The greatest annoyance that afternoon was the smoke from the steam engine. It poured through the windows, coating every surface with a fine film of soot, and the smell of burned coal – which is the smell of every Indian railway station – lingered in the compartment. It took much longer for the engine to build up speed, and the trip-hammer sound and the rhythmic puffing was transmitted through the carriages. But there was a gentleness in this power, and the sounds of the thrusting wheels gave a motion to the train that was not only different from the amplified lawnmower of the electric engine, but made the steam engine seem animal in the muscular way it moved and stopped.
After dark the compartment lights went out and the fan died. I went to bed; an hour later – it was 9.30 – they came on again. I found my place in the book I was reading, but before I finished a paragraph the lights failed a second time. I cursed, switched everything off, smeared myself with insect repellent (the mosquitoes were ferocious, nimble with their budget of malaria), and slept with the sheets over my head, waking only at Trichino-poly (Tiruchirappalli) to buy a box of cigars.
The next morning I was visited by a Buddhist monk. His head was shaved, he wore saffron robes, and he was barefoot. He was the very picture of piety, the mendicant monk with his sweaty head, going third class on the branch line to Nirvana. He was, of course, so right for the part that I guessed immediately he was an American, and it turned out he was from Baltimore. He was on his way to Kandy in Central Ceylon. He didn't like my questions.
'What do your folks think about you becoming a Buddhist?'
'I am looking for water,' he said obstinately.
'Are you in a monastery or what?'
'Look, if there's no water here, just tell me and I'll go away.'
'I've got some good friends in Baltimore,' I said. 'Ever get back there?'
'You're bothering me,' said the monk.
'Is that any way for a monk to talk?'
He was really angry then. He said, 'I get asked these questions a hundred times a day!'
'I'm just curious.'
'There are no answers,' he said, with mystifying glibness. 'I'm looking for water.'
'Keep looking.'
'I'm dirty! I haven't slept all night; I want to wash!'
'I'll show you where the water is if you answer me one more question,' I said.
'You're a nosy bastard, just like the rest of them,' said the Buddhist monk.
'Second door on your right,' I said. 'Don't drown.'
I think the next ten miles were the most exciting I have ever travelled in a train. We were on the coast, moving fast along a spit of land, and on either side of the train – its whistle screaming, its chimney full of smoke -white sand had drifted into magnificent dunes; beyond these dunes were slices of green sea. Sand whipped up by the engine pattered against the carriages behind, and spray from the breakers, whose regular wash dramatized the chugging of the locomotive, was flung up to speckle the windows with crystal bubbles. It was all light and water and sand, flying about the train speeding towards the Rameswaram causeway in a high wind. The palms under the scudding clouds bowed and flashed like fans made of feathers, and here and there, up to their stupas in sand, were temples flying red flags on their crooked masts. The sand covered the track in places; it had drifted into temple doorways and wrecked the frail palm-frond huts. The wind was terrific, beating on the windows, carrying sand and spray and the whistle's hooeeee, and nearly toppling the dhows in full sail at the hump of the spangled horizon where Ceylon lay.
'Few minutes more,' said the conductor. 'I think you are sorry you took this train.'
'No,' I said. 'But I was under the impression it went to Dhanushkodi – that's what my map says.'
'Indo-Ceylon Express formerly went to Dhanushkodi.'
'Why doesn't it go there now?'
'No Indo-Ceylon Express,' he said. 'And Dhanush-kodi blew away.'
He explained that in 1965 a cyclone – the area is plagued with them – derailed a train, drowning forty passengers and covering Dhanushkodi with sand. He showed me what remained, sand dunes at the tip of the peninsula and the fragments of black roofs. The town had disappeared so thoroughly that not even fishermen lived there any more.
'Rameswaram is more interesting,' said the conductor. 'Nice temple, holy places, and tombs of Cain and Abel.'
I thought I had misheard him. I asked him to repeat the names. I had not misheard.
The story is that when Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden they went to Ceylon (Dhanushkodi is the beginning of the seven islands across the Palk Strait known as 'Adam's Bridge'). Christ went there; so did Buddha and Rama, and so, probably, did Father Divine, Joseph Smith, and Mary Baker Eddy. Cain and Abel ended up in Rameswaram, which might be the true Land of Nod, east of Eden. Their tombs are not signposted. They are in the care of the local Muslims, and in this town of Hindus, the majority of whom are high-caste Brahmins, I had some difficulty locating a Muslim. The driver of the horse-drawn cab (there are no cars in Rameswaram) thought there might be a Muslim at the ferry landing. I said that was too far to go: the tombs were somewhere near the railway station. The driver said the Hindu temple was the holiest in India. I said I wanted to see the tombs of Cain and Abel. We found a ruminant Muslim in a dusty shop on a side street. He said he would show me the tombs if I promised not to defile them with my camera. I promised.
The tombs were identicaclass="underline" parallel blocks of crumbling stone on which lizards darted and the green twine of tropical weeds had knotted. I tried to appear reverential, but could not suppress my disappointment at seeing what looked like the incomplete foundations of some folly concocted by a treasonous clerk in the Public Works Department of the local mosque. And the tombs were indistinguishable.
'Cain?' I said, pointing to the right one. I pointed to the left. 'Abel?'
The Muslim didn't know.
The Hindu temple, founded by Rama (on his way to Lanka, Ceylon, to rescue Sita), was an impressive labyrinth, nearly a mile of subterranean corridors, garishly lit and painted. The traveller J. J. Aubertin, who visited the Rameswaram temple (but not the tombs of Cain and Abeclass="underline" maybe they weren't there in 1890?) mentions the 'blasphemous' and 'ugly' dances of the nautch girls in his book, Wanderings and Wonderings (1892). I looked. I saw no nautch girls. Five aged women were gravely laundering their shrouds in the sacred pool at the centre of the temple. In India, I had decided, one could determine the sacredness of water by its degree of stagnation. The holiest was bright green, like this.
It was a three-hour trip across the Palk Strait on the old Scottish steamer, the TSS Ramanujam (formerly the Irwin), from Rameswaram to Talaimannar at the top of Ceylon. Like everyone else I had met in India, the ship's second mate told me I was a fool to go to Ceylon. But his reason was better than others I'd heard: there was a cholera epidemic in Jaffna and it appeared to be spreading to Colombo. 'It's your funeral,' he said cheerfully. He held the Ceylonese in complete contempt, nor was he very happy with Indians. I pointed out that this must have been rather inconvenient for him since he was an Indian himself.