Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

By Paul Theroux

This book has been a good introduction for me to Theroux’s travel writing. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is about Theroux’s journey to the East, as far as Japan, from London. It is one he has been on 33 years before, and the book that came out of that particular journey was The Great Railway Bazaar, Theroux’s first international best seller. He reprises it as an older man, a happier man, traveling like a ghost, seeing places he had seen before with new and different eyes (“It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay”). The one big change is the way he gets to Asia from Europe – he cannot get a visa this time to Iran (the last time he traveled, the Shah was in power in Iran) and Afghanistan is for all purposes closed to travel, so he gets to Delhi through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. He travels alone, by train mostly, eschews luxury for the common class and lets himself stop and stare when he feels like it. It is a fascinating travelogue peppered with often harsh judgements on entire countries and peoples, heart-warming anecdotes about chance encounters, meetings with famous literary figures in the countries he travels through (Orhan Pamuk in Turkey, Murakami and Pico Iyer in Japan, Arthur C Clarke in Sri Lanka) and references to other writers and their travels (Greene, Orwell, Conrad, Woolfe, Twain – none of whom has ever gone back to the same places again, according to Theroux). All along, there is a parallel earlier journey as reference point; and because I have not read The Great Railway Bazaar, some of the references are lost to me.

One of the more quotable chapters is the first one – where Theroux dissects what he likes about travel (“Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel’s slow tempo”) and what he dislikes about travel books (“Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous…little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics…”). Well, he himself does jump to a hell of a lot of conclusions, is infuriatingly self-indulgent at times, can be intermittently curmudgeonly; yet there is little dullness, a lot of erudition (his references to literary journeys past are quite awe-inspiring) and he does manage to provoke reaction.

I found the pieces on Turkey (he goes into Istanbul expecting a shabby Asiatic city and instead finds “a grand and re-imagined city of laughing children and beautiful women and swaggering men which had been ignored by Europe and sneered at by Islamic republics”), Vietnam (the war might have been forgiven, but there is little forgetting for a guilt-induced American here) and Central Asia were the most fascinating for me – there are many interesting stories here, throwing light on otherwise dark places.

India disgusts him at some level – its crowds, the anarchy, the free-for-all attitude, the “unfeedable, unhousable, uncontainable 1.3 billion people”. “The Indian miracle” to him is a bad joke – fed on people working for a dollar a day – and there is little that has changed in 33 years in real material terms. The biggest change to him is in the attitude – in the new found confidence of a resurgent middle class that talks progress and praises India’s economy. There are incidents that will happen to gullible white men – paying a bribe for a railway ticket (get on the Indian Railways website I want to tell this Luddite; and get to know what a world-class web ticketing system can do for you!), experiencing a buzz while facing royalty (be it the Rajputs in Jodhpur or Prince Charles on a visit). All in all, the sense one got in his last book set in India ‘The Elephanta Suite’ is the same sense a reader gets here – of a man unable to deal with the chaos and deception that a vast multitudinous country like India can dish out to a visitor.

Sri Lanka is idyllic, Burma and Cambodia are tragedies couched in beauty, Thailand is sweet, nice, orderly, filled with pretty willing women, is proud of their king and the fact that they have never been colonized (the fact that the kingdom was long a protectorate holds no significance). Singapore has a special viciousness reserved for it – “No one was fat. No one was poor. No one was badly dressed. But many Singaporeans had…the half-devil, half-child look of having been infantilized and overprotected by their unstoppably manipulative government” and “Singaporeans are encouraged to spy on each other; rats are rewarded”. Lee Kwan Yew, the benign autocrat is articulate but incoherent, is meddlesome and fiddles with people’s lives, is a cold and single-minded control freak and Singapore’s citizens take after him. China is dismissed in a few nasty lines – “Ugly and soulless, China represented the horror of answered prayers, a peasant’s greedy dream of development”. Well, one can only be glad Theroux’s countrymen are less dismissive of this giant. Japanese society confuses him – it is alienating, conformist, “Manga and the graphic novel seemed to represent a dumb, defiant anti-intellectualism”, there is something perverse about the Japanese obsession with school girls and the whole of Japanese culture is ‘sculpted and controlled’.

Theroux’s last leg on the trans-Siberian Express is the culmination of all that is good in his book. In a coming together of literature and travel, he takes us on a journey redolent with Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov. And when he concludes his Russian leg by saying that 33 years later, Russia was essentially the same – “a pretentious empire with a cruel government that was helpless without secret police”, one can hardly disagree.

