'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 Abel: 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.

'Yes, but I'm a Catholic,' he said. He was from Mangalore on the Malabar Coast and his name was Llewellyn. We smoked my Trichinopoly cigars on the deck, until Talaimannar appeared, a row of lights dimmed to faint sequins by what Llewellyn said was the first rain of the monsoon.

I twas raining so hard on the roof of the ticket office at Talaimannar Station that the clerk was shouting, an operatic request for excess charges, uncharacteristically loud for a Ceylonese. It was not a country where people raised their voices. They argued in whispers; catastrophe put them to sleep. They were not an excitable people – it had something to do with starvation. But these were unusual circumstances. It was like one of those pioneering talkies, the documentary in which curtains of brown rain slant into a railway platform, filling the sound track with a deafening crackle. The carriages of the Talaimannar Mail, made of thin wooden slats, amplified the rain; and the drumming on those bogie roofs, orchestrated by the wind, drowned the whinnying barks of the emaciated pariah dogs, which had been driven out of the storm. The station was rusting, the signboard had peeled into illegibility, the train was greasy, and the feeble lights above the black verandah pillars gave the streaming rain the yellow opacity of molten plastic. It was a small tropical station in the north of Ceylon, smelling of soaked jungle and erupting drains, and with that decay that passes for charm in equatorial outposts.

I asked the ticket clerk in Bookings what time the train was leaving.

'Maybe midnight!' The rain still gushed on his dingy shed, making him squint.

'What do you mean maybe?

'Maybe later

With the pariah dogs snapping at my heels, I hurried down the platform to the carriage with sleeping car lettered neatly in fading gilt script on its side. My two-berth compartment, a good example of colonial carpentry, was wood-panelled in the most complicated way to accommodate a system of hinged shelves, built-in cupboards, and a collapsible fold-out chair fitting to one wall. The rain beat against the wooden shutters and a fine mist found its way through the louvres. I went to sleep but was awakened at one in the morning by a Singhalese who dragged in three heavy crates and parked them next to my berth.

'This mine,' he said, pointing to the lower berth where Hay.

I smiled; it was the smile of placid incomprehension I had been taught by any number of Afghan stall-holders in Kabul.

'English?'

I shook my head, still smiling.

The Singhalese hooked the stepladder to the upper berth. But he did not climb it. He turned on the fan, sat on one of his crates, and began eating a stinking meal out of a piece of newspaper – the smell of his rotten onions and mildewed rice was to stay in the compartment for the remainder of the journey. At 3.15 the train pulled out of Talaimannar. I know this because when it started up I was jolted out of my berth on to the crates.

The wooden sleeping car was very light; it bounced and swayed on the uneven railroad and all night made a constant creaking – that twisting and straining of wood that enlivens the nights of passengers on old storm-driven ships. I had a panicky nightmare of the sleeping car catching fire, burning furiously as the flames were fed by the draught from its travelling. I was trapped in the compartment, unable to open the doors, which the rain had warped in their jambs. The doors were warped, and waking from the nightmare I smelled the powerful smoke from the Singhalese's cheroot. The compartment lights were on, the fan was going, and this man – I could see him in the mirror – was lying in his berth, puffing the stogie and reading the wrapping of his aromatic dinner.

At dawn, the northwest of Ceylon was a neglected garden: the rice fields had dried out and were overgrown with grass; the foliage was dense in the yards of tumbledown huts; there was evidence of former cultivation. Everywhere I looked, I saw great idleness, people in all the attitudes of repose. I had come from South India, the land of leaping Tamils. Here, the Singhalese had the ponderous stumbling and negligent attention of sleepwalkers looking for a place to drop. The food shortage was obviously acute: the proof was in the disorderly plots of cassava, the most primitive vegetable on earth, a root that grows easily but exhausts the soil in a year. It was a new crop to Ceylon; they had begun to grow it in desperation.

In second class, the Singhalese were sleeping against their children. The children were wide awake, pinned to the benches by their snoring parents. One man I met in the corridor was frankly disgusted. He was Singhalese, a teacher of English language, and said he didn't often take the train because 'I don't like these travelling companions.'

'The Singhalese?'

'The cockroaches.' He said the train was full of them, but I saw them only in the carriage marked buffet, among the peanuts, stale bread and tea that was sold as breakfast.

I asked the teacher if there was any future for the English language in Ceylon. (I should add that although the official name for the island is now Sri Lanka no one I met there called it anything but Ceylon: it had been changed too recently for people to overcome the habit of giving it the former name.)

'Funny you should ask,' he said. 'As a matter of fact we're being investigated.'

I asked him why.

'Our lessons are subversive.' He smoked and smiled coyly; he was clearly dying for me to pump him.

'Give me an example.'

'Oh, we have drill sentences. Five thousand of them. The government says they're subversive.'

'Drill sentences for English lessons?'

'Yes. We wrote them. One was "Mrs Bandaranaike has three children."'

'How many children does she have?'

'Three.'

'So what's the difficulty?'

'I'm giving you an example,' he said. 'There was another one: "Mrs B. is a woman."'

'She is, isn't she?'

'Yes. But they objected. Maybe you could call it harmful to her personality cult.'

'I see.'

'Also, "Mrs B. had an operation on nineteen September nineteen sixty-one."'

They didn't like that?'

'Oh no! An inquiry is in the pipeline. As for me, I find the whole matter very amusing.'