Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (45 page)

It was a "chummery," a sort of frat house of the Raj where young single men—someone like George Orwell, who was a policeman, or H. H. Munro, who was also in the police—would have gone in the hot season for a month of leave. The more established officers of empire, with wives and children, had their own bungalows or villas. The town had always had a large population of Indian descent, and many Nepalese too, descendants of the courageous and well-drilled Gurkha soldiers the British had brought to Burma.

I walked up the path and onto the veranda and inside the open door, into the past.

Here there was no letdown. The whole place had been restored: the big varnished staircase with its curved banisters, the teak railings running along the upper gallery as in an English country house, the vast entryway rising two stories to the beamed ceiling and the stuffed buffalo head, and more trophies—small, sharp deer horns mounted on plaques in a long row.

I stood before the bare desk with its guest book open on it. The floor had been polished, the place was clean, with its tang of new varnish. Not a single guest in sight, no one at all, yet it was as warm and as welcome a destination as it had been thirty-three years before—more so, since it was for me, as some other places had been, a homecoming. It was full of memories, a ghost-haunted house in an unthreatening sense.

Though I had claimed in
The Great Railway Bazaar
to have encountered him on the train—I wanted to give my little trip some drama—it was here at Candacraig that I'd first met the hospitable Mr. Bernard.

This kindly and dignified man had challenged me to guess his age, and when I guessed wrong, he told me he was eighty, saying, "I was born in eighteen ninety-four in Rangoon. My father was an Indian, but a Catholic. That is why I am called Bernard. My father was a soldier in the Indian Army. He had been a soldier his whole life—I suppose he joined up in Madras in the eighteen seventies. He was in the Twenty-sixth Madras Infantry and he came to Rangoon with his regiment in eighteen eighty-eight. I used to have his picture, but when the Japanese occupied Burma ... all our possessions were scattered, and we lost so many things."

Mr. Bernard, a colonial from a transplanted family (he'd never been to India), was a link to the nineteenth century. His memory was wonderfully precise. He told me in detail about his working on the railway, his army career, his life as a chef and a steward. He had met Chiang Kaishek and Lord Curzon and the Duke of Kent—all in Mandalay, where he served them six-course dinners at the officers' mess. He remembered the day Queen Victoria died, the day the Japanese invaded Maymyo, and he told me about his many children. I met a couple of them when they came to my room to bring me buckets of hot water for my bath and to build a fire in my bedroom fireplace.

Now I was back in this stately mansion, glad that it still existed and was in business.

"Yes?"

A man slipped behind the registration desk and twisted the guest book my way for my signature.

"Welcome, sir."

He was a smiling slender Indian, about fifty or so, in a baseball cap and a jacket—he had just come from supervising some gardeners repaving a path. The clothes made him seem athletic.

I said, "I was here once a long time ago. This place is in really good shape."

"Recently renovated," the young man said. "New paint. New varnish. Better plumbing. When were you here, sir?"

"Thirty-something years ago!"

"A long time, sir."

"I wrote about it—about being here, meeting Mr. Bernard."

"My father," the man said. He looked at me narrowly, and then his smile brightened. He had beautiful teeth, a friendly face. "You are Mr. Paul Theroux."

"That's me."

"I'm Peter Bernard"—and he shook my hand. "I'm manager now. I'm so glad to see you. We talk about you all the time. We have a copy of your book. You were up there in room eleven. Let me take you there."

It is not often in life that you make a general travel plan and everything works out perfectly, but this was one of those times. And the best part was that, because perfection is unimaginable, there were limits to hopes. The rest came unexpectedly, unbidden, undreamed of.

"I remember you, sir!" he said.

It was more than I'd hoped for, and that was pure pleasure, a return to the past without an atom of disappointment—the past recaptured, like a refuge, everything that I'd wanted a homecoming to be but that a homecoming (at least in my case) never was. This was a wonderful way back, as though this man in his fifties, who'd been a teenager before, had been waiting for me to return.

"You came from Lashio on the train, on a pony cart from the station," he said. "You smoked a pipe. You wore a black shirt. Such a small bag you had." We were in the room—spacious, with a fireplace and a view of the gardens. "I saw you writing at the table here."

