Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  ‘Very fine. No more tonight.’

  In the morning: ‘Bass-et. Well, we ’ave everything in order ’ere. You ken ’ead beck to Dubai. Good treep.’

  Barton says, ‘Bonjour and thanks.’

  ‘All ze best.’

  ‘Happy landings.’ All quite friendly now.

  I asked Simeon Furio Junior, the first mate, if he minds when a captain shouts at him. ‘Oh, no, no,’ he says. ‘He’s busy and all alone up there mostly. It’s the job.’ Simeon Furio has had some tough jobs: for instance, towed barges of ammunition up the Saigon river under fire, sandbags around the bridge, rockets and bullets crisscrossing the deck, crewmen wounded. He got a 50 per cent bonus for that, plus extra for any direct hits on the vessel by rockets. Hot work, if you can get it. This was before he joined Swire’s, of course.

  Towing a barge without being fired at, Barton says, is hazardous enough. Erratic movements in bad weather? ‘No, the towline is very long. What can happen is that, while manoeuvring, your tug engine can fail, and the barge keeps going and overwhelms the tug. Still, that doesn’t happen often.’

  He stands up and bangs his head on a small Japanese shrine on a bulkhead. It has two little doors like a cuckoo clock. I open the doors and find inside, like an effigy of the Buddha, a small head-and-shoulders photograph of John Swire, the supreme boss of Swire Pacific Offshore and the whole Swire group. ‘It brings us luck,’ says Peter Barton, rubbing his head.

  From my hotel room I overlooked the creek that is Dubai’s watery heart and gives this brand-new, unreal city its cohesion, much as a magnetic rod attracts and holds iron filings. Commerce is the reason for Dubai: trans-shipping, and gold.

  The creek is about a hundred and fifty yards wide, lined on its eastern bank now by medium-sized skyscrapers, with a second bank of taller ones behind them. Towards its mouth are two pale, graceful minarets; along its eastern bank, a clutter of dhows, some from Aden, most from Iran, and a quay heaped with bales, crates and coils of rope and the sea chests of sailors, whose newly washed sarongs and long cotton drawers hang out to dry over spars on the dhows’ awninged decks.

  The sailors of the dhows are a mixed lot. Some with white skullcaps and beards are almost certainly Iranians. Some wear baggy Baluchi trousers; others, long Arab nightshirts or red and green checked Adeni sarongs (called futas here) and white cloths around their heads. Some wear the loose, knee-length Pakistani shirt. Beyond the western side of the creek, a fringe of lower buildings, palms and aerials wavers indistinctly in haze and rising dust. Beyond them nothing: an empty undulating stretch of sand and stone, interrupted less and less frequently by strands of telephone wire and perhaps an asphalt road that wanders off into the Empty Quarter, the ocean of great sands.

  Twenty-five years ago Dubai was little more than a mosque, a modest palace, a shipping office and a clump of palms. No census has been taken in Dubai for some time, but estimates circulate of an immigrant population that outnumbers the Arabs of Dubai by ten to one. The vast majority of the expatriates are Indian or Pakistani – perhaps seventy-five thousand of them. Then come the Iranians, it is presumed, followed by Arabs from outside the Gulf, then Filipinos and, finally, Koreans. None of them plan to settle, but all have come, sometimes at the cost of great effort and anxiety, to save money. Having done so, they will return home again – or, if they can, keep travelling west, to the eldorado of Europe.

  *

  Soon after reaching Dubai, I called Walid, my son-of-the-soil Pakistani friend, and he appeared, hot and flushed, at the hotel and, for a while, jumped around like a puppy at feeding time. I ordered tea for us both. He was plumper – he wasn’t starving in Dubai; people working in hotels never starve – but otherwise unchanged by the heat and limitations of this isolated desert port. His job bored him, and I had no doubt that with his honesty, energy and good nature he deserved a better one.

  Walid now earned more than he ever could in Lahore or Rawalpindi, and perhaps he could eventually leap the gap between Dubai and London or Paris, the cities he longed to see. He hoped to make, if not a fortune, a good nest-egg here; perhaps he would be ‘spotted’ by some hotel talent scout, if such people existed, as unknowns were once snatched out of Hollywood drugstores and raised to stardom.

