by Gavin Young
There was the aspect of a great medieval army about the dhow harbour. The heraldic standards of the French knights at Agincourt could have been only slightly less vivid than the pennants and ensigns of this tightly packed fleet of wooden ships. In the fair offshore breeze the colours of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Iran and Kuwait – reds, purples, greens, whites and browns – stirred and flapped over scores of vessels tied up eight or nine deep alongside the wharves of Ghas Bandar. They lay lazily rubbing sides, cushioned by fenders of old truck tyres. Their cargoes, sacks of rice or grain, crates of furniture (descriptions of their contents stencilled on their sides), bicycles, scooters, bales and boxes of God-knew-what stood on their decks undisturbed. Their crews on holiday had gone ashore, or squatted in skullcaps and sarongs, chatting and gesticulating, playing cards on the planked decks; some slept on thin woven mats or drank tea or smoked in silence.
As Al Raza drew near, men sprang up shouting, ‘Come in here! Come alongside us!’ and Al Raza’s crew shouted back. I heard Sumar’s ‘Ooooh … aaah’, as he and Lal Mohamed threw lines to friends on other vessels who hauled us in, making fast the lines, releasing them, hauling, making fast again, until Al Raza was in perfect alignment and at rest, her engine silent and smokeless at last. The crew of the vessel we lay alongside crowded aboard and told us they had arrived three days earlier. They greeted Mir Mohamed with ribald cheers and slapped the backs of the rest of the crew. Their vessel was Khalid, the passenger launch that had left Sharjah without me. Now I was glad I had missed the Khalid, although I remembered well my anguish at the time. Since then I had become deeply attached to the jolly crew of Al Raza, that inelegant polluter of the breezes of the Arabian Sea.
Sixteen
The stretch of coast from Karachi to south-west India turned out to be a region of dismal, stop-and-go uncertainty. Dock strikes, diverted ships and the timidity of ships’ agents all combined against me. In the background lurked the repulsive Indian bureaucracy – the niggling regulations that, brandished in the trembling hands of myriad minor officials, achieve the menace of loaded clubs. Regulations: the gelatine that prevents the jello of the Indian state from dissolving into slush. Perhaps that’s the best that can be said for them.
Aeroplane, ship and aeroplane again: such mixed transport conveyed me to Sri Lanka. As it turned out, my luck changed there, and thereafter I had no further need of buses or jets until I reached my destination, Canton. But in Karachi all I knew was that I would have to fly again. The cat-versus-dog political obsessions that haunt governments in Delhi and Islamabad made it impossible to continue to Bombay by sea from Karachi’s dhow harbour at Ghas Bandar.
A 10.30 p.m. flight to Bombay. My notebook begins once more to register the agonies of flying: the delay – two and a half hours – at Karachi airport, the crumpled and irritable crowds. The banks were closed or not working, the cashiers sat behind their counters chatting in a haze of cigarette smoke, surrounded by cups of tea, indifferent to the pleading of passengers who wanted to change their useless rupees and whose plane was leaving. ‘Regulations say we cannot work between nine and nine fifteen,’ a cashier told them, hardly looking up from his crossword puzzle.
Miserable, I wondered when next I would be leaning on a ship’s rail. I missed Sumar’s whiskered huffing and puffing, Khalat’s good nature and Mir Mohamed wheedling for a nip of gin. Before saying goodbye to them, we had all driven along the coast from Karachi to a beauty spot, a strange formation of rocks dramatically battered by the surf, and spent an afternoon walking there, jumping from ledge to rock ledge dodging the spray, and finally drinking tea at a small shop where students had scribbled their names (or obscenities) on the walls in big green Arabic letters.
Khalat, Lal Mohamed and Sumar were excited to be ashore in the brown wilderness of their hard country. They talked proudly of the size of Baluchistan, which stretched from the tawny cliffs we had seen to the mountains of Afghanistan. Still, they said, they were glad to be sailors; travel meant freedom from the cruel and absurd restraints imposed by unpredictable rulers on those who lived ashore. Travel meant freedom from regulations: ‘In Pakistan everything you want to do is memnu’h [forbidden],’ Khalat mourned. ‘Everything is haram.’ Lal Mohamed and Sumar shook their moustached heads in agreement. ‘Generals, colonels, mullahs … memnu’h.’
On the Indian Airlines flight to non-Muslim Bombay, young Pakistanis celebrated their freedom from generals and mullahs by ordering Scotch and half-bottles of Rémy Martin. In India they might find an obliging girl for the first time in their lives. From the toilet came a muffled sound of retching.
At Bombay airport customs, my skinny porter, a puckish man with a mischievous mouth, said, ‘India three hundred and fifty declared. Australia fourteen for two.’
