To the Ends of the Earth

“One hundred rupees all night,” said the man with the turban. “Fifty for one jig.”

“He said it costs twenty-five.”

“Fifty,” said the grizzled man, standing firm.

“Anyway, forget it,” I said. “I just came for a drink.”

“No drink,” said the thin man.

“He said he had an English girl.”

“What English girl?” said the thin man, now twisting the knot on his lungi. “These Kerala girl—young, small, from Malabar Coast.”

The man in the turban caught one by the arm and shoved her against me. She shrieked delightedly and hopped away.

“You look at room,” said the man in the turban.

The room was right through the door. He switched on the light. This was the bedroom; it was the same size as the outside one, but dirtier and more cluttered. And it smelled horrible. In the center of the room was a wooden bed with a stained bamboo mat on it, and on the wall six shelves, each holding a small tin padlocked suitcase. In a corner of the room a battered table held some medicine bottles, big and small, and a basin of water. There were scorch marks on the beaverboard ceiling, newspapers on the floor and on the wall over the bed charcoal sketches of dismembered bodies, breasts, and genitals.

“Look!”

The man grinned wildly, rushed to the far wall, and threw a switch.

“Fan!”

It began to groan slowly over the filthy bed, stirring the air with its cracked paddles and making the room even smellier.

Two girls came into the room and sat on the bed. Laughing, they began to unwind their saris. I hurried out, into the parlor, through the front door, and found the taxi driver. “Come on, let’s go.”

“You not liking Indian girl? Nice Indian girl?”

Skinny was starting to shout. He shouted something in Tamil to the taxi driver, who was in as great a hurry as I to leave the place: he had produced a dud customer. The fault was his, not mine. The girls were still giggling and calling out, and Skinny was still shouting as we swung away from the hut and through the tall grass onto the bumpy back road.

Mr. Wong the Tooth Mechanic

THE TRAIN FROM GALLE WINDS ALONG THE COAST NORTH TOWARD Colombo, so close to the shoreline that the spray flung by the heavy rollers from Africa reaches the broken windows of the battered wooden carriages. I was going third class, and for the early part of the trip sat in a dark, overcrowded compartment with people who, as soon as I became friendly, asked me for money. They were not begging with any urgency; indeed, they didn’t look as if they needed money, but rather seemed to be taking the position that whatever they succeeded in wheedling out of me might come in handy at some future date. It happened fairly often. In the middle of a conversation a man would gently ask me if I had any appliance I could give him. “What sort of appliance?” “Razor blades.” I would say no and the conversation would continue.

After nearly an hour of this I crawled out of the compartment to stand by the door and watch the rain dropping out of a dark layer of high clouds just off the coast—the distant rain like majestic pillars of granite. To the right the sun was setting, and in the foreground were children, purpling in the sunset and skipping along the sand. That was on the ocean side of the train. On the jungle side it had already begun to pour heavily, and at each station the signalman covered himself with his flags, making the red one into a kerchief, the green one into a skirt, flapping the green when the train approached and quickly using it to keep the rain off when the train had passed.

A Chinese man and his Singhalese wife had boarded the train in Galle with their fat dark baby. They were the Wongs, off to Colombo for a little holiday. Mr. Wong said he was a dentist; he had learned the trade from his father, who had come to Ceylon from Shanghai in 1937. Mr. Wong didn’t like the train and said he usually went to Colombo on his motorcycle except during the monsoon. He also had a helmet and goggles. If I ever went back to Galle he would show them to me. He told me how much they cost.

“Can you speak Chinese?”

“Humbwa—go, mingwa—come. That’s all. I speak Singhalese and English. Chinese very hard.” He pressed his temples with his knuckles.

Simla had been full of Chinese dentists, with signboards showing horrible cross sections of the human mouth and trays of white toothcaps in the window. I asked him why so many Chinese I had seen were dentists.

“Chinese are very good dentists!” he said. His breath was spiced with coconut. “I’m good!”

“Can you give me a filling?”

“No, no stoppings.”

“Do you clean teeth?”

“No.”

“Can you pull them?”

“You want extraction? I can give you name of a good extractionist.”

“What kind of dentist are you, Mr. Wong?”

“Tooth mechanics,” he said. “Chinese are the best ones for tooth mechanics.”