  He had paid a lightning visit to Pakistan the month before my arrival. ‘I had a very good time,’ he said. ‘My girlfriend was very happy to see me. I was enjoying her very much.’ He shook a finger at me and smiled. ‘I do not mean that I played with her body. Oh, no. In Pakistan we never do that before marriage. We went to the Muri Hills to see the snow falling.’ He fell silent and his smile faded. His thoughts, I could see as he sat in this place of sandstorms and humidity, were on the green trees, the familiar language and the unfamiliar snow he’d held in his hand north of the Punjab.

  I was sure Walid had been waiting impatiently for my arrival with the sex doll he’d asked for in his letter. I said awkwardly, ‘Walid, look, about the sex doll. Don’t be too upset, but I haven’t brought it. Your letter reached me in Cyprus; too late – and my Greek friends told me such things are not on sale there.’

  ‘Oh, my letter was late, was it?’ He looked crestfallen but, considering the head of steam that must have been building up inside him since his letter, he didn’t seem too depressed. ‘Never mind, it is not worrying.’

  ‘You realize I’d look very stupid if the Dubai customs officers found a sex doll in my suitcase and inflated it in the baggage hall in front of two hundred people. Suppose it had broken free and floated slowly over the rooftops of Dubai?’

  Walid sat back and giggled, and I pointed a finger at him in mock severity. ‘Walid, I’d have blamed you. You’d only have been deported back to Pakistan, but I’d have gone to jail for months in a deafening scandal.’

  His giggling turned into open-mouthed glee.

  ‘A really deafening scandal, Walid. Is the sex situation really so desperate?’

  ‘Deafeningly desperate.’ He laughed, slopping tea. ‘Some Korean chap told me about these dolls. Did you know that you can even wash them?’ He repeated bleakly, ‘Desperate I am saying. You know, I’ve been back to Pakistan only once in two years, and there’s no sex for people like me here. The prosses have all gone.’

  ‘Prosses?’

  ‘Prostitutes – girls and women, mostly from India. The Dubai government sent them off home, so now there are only the air hostesses.’ His eyes had a dreamy look. ‘Very love-lee. Their boom-booms are very lovelee.’

  ‘Boom-booms?’

  He made pyramid shapes with both sets of fingers and clamped them to his chest. ‘Very lovel-ee and shape-lee.’

  ‘Well?’

  Walid shook his head mournfully. ‘They go only with the hotel’s front-office managers and assistant managers, who have more money. Of course, there are also the Filipino girls working in hotels here.’

  ‘They sound promising.’

  ‘They all make jigajig with Arabs for money. We are not being able to pay them on our salaries. Some male Filipinos also make jigajig.’

  No wonder he wanted a doll.

  ‘I’ll tell you something very privately. Twice in two years – only twice – a Filipino kid called Dave in Food and Bev was obliging me –’

  ‘Food and Bev?’

  ‘The food and beverage department of the hotel. And once a Filipino in the night telephone staff – on a friendly basis.’

  ‘Well, he can’t have been exactly hostile.’

  ‘I mean not for money. Only twice in all that time. Not much, is it? I prefer fucking girls to boys, as you know, but some Filipinos, nice kids, are being more free in their conduct. They are going to parties with Arabs on their days off. Dave from Food and Bev has a big mountain of hi-fi stuff from his Arab friends.’

  ‘Watch out, Walid,’ I teased. ‘When I visit your house in Pakistan, I’ll point to the stack of hi-fi equipment you’ve got there and denounce you to General Zia. He’ll chop off your hands – at the very least your hands.’r />
  ‘You’ll not be finding the smallest transistor radio there,’ Walid protested. He began to laugh again. ‘I’ll tell you another thing. Jackie from the night switchboard had to go to hospital last month with six stitches in his what-you-call – his anus. Five Arabs damaged him like that.’

  ‘Five?’

  ‘He couldn’t sit for a week.’

  Walid’s laughter rocked him back and forth in his chair. ‘Luckily he was not taking phone calls at the time. Perhaps only incoming and trunk calls, you might say!’ I saluted the joke by raising my teacup. ‘Don’t look so shocked,’ Walid spluttered. ‘Jackie is fine again now.’

  ‘And you, Walid?’

  ‘Well, there’s always HP.’

  ‘What’s HP?’

  ‘Hand practice, as we call it here. Masturbation. Not very often. I’m saving up for marriage in three years’ time.’

  ‘Unless you can get your hands on that doll.’

  *

  Whether or not he was conscious of it from minute to minute, Walid’s every waking moment was part of a war to keep his head above the stagnant surface of a dead-end life, to avoid drowning in a Sargasso Sea of faceless, penurious humanity. This struggle to keep alive the hope of enjoying a mere shadow of the affluent life European workers are blessed with – and find inadequate – was not something he could ever resign from. If only the peoples of America and Europe, and those of Africa, Asia and Latin America could change places for a week – for a single day! But would it do any good?

  ‘Any more British airline pilots come your way?’ I asked, referring to a surprising story he’d told me in Rawalpindi.

  ‘No more. And to show you I’m not interested like that any more,’ he continued sententiously, ‘I’ll tell you this story. The other night I was standing in the hotel with my Pakistani boss on duty at 1.00 a.m. and an old businessman – a German, I think – came up and gave us each fifty dirhams [about six pounds sterling] and just said to me, “Come up to my room in fifteen minutes.”

  ‘Did you go?’

  ‘Certainly I did not go. But imagine it. My boss said, “But we’ve taken the gentleman’s money. You really ought to go.”’

  ‘An honest boss you’ve got there.’

  ‘I didn’t go, and the businessman checked out the next morning.’

  ‘Minus a hundred dirhams chargeable to expenses.’

  ‘I didn’t feel badly about taking his money because he had been in the hotel before and never left any tips.’

  ‘Serve him right, then.’

  Walid and all the other immigrant workers in the Gulf needed any tips they could get. His father, who for thirty-six years had been a senior supervisor in a machine shop – ‘in charge of it, you might say,’ he had told me – had recently retired. According to Walid, his provident fund and other monies would bring him about two thousand pounds a year in all. Later, for some reason I couldn’t grasp, there would be another twenty pounds a month. ‘And he will go on working,’ said Walid. ‘Maybe he will open a poultry farm, or a tractor business. We have fields, but we can’t depend on them.’

  The talk of the tractor business sounded ambitiously unreal to me. I had seen the family home; the ‘fields’ were indeed undependable – ‘unworkable’ seemed more accurate. Still, to help out, Walid was sending home a hundred pounds a month out of the one hundred and fifty he earned at the hotel.

  ‘I earn a little from part-time jobs, too – say, forty pounds a month. But I have to spend much money when my sisters get married.’ Weddings are a great burden for Asian families. ‘And on gifts for the family every time I go home.’ Yet he earns double what he earned in Pakistan.

  Before going off to his hotel shift, Walid had a question to ask about Eldorado. ‘In London, it’s easy to fuck? I hear girls do it in parks and streets and discos – everywhere.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘practically everywhere, but usually in bed.’

  Walid looked intent. ‘How many times? Once a day? Two or three times?’

  ‘Walid,’ I said, ‘first get there, then make your own arrangements. And meanwhile lay off the HP.’ I heard his gurgle of laughter going down the corridor. If he ever reached London, I reflected, he would certainly find it easier to get into bed than into work.

  By the time I reached Singapore there was a letter waiting for me from Walid. A beautiful English girl was staying at the hotel, he said; they had made friends, and might even be in love; he was trying to persuade her to stay another month. He hoped I was fine and that my sea trip was going well. Well, he’s happy now, I thought, but he added a PS: ‘Dave in Food and Bev says you can buy sex dolls in Manila. Don’t forget!’

  *

  Chris Pooley reported a delay. The acid-carrying tanker that might have taken me on to Karwar was sinking at its moorings, or so it seemed; at any rate, it was certainly not sailing to India in the foreseeable future. Indefatigably, Pooley continued to telephone his contacts, including the British firm, Gray Mackenzie, the commanding position of whose offices at the very lip of the entrance to the creek proclaimed its seniority in Gulf shipping circles.

