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

by Paul Theroux

the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it

There was a drama outside Niš. At a road near the track a crowd of people fought to look at a horse, still in its traces and hitched to an overloaded wagon, lying dead on its side in a mud puddle in which the wagon was obviously stuck. I imagined its heart had burst when it tried to free the wagon. And it had just happened: children were calling to their friends, a man was dropping his bike and running back for a look, and farther along a man pissing against a fence was straining to see the horse. The scene was composed like a Flemish painting in which the pissing man was a vivid detail. The train, the window frame holding the scene for moments, made it a picture. The man at the fence flicks the last droplets from his penis and, tucking it in his baggy pants, begins to sprint; the picture is complete.

It was now dark outside, moonless, impenetrable, desert darkness; the tables of the dining car transmitted the click-click of the wheels to the knives and forks,

On our way into Herat the next day an Afghan passenger fired his shotgun through the roof of the bus and there was a fight to determine who would pay to have the hole mended. My ears were still ringing from the explosion a day later in Herat, as I watched groups of hippies standing in the thorn bushes complaining about the exchange rate. At three o’clock the next morning there was a parade down the main street of Herat, farting cornets and snare drums: it was the sort of bizarre nightmare old men have in German novels.

I didn’t feel I had any right to watch people bathing under a low faucet – naked among the incoming tide of office workers; men sleeping late on their charpoys or tucking up their turbans; women with nose rings and cracked yellow feet cooking stews of begged vegetables over smoky fires, suckling infants, folding bedrolls; children pissing on their toes; little girls, in oversized frocks falling from their shoulders, fetching water in tin cans from the third-class toilet; and, near a newspaper vendor, a man lying on his back, holding a baby up to admire and tickling it.

Train travel animated my imagination and usually gave me the solitude to order and write my thoughts: I travelled easily in two directions, along the level rails while Asia flashed changes at the window, and at the interior rim of a private world of memory and language.

I arrived at this hour: the bats were tumbling past the crows, and the pale yellow sky was inked like Burmese silk with the brush marks of the black bodies.

Sule Pagoda Road, with its five theatres, was mobbed with people, dressed identically in shirt, sarong, and rubber sandals, men and women alike puffing thick green cheroots, and looking (as they waved away the smoke with slender dismissing fingers) like a royal breed, strikingly handsome in this collapsing city,

At a well near the halt of Indian Fort a Burmese girl was combing her hair. She was bent forward, all her hair down – so long it nearly touched the ground – and she was drawing her comb through it and shaking it out. It was such a beautiful sight on this sunny morning – that cascade of black hair, swaying under the comb,

For lunch I had my old favourite, mee-hoon soup with a partly poached egg whisked in among the Chinese cabbage, meat scraps, prawn slices, bean sprouts, rice noodles, and a number of other atomized ingredients that thicken it to the point where it can be eaten with chopsticks.

A man near by, with his feet wide apart like a mate on a quarter deck – it is the stance of the railway drinker

We were at the fringes of a bay that was green and sparkling in bright sunlight. Beyond the leaping jade plates of the sea was an overhang of cliffs and the sight of a valley so large it contained sun, smoke, rain, and cloud – all at once – independent quantities of colour. I had been unprepared for this beauty;

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

‘That is a turnip. Kyoto is famous for them. Eat it – you will find it very tasty,’ said Professor Kishi, who had assumed the role of host. I took a bite: it was fibrous but fragrant. The bar hostess said something in Japanese to Professor Kishi. ‘She says you look like Engelbert Humperdinck.’ ‘Tell her,’ I said, ‘I think she has beautiful knees.’ He told her. She laughed and spoke again. ‘She likes your nose!’ The following day I took my hangover to the top of Mount Hiei.

I had planned to get tickets for the puppet theatre, Bunraku – it seemed the appropriate move for the travel writer to make in a strange city. If you see nothing you write nothing: you compel yourself to see.

It was not only the grey buildings and the sight of a mob of people in surgical masks waiting on a sidewalk for the light to change (in itself worrying: a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists);