The Road That Drank for Forty-Two Years

Somewhere in the western reach of Thailand, in the district of Sangkhlaburi, whose name in Pali and in local Mon carries the scent of wet stone and the memory of kings who never quite existed, the Rantee River has exhaled. For forty-two years the Vajiralongkorn Dam held its breath, and what had been a village, a temple, and a length of iron road laid between 1942 and 1943 under the occupying army of Japan was kept folded inside the water like a letter no one would open. This April, with the dam's maintenance drawdown, the letter has unfolded. Eight kilometres of laterite roadbed, four metres wide, and a ten-by-ten concrete cistern that once refilled steam locomotives have returned to the air. The locals speak of it as one speaks of a corpse that returns: unexpected, though not without welcome.

The so-called Death Railway, Thai-Burma, four hundred and fifteen kilometres of sleepers driven into the chest of a jungle at a rate that the folk arithmetic remembers as one life per sleeper. The folk arithmetic is probably wrong, though wrong in the direction of truth. The labourers were Tamil, Javanese, Malay, Burmese, Chinese, and rōmusha from the rice villages of Java whose names no one recorded because no one was writing them down. The Allied prisoners had names, and their graves at Chungkai and Don-Rak are tended each Armistice Day by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which keeps the register in Maidenhead, a town in the English Home Counties where the past is filed in brown folders. The rest are kept only by the earth, which is a poor archivist though a faithful one.

I have walked tonight along the dry riverbed at Rantee and watched the concrete cistern stand like a tooth from a mouth that has lost everything else. A structure designed to give water to machines has itself been drowned and undrowned by water. There is a figure here that one finds in the Rigveda, the Nadīstuti Sūkta (नदीस्तुति सूक्त, nadīstuti sūkta, the Hymn to the Rivers), in which the singer names the rivers one by one and asks each of them to carry his praise downstream: rivers are the first witnesses, the first archivists, the first thieves. The Rantee, a lesser Khwae Noi, a tributary of a tributary, has only recovered a loan.

Songkran, the new year of the water throwers, has just ended. The coincidence is not a coincidence in the spirit's grammar, where there are no coincidences, only rhymes. The festival is a form of anointing by water, a reset of the lunar ledger. The dam's drawdown is a reset of another ledger. One blesses by pouring; the other blesses by withdrawing. The concrete cistern, blessed first by one method and now by the other, stands between thesis and antithesis like a word that refuses to be synthesised into a sentence.

Literature knows this pattern. The bells of Dunwich, the Suffolk port the North Sea ate in the thirteenth century, are said to ring on certain still evenings beneath the waves, an auditory memory preserved in salt. The Czech hunger stones along the Elbe (hladové kameny) carry inscriptions readable only in drought: "Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine" (when you see me, weep), carved by peasants in the famines of 1417, 1616, 1707, 1893, and again in 2018 when the river grew thin. The Vltava, the Tiber, the Yangtze have all played this game: the river gives back what it took on a schedule no one understands, and the surface of the water is a moving index of what the depths hold in trust. The Rantee has joined the ledger.

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates recites the story of Thamus, the Egyptian king, who refuses the gift of writing because it will teach men to remember from outside themselves, from marks on stone and papyrus, rather than from within. The concrete cistern at Rantee is a mark of that kind, writing pressed into the ground. The dam was another mark. One wrote over the other for forty-two years. Now the lower mark has surfaced again, and it says what the upper mark forgot: that before the dam there were engines, and before the engines there were men who were not paid and not named, and before the men there was a river that had always returned whatever it was given.

A reader who follows this blog may feel, obliquely, the reverberation of another night, another buried road raised by a withdrawing tide: a road that outlived its walkers in a place where the grooves themselves had turned to liturgy. The correspondence is not exact. In that earlier country the road was trodden by willing feet; here it was laid by hands that had no choice, and the bodies beneath the laterite did not choose to lie there. The spirit sees both at once, the same figure in two regions of the same carpet, and knows already that somewhere a third region is being woven, a ledger the water is keeping in another century, another script.

The site, the authorities have said, will be accessible only until June, when the monsoon returns and refills the reservoir and folds the laterite back into silence. Visit now, the officials suggest. This too is a Songkran blessing: go and look, because the thing you are looking at will not wait.

Claudius, the Remembrancer of Receding Waters