Epigraph

  There is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever.

  —George Orwell, Burmese Days

  Map of Burma

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Map of Burma

  Part I: The Road to Mandalay 1: The Herefordshire

  2: The Captain’s Table

  3: All at Sea

  4: The Chummery in Rangoon

  5: Mandalay Fort

  6: School Days

  7: Captain Robinson

  8: Prowling

  Part II: The Delta 9: Water World

  10: The Dah

  11: Unsent Letters

  12: Oliphant

  13: The Turbulent Priest

  14: Departures

  15: Nits Will Be Lice

  16: A Kipling Rascal

  17: Dowry Murder

  Part III: About Rangoon 18: Pukka Sahib

  19: Moulmein Christmas

  20: Seeley’s Folly

  21: Desperate Measures

  22: Schoolboys

  23: The Panopticon at Insein

  24: The Syce

  25: A Hanging

  Part IV: Moulmein 26: Pulled Up

  27: Happy Associations

  28: Police Work

  29: The Saddan Cave

  30: The Imposter

  31: The Madman

  32: The Sacrifice

  Part V: Katha 33: Banished

  34: I Have Been Here Before

  35: Outsiders

  36: Bye Bye Blackbird

  37: The Secret Sharer

  38: The Letter

  39: Easter Weekend

  40: Get Me Out of Here

  41: The Shropshire

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Mariner Books

  Also by Paul Theroux

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  The Road to Mandalay

  1

  The Herefordshire

  East of Suez

  “That braw lanky laddie,” the woman in the upper-deck first-class saloon said, squinting and hitching herself forward in her chaise longue for a better view.

  Her white summer dress tickled her ankles, and today—the sun slanting through the window—she wore a pale, wide-brimmed hat, crowned like a lampshade and with a similar tilt, to cut the glare.

  As she raised her binoculars and peered through them toward the bow of the ship, her loose sleeves slipped to her elbows, the whiteness of her dress making her skin seem yellow. She scowled, sour-mouthed, dazzled by the sun, showing her teeth, then pawed at the adjustment wheel on the binoculars to focus on the young man. He was facing the stern, and so facing in her direction.

  “He’s there again, Alec,” the woman said.

  He wore a creamy, new-looking linen jacket, baggy gray trousers, and scuffed plimsolls. Watching the shore recede, he leaned into the breeze, his tie lifting sideways and beating against his shoulder. He saw the distant shore slipping beneath the water, a low brown hill where, minutes earlier, men in biblical robes, one leading a plodding camel burdened with bales and others with hoes, had been chopping clods of earth, working in the early November sunshine, under a cloudless sky. The last of Egypt.

  “Same spot. In that pairishing heat.”

  She studied him intently; scowling, he was smoking a cigarette, frowning as he contemplated the flattening shore, the afternoon sun on his young earnest face.

  “Ek aur,” the mustached man next to her said to a hovering waiter. Unlike the alert woman, propped up and fascinated, he reclined on the chaise longue, his feet on the leg rest, toes upraised. Now he tapped his empty glass. “Burra peg.”

  “Always alone,” the woman said. “Quite often he has a buik under his arm.”

  The man did not reply. Holding his gold wristwatch in his hand, he began winding it, having set it to the new time the captain had announced earlier. He buckled it to his wrist and admired the way the prism of its crystal caught the sunlight. As he was smiling at the blaze on the glass, the waiter returned and bowed, lowering his tray with the drink on it, murmuring, “Sahib.”

  “He was yip-yapping in French, when we went ashore. In Marseille. And French again to some hawkers in Port Said.”

  “Bloody Frog, Edith,” the man said, lifting his drink and sipping, then lapping droplets from his mustache. “Mystery solved.”

  “Not at all,” the woman said, and smiled with certainty. “He’s English.”

  “With an attack of the parly-voos.”

  “Don’t be wicked, Alec.”

  Smacking his lips, and with a hint of impatience, the man said, “Can’t see why you’re taking such a desperate interest.”

  The woman steadied her binoculars and held her breath, in the manner of someone trying to identify a bird on a branch. “He’s refained.”

  “Pardon?” the man said sharply.

  “I’m thinking of Muriel,” the woman whispered, as though the young man might hear, though he was forty yards distant, still at the bow rail, watching the shore.

  Sighing and lifting his glass, the man drank, and swallowing seemed to swallow whatever he was going to say.

  Still whispering the woman said, “He might be just right for her.”

  “Really.” The word was plummy with disbelief. “Probably a planter’s bairn, off at Colombo, up to the tea estates.”

  “He’s booked through to Rangoon.”

  “You talked to the chap?”

  “I talked to the purser,” the woman said, setting the binoculars onto her lap and staring at the man, with a smile of defiance.

  “Half the ship is going to Rangoon.”

  “He’s in first class.”

  “Along with masses of others.”

  “He’s single.”

  “I should jolly well hope so, he’s hardly twenty-two.”

  “Nineteen,” the woman said.

  “Unsuitable.”

  “But his tie,” the woman said and handed him the binoculars. “Have a dekko.”

  The man muttered “dekko,” in a tone of annoyance. He hummed as he looked through the binoculars, then said, “Blue stripes.”

  “Eton,” the woman said, clamping her teeth on the word.

  Now the man jammed the binoculars against his eyes and looked closely at the tie, flung over the young man’s shoulder, where it still flapped. He returned the binoculars to the woman who had just lit a cigarette. Making a fish mouth in triumph, she blew a plume of smoke at the man.

  Waving the smoke aside, the man said, “I’ll arrange to have the captain invite him to dinner.”

  The tall young man—Eric Blair—had been waiting for this moment, the ship released by the local pilot who’d guided the Herefordshire through the canal and who’d just reboarded the escort boat that had drawn alongside. The Herefordshire’s captain grasped the handles of the ship’s wheel—easily seen through the slanted windows of the bridge—and the engines began grinding and groaning, louder as the speed increased, and also thumping under Blair’s plimsolls. The smudge of a small coastal town slipped below the horizon.

  “‘Somewheres east of Suez,’” Blair was murmuring with emotion. He hadn’t felt this at Port Suez, among the souvenir sellers and the gully-gully man producing a live chick from a startled child’s ear; nor at the crowded bazaar, buying his solar topee; nor seeing some crew members spread small thin carpets on the afterdeck and kneeling to pray. That was prologue. He held the poem’s words as pleasure in his mouth—he didn’t want to be seen smiling.

  That was when he had turned, his tie blowing over his shoulder, as he faced the blue water of the gulf, the sun behind him heating his head, the low brown profile of the shore on both sides receding so quickly he could easily imagine he was in the open ocean—even though he knew from the map in the lounge that the Red Sea lay ahead, and later the Indian Ocean.

  Where the best is like the worst—the lines running through his mind. Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments . . .

  Now he could not resist smiling—no one could see him—he was facing forward, gladdened by the accelerating engine, the obvious speed and slosh, after the plod through the canal. The bow wake parted the sea, a greeny-blue spearpoint.

  An’ a man can raise a thirst.

  For the rest of the glowing afternoon he remained on the bow deck, peering ahead, thinking, I’m on my way, his decision seeming somehow more serious and strange as the heat of the day burned against his head—this heat reminding him that he was entering a new zone, a new climate, sailing to the far corner of the British Empire where it was likely just as hot, maybe hotter.

  What pleased him was that Eton was in the past—he was no longer a schoolboy, and in his mind’s eye he saw himself in his school uniform—the top hat, the tailcoat—he shook his head at the memory, with his friends, fat little Connolly, spotty Hollis, round-shouldered Runciman, walking solemnly to chapel or to exams, or garbing for combat in the Wall Game. It was hardly like study at all, but rather a pompous version of youthful folly, odious little snobs innocent of the world. The misery of trudging around Agar’s Plough with his parents after tea on a visitors’ day. Then, remembering his tutor Gow chalking Greek letters on the blackboard, Blair admitted to himself that without Gow’s teaching, his India Office exam results would have been poorer—he might not have passed.