This friendly shaft of cricket talk in the gloomy barn of Santa Cruz airport did me good. So did a newspaper story in the Times of India next morning:
Mr Harisinh Chavda, Minister of Roads and Buildings, will personally enquire into the flush tank collapse in the government resthouse at Idar … in which the former Prime Minister, Mr Morarji Desai, had a narrow escape…. It could be a deliberate attempt on the life of Mr Desai…. As soon as Mr Desai pulled the chain, the flush tank collapsed and crashed on the ground and missed him by inches.
Out of my window in the Taj Hotel I stared out across the Indian Ocean in the direction of the Arabian Sea and the Gulf. Or thought I did. Actually, the Gateway to India, the stone imperial arch high as a three-storey house under which the King–Emperor George V and Queen Mary had stepped for the coronation durbar in 1911, faces India, so George and Mary were walking away from the mainland when they arrived in Bombay. The city’s obese and still-growing bulk covers and overflows a narrow peninsula, which protrudes like a fin from the coastline; the Gateway stands on the inside edge of the fin.
*
In the offices of the Great Eastern Shipping Company, one of the most important private shipping organizations in a country of largely nationalized shipping, I found good news and bad. From Mr Β. Ν. Adappa, Great Eastern’s operations manager, I learned that the Mogul Line ran a regular daily service to Goa.
‘You sail at ten o’clock in the morning and arrive at Panaji – that is, Goa – at seven or eight o’clock next morning. The passenger steamer service down the Konkan coast is very fine.’
So at least there was a sure way ahead to Goa by sea.
‘Does it continue on down to Calicut or Cochin?’
Once, it had done so, said Mr Adappa, but recently this service had been suspended as an economy measure. Just my luck, I thought.
‘The Mogul Line is a very old and respected line, but now it is a government undertaking, like the Shipping Corporation of India, which you must be knowing.’
I asked Mr Adappa’s advice on how I might bridge the gap between Goa and Colombo. Below Goa, Calicut and Cochin were the two ports I had hopefully underlined on my map, both of them on the Malabar Coast and both in the state of Kerala.
Mr Adappa shook his head. These days, he said, very few ships plied that coast. I might find some ‘country boats’ – the Indian term for small private vessels like dhows or launches – but these days the traffic came from Calcutta, and very little of it went the other way. This state of affairs seemed illogical: surely what went westwards had to return eastwards in order to come westwards again? I had a vision of all that shipping from Calcutta piling up in Bombay harbour. But Mr Adappa explained that, westwards or eastwards, sea traffic around India’s shores had been considerably reduced. ‘People prefer road and rail transport. It’s like England. There used to be many coasters, but the fuel costs and the labour problems…. Oh, my God, the labour problems.’
I was going to hear a good deal more about India’s labour problems. Indians talk about dock strikes as Englishmen talk about the weather, and there are probably about as many workless days in the country as there are rainy ones in Great Britain. In Calcutta they talk not only
of strikes but of silt as well: the Hooghly river is being choked to death by it, just as a man’s veins and arteries are fatally blocked by cholesterol. Mr Adappa told me, ‘Calcutta is no longer India’s number one port. Now it’s first Bombay, then Goa, then Calcutta.’
*
Mr Adappa arranged for me to visit the Bombay docks. To enter them was to take a backward step in time, into an old engraving. In the maze of Victorian brick godowns, among the derricks that bent their heads together over ships like guardsmen’s swords arched over the bride and groom at a military wedding, among the clerical black of rotund and venerable steam cranes, bulbous bollards and heavy, cogged swing-bridge mechanisms with their nineteenth-century look of complete dependability, there was, as Conrad wrote of the London docks, an ugliness so picturesque as to become a delight to the eye. Dark-skinned workers, made darker by oil and grime, swung in cradles, chipping paint from the sides of freighters, or squatted in groups in the shadow of containers. Victoria, Princess and Indira (once named Alexandra) are the three docks of Bombay. Unexpected trees grow among them. Fine old buildings of old British trading houses, still in use, cluster like dignified old gentlemen in retirement between the dock gates and the grand Victorian pile of the Bombay Yacht Club and the Gateway to India.
*
The Royal Bombay Yacht Club is such a splendid building in such a striking situation – next to the Taj and behind the great Gateway – that I walked in and asked if I could have a look at this fascinating example of Victoriana. A friendly Indian secretary welcomed me, and added, ‘You should talk to Captain Philip Bragg. He knows all about it’.
Where would I have to go to meet him? Not far; Captain Bragg was in one of the tall public rooms, reading a delayed London Times over a cup of tea. The breezy friendliness of the Royal Navy flowed out of him; so did the spirit of Indian hospitality. ‘If you’re here for a few days, you’ll find the club useful. Prices are … well, helpful.’ I hoped to leave Bombay very soon, but I was grateful for the offer.