So, at last, a witness to my long-ago misery, my loneliness, my scribbling. I said, "Your father—what happened to him?"

"Dead, sir. Some years ago." But he began to smile again. "He read your book! A guest brought him a copy. He was so happy to read about himself. Everyone knew about it. He became quite well known. Because of what you wrote in your book, many people came here. They mentioned you."

Peter Bernard showed me around the mansion—the floors were polished, the beds made, the fireplaces whitewashed, flowers in vases, the tables laid in the dining room. The light was exceptional, because all the rooms had large windows and each room its own balcony. Imperial architecture here, the villas and bungalows of the British colonial officers—Indian army, civil service—was deliberately roomy and comfortable, reflecting their pretensions to be considered upper class if not aristocratic. That was the imperial ploy: as soon as the British got to the colonies, they jumped up a class or two and put on airs and browbeat the underlings, the servants, the workers they referred to as dogsbodies. Kipling dramatized it, Saki satirized it, Orwell objected violently to it, E. M. Forster fictionalized it, J. R. Ackerley tittered over it. But Mr. Bernard had stood and served; he was, after all, a Victorian, from a transplanted family, a loyal British subject.

His first name had been Albert. If I had known that, I would have remembered it; it was my own father's name. Mr. Bernard had been chief steward of Candacraig, appointed in 1962 at the age of sixty-six, summoned out of semi-retirement to straighten the place out. He'd been so old when I'd met him (he had stories of World War I), he might have waited on the colonial policeman Eric Blair, who might have stayed here, before he left for London to become George Orwell. Mr. Bernard had died at the age of ninety.

The portrait of Mr. Bernard in my book had done what the written word sometimes accidentally does, worked a kind of magic. It had brought visitors, and it had given Mr. Bernard "face," which was so important in Burma, especially for a non-Burmese of Indian descent. I had mentioned in my book that his father had been in the Indian army. Peter told me that his grandfather had held the post of bandmaster in the Madras Infantry, and that he had never returned to India, nor had any other member of the family ever been to India, even for the merest visit.

"What's it like there, India?" Peter asked. "So many people, eh?"

Later he invited me to his house—the family house, built by Mr. Bernard for his nine children.

It was a sprawling bungalow called Newlands, at the end of a long driveway—the usual wall around it—and beneath a large banyan tree. I was greeted by two men in their sixties, Vincent and John, so delighted to be told who I was that they got my book from a back room and showed it to me. Mr. Bernard's signature was on the front endpaper.

"He used to read it," Vincent said. "It made him really happy."

Of the nine Bernard children, only two were married, John and Margaret. Victor—born in 1945, named for the victory over the Japanese—had died of heart failure.

"He was a priest, a Salesian father, with a church upcountry in Wa State."

Wa State was distant and isolated, in the Shan Plateau, the poppy-growing and opium-exporting area, in the smoky mountains of the
Golden Triangle. But Father Victor Bernard hadn't been fazed and had been popular in his parish, which included the main town of Pang Wai. The Wa people were darker than the Burmese, animist, jungle-dwelling. They were mainly poppy cultivators and had a high incidence of opium smoking. What made them especially attractive to Catholic and Baptist missionaries was their colorful paganism. Noted for their dog eating, their headhunting, and their connoisseurship of skulls, they often set so many skulls on poles that they created (as Mr. Kurtz had done in the Inner Station) what seemed avenues of human skulls in the jungle, aiming at purification, to drive evil spirits away.

The Wa denied they were cannibals, the Burmese historian Thant Myint-U claimed. It was only good fortune that they sought in their strenuous decapitations: "a good skull or two would ensure all the maize and dog and good liquor (strong rice wine) they needed to be happy." Wa State bordered China, and Pang Wai was conveniently near the Chinese town of Cangyuan, on the opium transshipment route. Even in a shrinking world, Wa State, east of the Salween River, was not just distant but almost inaccessible.

I sat in the Bernards' parlor drinking tea, catching up. Margaret now lived in Berlin. A German doctor who'd read my book had made a visit to Candacraig. A widower, he'd taken the trip for his nerves and had met Margaret, who was a receptionist at the hotel. He fell in love with her. They married here, garlanded with flowers.