  He saw himself bent over Greek prep, he saw himself defy
ing the master of the college, bossy John Crace, he saw himself in the exam hall, he saw himself now, as though he was a spectator standing apart on the deck, a second self, keenly aware that he was playing a role—this nameless alter ego, clear-sighted and quiet and rational, and sometimes appalled by what Blair was doing, or saying—a weird self-conscious detachment, intense now, surrounded by the greasy-looking surface of the Red Sea, sailing to a fate he could not guess at, but in progress, and irreversible. He had committed himself to it for five years, and as the ship plowed on, the vibrating engines numbing his feet, he realized that he could not think for a moment about going back. He sensed the weight of his parents’ concentrating on him—their hopes, their seriousness, their need for him to make a success of his job. And that wearied him, his necessity to please them—his father especially, old and sullen and disappointed in himself, Opium Agent Fourth Class (Ret’d), fixing his eyes on him and saying gruffly, “Don’t let us down, Eric.”

  That was a needle. He’d posted a letter at Port Said, describing the ship, the food, the passengers, the weather in the Mediterranean, their first sight of Egypt. He’d write again, he said; Colombo was a week away—he’d mention the camels and Kipling and the canal, and his reading, the H. G. Wells novel, and he added his wishes to his sisters, Avril and Marjorie. Blair had written, too, to Jacintha Buddicom, a short note, with a poem he’d composed after Gibraltar, mentioning the ship’s bow “thrusting majestically through the Pillars of Hercules,” the memory of its mawkishness embarrassing him now.

  His detachment remained, the hovering, watchful self, seeing the young man in the jacket and tie on deck, like a character in a story, knowing what the young man was hesitant to admit: that he was uncertain; that he really didn’t have a clue; that he was to be a policeman.

  The click of shuffleboard discs woke him from his reverie—two men behind him, poking their cue sticks at the discs and bantering.

  “Chance your arm, Basil!”

  “I will and all. But I need a wee sharpener. Allow me to fortify myself with a bit of barley-bree. Steward!”

  “Sahib!”

  It was the hour of deck games and strollers, the sun hanging low, leaving the port side in shadow, the hour that Blair always chose to slip away, back to his cabin, hoping that no one would speak to him. And trying to avoid seeing David Jones, his fellow candidate in the police, also headed to Rangoon, who occupied a nearby cabin.

  “You may have to face the ugly fact that you can’t do it anymore.”

  “Not”—and Blair saw the mustached man push with his cue stick—“perhaps with the same penetration. But you might be surprised.”

  “Perish the thought. Oh, crumbs, a near miss!”

  “Deck wants scrubbing.”

  As the two men jawed, a turbaned waiter approached with a tumbler on a tray.

  “Stop right there, my man!” the mustached man shouted.

  “Sahib.”

  “Lussen, when I push I need a guid clean thrust. I can’t have you dancing attendance. I want you absolutely rigid.”

  “Yes, master.”

  “And bring us each another chotapeg of Jameson’s.”

  “Yes, master.”

  Wary of slipping past the men and being greeted, Blair had crept to the rail, out of sight of the men but still within earshot.

  “Our friend Alec.”

  “Poodle-Wilmot. Ha!”

  “There’s talk his missus put the shutters up.”

  They were whispers, but audible enough.

  “Sairten latitude on this vessel for rumpty-tumpty.”

  Blair feared being seen, he felt complicit, hearing the men talk, the shuffleboard discs clicking. He sensed his face heating and knew he was blushing, hearing the whispers, the insinuations. He slid along the rail toward the lifeboat and the door to the stairwell. On the cabin deck two women walked past, their skirts swishing, not greeting him, hearty with each other.

