The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Paul Theroux

way of modernization, closed down all religious schools, dissolved dervish orders, and introduced the Latin alphabet and the Swiss civil code. He died in 1938, and that was my insight: modernization stopped in Turkey with the death of Atatürk, at five minutes past nine on 10 November 1938. As if to demonstrate this, the room in which he died is as he left it, and all the clocks in the palace show the time as 9.05.

‘What time does the Khyber Mail get to Karachi?’ ‘Timetable says seven-fifteen in the night,’ said Rashid. ‘But we will be five and a half hours late.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘We are always five and a half hours late. It is the case.’ I