  I went to the office at the mouth of the creek and saw Jay Walton, Gray Mackenzie’s shipping manager. He said they might find a place for me in a week or so aboard a small vessel called Bacat 2; he would telex Bombay for Indian permission to put me aboard as a supernumerary. Then he took me to lunch with one of the company’s experienced captains, David Maudsley, master of a small tanker, the Arrisha. With a crew of twelve Iranians and two Bangladeshis, he regularly passed through the Strait of Hormuz just north of Dubai on his way to Muscat, carrying oil and jet fuel.

  Maudsley was a quiet, dry-voiced man, the sort of man you wouldn’t mind sailing with in a highly flammable tanker. Not the sort to irritate a militant Muslim or anyone else. ‘I don’t mind Iranians,’ he said. ‘These Iranians are not Khomeiniites. Even if they were, you can’t let prayer interfere with sailing a ship – anyone can see that – however fanatical they are.’

  It was the time of great Western fears that oil supplies might be cut off by a blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, but Maudsley didn’t think it would happen. ‘You could block the inner passage; it’s five miles wide. But I doubt if you could bottle up the outer passage, which is twenty to thirty miles wide.’

  Maudsley said bluntly that, though British seamen probably weren’t any less good at sea than others, and perhaps just as good, they certainly could be a liability ashore, delaying the ship. This was the downfall of British seamen. ‘My last deep-sea job,’ he said, ‘we had British and Portuguese seamen. Terrible trouble we had with the Brits – knifings, fights, arrests. It’s always been unusual to have no trouble with British seamen. You have to have someone standing at the top of the gangway when they come back on board, taking bottles off them. We’d have to go around all the brothels to rout them out, and they’d be hiding under the beds and I don’t know what else. Of course, the Scawegians [Scandinavians] can be the wildest cowboys, but the Brits always seem to find the lowest dives possible. The British seaman has always had a reputation ashore.’

  Maudsley also told me that his day cabin had an artificial fireplace. It reminded him of his home in the cold north of England.

  *

  Apart from the Bacat 2, the American Tycoon Lines seemed to offer hope. (I have changed the name somewhat; the line’s agent seemed a muddler to me, but it’s possible I misjudged him.) The line’s container fleet had spacious passenger accommodation and a reputation for comfort. It was hard, however, to get passage on them and, because they were cargo vessels first and passenger handlers second, they were subject to delays in loading and unloading. A strike in Bombay, for instance, had delayed the line’s Samuel Goldwyn in Dubai, and she didn’t know where to go next; at least this was what her agent seemed to convey. But the situation remained confused even when news of the end of the strike in Bombay came through. Apparently the Samuel Goldwyn was destined for Cochin in southern India and was carrying her full co
mplement of passengers – or else they’d been put ashore and repaid their full fares; the truth was elusive. In any case, another idea had come into my head.

  After a week in Dubai I was sitting alone at the bar of the International Seamen’s Club, sipping a beer and wondering which film to kill time with. The list was not long: Scream and Die, Sexy Merilla, Madhirikkunnha Raathri (a Tamil comedy with music), and a love drama in Pushtu.

  I decided against all of them and in favour of another beer, even at the expense of watching the Keralan barman plucking his eyebrows over a bowl of chips and hearing him croon, ‘…Only trouble is, Gee whizz, I’m dreaming my life away.’

  Soon a friendly Englishman hoisted himself on the next barstool. He was, he said, Captain Bill Nelson; he had worked in Dubai for some years, and supervised shipping in the creek and the dhow harbour at Hamriyyah, a little way up the coast. ‘Surely, you shouldn’t bother with ordinary freighters and such,’ he said. ‘It’s the dhows and native motor launches crossing to Karachi and Bombay that would interest you more.’

  Of course. Next day I accompanied Bill Nelson on his daily tour of native shipping. He drove his yellow Mazda while his clerk jotted down the tally of vessels in harbour: tugs, dredgers, every ship from Dubai to Hamriyyah.

  Hamriyyah is a small harbour full each day with motorized dhows loading and bound for Iran, Aden or India, and with Pakistani ‘launches’, which could be transformed into sailing vessels simply by raising canvas.

  Coolies ran up planks with bales and crates, timber from Malaysia and milled American rice. Water buffaloes were winched up from fetid holds and dumped, eyeballs rolling, on the quay.

  ‘This is the place to find something, mark my words,’ said Nelson. ‘Meet my man here, Majid.’