There are many parts of the book that get your back up – especially when he describes places you know intimately, India and Singapore and Sri Lanka and Thailand. At times he comes across as a Westerner sneering at Eastern progress, almost as if he misses the idyllic village that the East once was, almost as if he is romanticizing poverty. Theroux is provocative, confrontational and many a time offensive. But he is hardly ever uninteresting. And even at places where you most disagree with him, you have to admit that there could be a kernel of truth in his point of view.

The Elephanta Suite

By Paul Theroux

Theroux sets his latest book - a 3 novella piece, in contemporary India. His protagonists in all 3 stories are Americans, newly arrived in a country that stuns, revolts and mostly scares them. Theroux brilliantly evokes the fear and the fascination, the decay and the opportunity, the squalor and the beauty that confronts the first time Western visitor to India today.

In the first story we encounter a couple, the Bundens, come to a yoga retreat – away from the heat and the dust of real India, cocooned in an unreal world of ayurvedic (they are unable to make up their minds whether the ayurveda doctor is a quack or not) massages, meditation and satvic food. To them this retreat is a miracle – “…India was not a country but a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures, pestilential with people – a big, horrific creature, sometimes angry and loud, sometimes passive and stinking, always hostile, even dangerous. And another miracle was that they’d found a remote part of it that was safe.” This fear of what is so unfamiliar to them makes them quite ridiculous – especially when they believe they have used the power of their wealth to grant themselves sexual favours from the staff of the retreat. It takes them a while to discover that they have been used as much. And when the real India does catch up with them (the book almost seems to say there is no escape), all the privilege in the world can do little to save them.

Debauchery is a bigger theme in the next story. That of Dwight Huntsinger, an American lawyer in India to procure outsourcing deals for his American clients. He comes to India in a fit of reckless willfulness – he is recently divorced and he says to his ex-wife that he is going to India “…as though jumping off a bridge.” His first Indian trip was “a week of Indian hell – a secular hallucinatory underworld of actual grinning demons and foul unbreathable air…’hideous’ did not describe it; there were no words for it. It was like an experience of grief, leaving you mute and small.” Yet, he recognizes that “in all that misery there was money.” And it is that which draws him back for a second trip. Now he forces himself to step out of his luxurious Elephanta Suite in the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai. And in the shadowy world around the Gateway of India, the moral depravity of his soul finds an echo – in his encounters with teenage prostitutes. They become his reason for remaining in India and day by day his dissolution grows. (The sex is vivid and frequent and nauseating - one wishes we could have been subjected to less of it). An Indian hell has enveloped him, and it takes an Indian heaven (an ashram) to help him break with the bonds of the flesh.

The third story has the character that is most empathetic to the India of today. Alice is a backpacker, taking time off after college to spend a year in India. Her travels take her to Bangalore and the ashram of Sai Baba. To pay for her way she takes up a job in the Electronic City as a tutor to call centre executives practicing their American accents. The peace she is seeking is almost there – yet it is periodically interrupted by her roommates cocooned in the ashram with little idea of the India that Alice has encountered on her journeys and her pupils who she is worried are turning into the very American brats she has run away from. Her only friends are an elephant and its mahout she befriends on her way to work. It is this elephant and the family that looks after it that shelters her when her idyll is shattered by one of those very pupils she has come to loathe. And it is this beloved elephant that secures her justice in an India that does not seem to offer her any.

All three stories are of Americans who come to India with preconceived notions; who are repelled by the country and yet who are irrevocably changed by their encounters with it. There is an unraveling in each of them, that conforms to their fears. Yet there is resolution, at least for some of them.

Theroux is amazing in his capturing of the nuances of a first timer’s encounter with a complex country. His observations are bang on –the Indian script is "like washing hanging on a clothesline"; the penchant for Indians to keep talking about themselves and their need to explain their culture to outsiders who do not get it; their inclination to use archaic English words, words like ‘utterance’, ‘miscreants’, ‘cudgeling’, ‘jocundity’. They can be sometimes trenchant – “From a distance, India was splendor; up close, misery.” And they definitely would not endear him to new age Indians looking to show off their country to outsiders. But they ring true. How could a New Englander react to India in any way but this?

As travel writing, this is brilliant. Not too many people have captured the horror India can be to a rank outsider so well. But Theroux’s story telling is more mundane. The Blundens, Dwight and Alice – they are all characters whose stories do not engage. One keeps looking for quotable quotes, little gems of observations of places and people around. These made the book for me, not the stories themselves.