.’
He mounted his bike, while I sat behind, wondering, ashamed again that he was toiling for me. He ended: ‘So I became a rickshaw driver in Mandalay.’
IN THE DAWN LIGHT I woke to catch the steamer south to Pagan, and Tun pedalled me unspeaking to the wharfside. He may have regretted his sudden intimacy, I don’t know. He looked quiet and worn. Only as the tottering, two-storey steamer pulled from the quayside, he raised his hand at me departing over the flood-waters, and went on waving for a long time, as if he were saying farewell to something else, until the swell of the river took him from sight.