In a country of slender, soft-voiced beauties with creamy skin, the loveliest smiles, and the gentlest manner, the rest of the Bernard brothers had remained stubbornly single. This baffled me. Apart from Margaret, the sisters, too, had chosen spinsterhood. The better I got to know them, the more I felt that this was a comment on their happy household, the mutually supportive family Mr. Bernard had fathered, and maybe an indication of how they had lived in Upper Burma, in a closed culture, Catholics of Indian descent among Buddhist Burmans. Pictures of Jesus, of Mary, of saints, were hung on the walls of the parlor. On the mantelpiece a gold chalice glittered among devotional tokens.

Their mother, Theresa Bernard, had been beloved and doted on; she'd died only a few years before, also at the age of ninety. It was as though they were all so content they couldn't bear to leave the serenity of the homestead. Margaret had left the country. Jane had recently visited her in Germany, and reported that she was happy in Berlin. Of the others,
none had left Myanmar. They continued to live the provincial life of the small town, with occasional visits to Mandalay.

"I'm still waiting for my lucky day," Vincent said of his marriage prospects. He was a powerfully built man who, with a Dutch partner, managed two thousand acres of maize some distance from Pyin-Oo-Lwin.

John, whose nickname was Sunny, was a thin, watchful man. He sat sideways on a straight-backed chair, tremulous in the early stages of Parkinson's disease. He said, "I remember you so well, Mr. Paul. You were in the corner room. You talked to us."

"Your father was proud of you," I said.

"You wrote our names in your book!" Vincent said.

"Was your father strict?"

"He beat me twice a week," Sunny said without rancor, smiling, widening his eyes.

Peter agreed: I had described their father's interesting career as a colonial servant, but I hadn't mentioned his severity. Well, how was I to know? Their father had been punctual, methodical, demanding, an early riser. Candacraig had been his entire responsibility, and the burden had come at the end of his career. He had supervised the place until his retirement. And, though it had been owned by the government, he had turned it into a family enterprise: all the children had worked here at one time or another.

Vincent said, "People came holding your book, wanting to meet my father. Tourists from Britain. From America. Aussies, too. My father met them and talked to them and told them his stories."

"He was eighty-one when he retired," Peter said.

"Later, when they came, we informed them he was dead," Sunny said. "Some of them cried. They went away sad."

They showed me family albums, memorabilia, a large studio portrait of their father, looking owlish in horn-rimmed glasses. And so I sat there, and drank tea, and was happy. It was a homecoming I had not expected, like a visit to generous grateful relatives I had not seen in decades. Nothing like this had ever happened to me among my own family. Was this a motivation, the embrace of strangers, in my becoming a traveler? It was all positive and pleasurable, the men I had remembered as eager polite boys; the women who'd just been names. The wonderful part was the continuity of it all, that life had gone on. Without daring to
anticipate such an event, it was the sort of reunion I had hoped for when I set out to repeat my trip.

I looked at the bazaar and the Christian churches—Gothic in red brick—and spent a day at Kandawgyi, botanical gardens that dated from the first serious settlement of the town, when the railway had been finished in 1900. It was a beautifully landscaped area of more than four hundred acres, with a pond and bamboo groves and endangered deer and a research center devoted to growing mulberry trees for silkworms, as well as the raising of silkworms themselves. Walking along the flower-bordered paths I was reminded that at an earlier time I would have directed the rickshaw driver to pass the Kandawgyi Gardens and asked him to stop at the Kandawgyi Bar, if such a place could be found, and I would have stayed there, getting half drunk and homesick.

The night before I left, I did get half drunk at the Aung Padamyar, an Indian restaurant that Vincent recommended. It was run by one of his female cousins, for Mr. Bernard's brother was also an old-time resident of Maymyo.

Dennis Bernard, another cousin, introduced himself. Another genial wraith from the distant past, he said, "Remember me? I set the table for you at Candacraig."

He was also in his fifties, semi-retired. He said that he had worked for Mr. Bernard as a waiter and a cleaner.