The Great Railway Bazaar - Theroux Paul - Страница 55

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I said, 'Now, you've been to the conference, right? And I suppose you're going back to Bangladesh – '

'Back to Singapore, then Bangkok by air, then Dacca,' said Mr Ghosh.

'Right. But when you get back there – I mean, you've heard all these papers about family planning – what are you going to do?'

'Ghosh?' said Rahman, inviting his colleague to reply.

Mr Ghosh cleared his throat. He said, 'There are many problems. I should say first we will start straightaway on curriculum. Curriculum is most important. We must build a model – work with a model of aims and objectives. What are we trying to do? What do we aim to achieve? And why? And costings must be considered. All those questions: answers must be found. Do you follow me?' He cleared his throat again. 'Then, next important, is areas of information' – he spread his hands to suggest the size of the areas – 'that is, we must create areas of information so that ordinary people can understand importance of our work.'

'Where are you going to do this?'

'In universities,' said Mr Ghosh.

'Universities?'

'We have many universities in Bangladesh,' said Mr Rahman.

'You mean you're going to get the universities to practise family planning?'

'No, to study the problem,' said Mr Ghosh.

'Hasn't it been studied before?'

'Not in these new ways,' said Mr Rahman. 'We haven't got areas of information, as Ghosh said. And we have no trained people. Ghosh and myself were the only delegates from Bangladesh at the conference. Now we must take all this knowledge back.'

'But why to the universities?'

'Explain,' said Mr Rahman to Mr Ghosh.

'He does not understand,' said Mr Ghosh. 'First to the universities, then, when the trained people are there, to the rural areas.'

'What's the population of Bangladesh?'

'That is a difficult question,' said Mr Ghosh. 'There are many answers.'

'Give me a rough estimate.'

'Round about seventy-five million,' said Mr Ghosh.

'What's the growth rate?'

'Some say 3 per cent, some say 4,' said Mr Ghosh. 'You see, no work can begin until a proper census is taken. Do you know when the last census was taken in our country? Guess.'

'I can't guess.'

'It was years ago.'

'When?'

'So many, I don't know myself. Years and years. British time. Since then we have had cyclones, wars, floods, so many things to add and subtract. We cannot begin until we have a census.'

'But that could be years from now!'

'Well, that's the problem,' said Mr Rahman.

'In the meantime the population will get bigger and bigger – it'll be fantastic.'

'You see what I mean?' said Mr Ghosh. 'Our people don't know this. I can say at the moment they lack jeal.'

'Zeal?'

'Yes, and purpose.'

'May I ask you another question, Mr Ghosh?'

'Go right ahead. You ask so many!'

'How many children do you have?'

'I am having four.'

'Mr Rahman?'

'I am having five.'

'Is that a good size for Bangladesh?'

'Perhaps not. It is hard to say,' said Mr Rahman. 'We have no statistics.'

'Are there other family-planning people like yourselves in Bangladesh?'

'Many! We have had an ongoing programme for -what? Mr Ghosh – three years? Four years?'

'Do these other family planners have big families or small families?' I asked.

'Some family planners are having big and some are having small.'

'What do you call big?'

'More than five,' said Mr Rahman.

'Well, it's hard to say,' said Mr Ghosh.

'Do you mean more than five in the family?'

'More than five children,' said Mr Rahman.

'Okay, but if a family planner goes to a village and word gets out that he has five children of his own, how the hell is he going to convince people that – '

'It is so hot,' said Mr Rahman. 'I think I will go inside.'

'Wery interesting to talk to you,' said Mr Ghosh. 'I think you are a teacher. Your name?'

It was dark when we pulled into Kuala Lumpur Station, which is the grandest in southeast Asia, with onion-domed cupolas, minarets, and the general appearance of the Brighton Pavilion, but twenty times larger. As a monument to Islamic influence it is much more persuasive than the million-dollar National Mosque down the road, which gets all the tourists. I rushed off the train and ran to the Booking Hall to get a ticket for the next train to Singapore. It was leaving at eleven that night, so I had time to have a quiet beer with an old friend and a plate of chicken satay in one of those back lanes that made Cocteau call the city 'Kuala L'impure'.

THE NORTH STAR NIGHT EXPRESS TO SINGAPORE

'T wouldn't go to Singapore if you paid me,' said the JL man at the end of the bar in the lounge car. He was an inspector in the Malaysian police, a Tamil Christian named Cedric. He was getting drunk in the lazy confident way people do when they are on a train and have a long journey ahead of them. It was overnight to Singapore, and the people in the lounge car (Chinese at mahjong, Indians at cards, a scrum of English planters and estate managers telling stories) had the relaxed look of members in the bar of a Malaysian club. Cedric said Singapore had lost its charm. It was expensive; people ignored you there. 'It's the fast life. I pity you.'

'Where are you headed for?' I asked.

'Kluang,' he said. 'On transfer.'

'Let's hear it for Kluang!' said one of the planters. 'Hip! Hip!'

The others, his friends, ignored him. A man near by, with his feet wide apart like a mate on a quarter deck – it is the stance of the railway drinker – said, 'Hugh got his fingers burned in Port Swettenham. Chap said to him – '

I moved over to Cedric and said, 'What's the attraction in Kluang?' Kluang, a small town in Johore State, is the typical Malaysian outstation, with its club, rest houses, rubber estate, and its quota of planters going to pieces in their breezy bungalows.

'Trouble,' said Cedric. 'But that's why I like it. See, I'm a roughneck.' There were labour problems with the Tamil rubber-tappers, and I gathered Cedric had been chosen as much for his colour as for his size and intimidating voice.

'How do you deal with troublemakers?'

'I use this,' he said, and showed me a hairy fist. 'Or if we can get a conviction, the bloke gets the rotan.'

The rotan is a cane – a four-foot rod, about half a finger thick. Cedric said that most jail sentences included strokes of the rotan. The usual number was six strokes; one man in Singapore recently got twenty.

'Doesn't it leave a mark?'

'No,' said an Indian near Cedric.

'Yes,' said Cedric. He thought a moment and sipped his whisky. 'Well, it depends what colour you are. Some of the blokes are pretty dark, and rotan scars don't show up. But take you, for instance – it would leave a huge scar on you.'

'So you whip people,' I said.

7 don't,' he said. 'Anyway, it's much worse in Singapore, and they're supposed to be so civilized. Let's face it, it happens in every country.'

'It doesn't happen in the States,' I said.

'And it doesn't happen in UK,' said one of the planters, who was eavesdropping on the conversation. 'They did away with the birch years ago.'

'Maybe they should still have it,' said Cedric. It was a genial challenge.

The planter looked a bit nonplussed, as if he believed in corporal punishment but didn't want to admit his agreement with the views of a man he held in contempt. He said, 'It's against the law in UK.'

I asked Cedric why, if it was such a marvellous solution, he was being sent to Kluang, where obviously they had been caning men for years?

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