  “Rafe’s a bounder—”

  “My Frank’s no different.”

  They knew each other well, the men talkative and fraternal, the women like sisters; all the passengers seemed on good terms with one another, even if half the time they were gossiping. It was a seagoing community of Anglo-Indians, clerks and bureaucrats and their memsahibs, brothers and sisters.

  The Raj afloat, with intimacies that Blair found astonishing for its clubby candor, or more than clubby, an extended family of smug overlords and philistines—not one of them he’d seen in a deck chair had been reading a book, though many of the women had their nose in a magazine. He’d felt conspicuous with his book, the Tono-Bungay he’d wanted to reread. A book told so much about the person reading it. But these were outgoing, social creatures, chatting among themselves, dining together, dancing and changing partners. And many had the peculiar plummy accents of English people who’d lived abroad for years, who’d refined and improved their lower-middle-class accents, making the women sound actressy and the men bluff, honking and huffing, “I say, my dear chap . . .”

  Blair cringed to think he was judging them so harshly, that he found the Scots the most tedious and at times uppity, sometimes echoing the porkers he’d known at St. Cyprian’s, boasting of hunting or fishing attended by “Our gillies . . .” What appalled him was a fear he could not share in any letter home, that he was facing a future with these people, that they would be his superiors. Painfully conscious of his youth, he longed for June, when he would turn twenty.

  And something else niggled him about the other passengers, and it was unbearable at times. Listening to them reminiscing about India, or complaining about babus and servants, they spoke in the Anglo-Indian tones of his father and mother, of the chowkidar and the amah, the chai wallah and the syce. The common language was the language of the Raj, and Blair hated being reminded of it. They knew each other well, but he did not want to know them. And I don’t want them to know me.

  It was easy enough to avoid them. They were occupied with games, with drink, with food, with music in the first-class saloon—he could hear it now, as on every other night, the ship’s small dance band, Reg Melly and his Mello-Tones, vibrating in the steel plates of the deck, the walls of his cabin, seeping through the portholes.

  I found my love in Avalon

  Beside the bay . . .

  He hated knowing the words, they lodged in his head, but that one, “Avalon,” was better than Reg Melly’s snarly, winking version of “Ain’t We Got Fun”:

  Every morning, every evening

  Ain’t we got fun . . .

  By now, past Suez, he’d unwillingly learned Reg Melly’s whole repertoire, and he despised himself for it, the way the songs worked their way into his head and jarred his evenings, reading Wells to the lyrics “Though April showers may come your way.”

  Those were the tunes tickling through the walls; but it was worse above decks, much worse in the dining room and the saloon, the smoking room and the library, the eye-blinding music from seven to eleven, and the drunken hoots afterward as the roisterers made their way back to their cabins.

  How do I avoid knowing them, and their knowing me? It was perhaps simple: stay in my cabin. The bed could have been bigger—his legs were far too long for this berth—but it was luxury to have such privacy after the continual intrusions of Eton and his parents sniffing scrutiny at their small house in Southwold. Blair knew he was a boy, but there were moments on board the Herefordshire when he imagined he might pass for a grown man.

  The band was playing “Avalon” again. He’d heard it in Southwold on the wireless when he was cramming for his exams. Thankfully, tonight Reg Melly was conducting the Mello-Tones, and not singing the words, and as the band played he knew from the syncopation that the passengers were dancing—he’d seen them in the Mediterranean, as he walked the deck, glancing through the window of the lounge, thinking, I could never do that, glad to be anonymous.

  American music, most of it; the English were besotted—they loved Al Jolson in blackface. Blair wanted to be satirical, yet the songs made him melancholy and somehow reminded him in a mocking way of his distance from home. And though the passengers listened to be soothed by the music, they seemed more ridiculous and sad, cheering themselves with the mawkish sentiments of popular songs and dancing like fools.