Founded in 1846, the yacht club had moved into these spacious quarters in 1948 from a venerable building on the Wellington Reclamation nearby. The present clubhouse was built as residential chambers in 1897, and stands, like much of Bombay, on reclaimed land. It is the grandest yacht club in India, said Captain Bragg. It’s grand in the way that a grand old man is grand; not plush, far from it. Surely Kipling came here; his father’s college stands just behind it. Its touches of the modern are tentative; like a newly joined midshipman, they know their place. Notices inform you that the King and Queen visited the club in December 1911, that Admiral of the Fleet Viscount Jellicoe of Scapa came here in 1919, and that, in November 1921, ‘His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales had Tea on the Lawn.’ Did he also have a siesta in the club chairs, the old wicker-backed kind with extendable arms for propping up one’s legs in the heat? Some have holes in the arms in which you can slot your burra peg. Captain Bragg lives in the club in a large apartment high up in a turret, like a ship’s lookout. A brass spyglass, two tables of ships’ wheels and his naval sword on a wall befit the retreat of an old British seadog.
We were borne aloft in a lift decorated with Corinthian columns. Doors are of teak – one from the deck of HMS Achilles – with real portholes and their brass wing nuts still in place.
‘Sit ye down,’ said the captain. ‘What’s your poison? Pink gin? Jolly good.’
The captain’s windows looked not only down on but through the Gateway to India. Sun shone on sailing praus out to sea; an island wavered vaguely in a haze; green parrots swooped from tree to tree in the club’s garden.
Captain Bragg retired here in 1945. When I asked him if he planned a final retreat to England, he said, ‘You must be joking.’ There are bearers to sweep out his rooms, to shake out the floppy cushions in his old armchairs, and to dust his old HMV phonograph, his few pictures, his books.
I told Captain Bragg of my journey, my progress and my fears of future difficulties, particularly in Indian waters. He, too, suspected that the west coast of India would produce snags, but he promised to give me a letter to an Indian shipping friend in Go a. He still had an office in a Bombay shipping company, and the letter might help.
Over the pink gin, the captain told me of the decline in yachting; apparently the sun is setting on this innocent and character-forming pastime. ‘India has its troubles, as you know. Poverty galore. We all realize that to display wealth is unwise and undesirable, and sailing has become wildly expensive. If you want to import a sail, much less a yacht, you must pay a hundred per cent duties, plus one hundred and twenty per cent extra charges. It’s a pity. There’s marvellous sailing here.’
He got up, selected an old acetate-coated record and blew on it before laying it with extreme care on the turntable of an old phonograph. The suave, precise rhythms of Victor Sylvester’s orchestra sounded, and the captain, beaming, wandered to the window of the turret, and stared out to sea through his spyglass, his foot tapping to ‘Cochabamba Samba’.
I scouted other shipping possibilities. There was, I found, an American President Lines container–passenger ship due to leave for Colombo in a day or two, but after Dubai I didn’t care to depend on the vagaries of her schedule. In any case, I wanted to see the west coast of India. Mogul Lines seemed the best bet, so I went to their office in Bank Street and arranged a cabin-class booking to Panaji, Goa. Once the ticket was in my pocket, a weight fell from my mind.
That settled, I made a serious attempt to arrange for a permit for the Andamans. In vain. Travel agents I consulted were ignorant of official procedures for procuring such a document. I resorted to the telephone. Someone in the British high commission said I must arrange it through the Indian Tourist Board; the procedures involved the Ministry of External Affairs, he said. The Andamans were a sensitive area, it seemed; permission to go there was seldom, if ever, granted. The senior Indian tourist official in Bombay seemed reluctant to discuss the Andamans at all. His high, impatient babu’s voice complained that it was an unusual request – a futile one, too, he implied. My application for a permit would have to go to his office, he said, then be sent to Delhi, then returned to Bombay after ‘due consideration’ by more than one government department. In six months I could return to Bombay to collect it – if indeed it was approved by Delhi.
What were the chances of approval?
‘Fifty-fifty, at best,’ the impatient voice said.
‘Is there nothing you can do to speed things up?’
‘Nothing.’ Did I detect a hint of triumph?
‘Suppose –’ But he had rung off. And that was that.
*
Captain Bragg and I had our last drink together in the yacht club: Hayward’s beer, brewed in Maharashtra, then pink gin. A crested menu propped against a tankard offered dhal soup, pork vindaloo and rice. Pennants and ships’ crests painted on little shields, presented by visiting officers grateful for the club’s hospitality, hung behind a barman who swirled angostura bitters around the inside of the glasses, coating them pink before pouring in the gin, the drink of the Royal Navy and of east of Suez. The dining-room tables had brass tops, and the gents’ toilet had brass handles on the slatted cubicle doors. Indian and non-Indian members drank or lunched together. The club has long been more Indian than Royal or British, and in that sense it is not an imperial relic at all.
*
The kind captain drove me to the ferry wharf to catch the Goa steamer. A long street took us through jams of battered trucks and hordes of half-naked coolies, chimney-sweep black, pushing carts and humping bales.
‘See all those big houses? They once belonged to the foremen of the dock navvies.’
‘Indian or British?’
‘My God, British. Even at that level, people were British in the old days. You notice I don’t say “good old days”.’
At New Ferry Wharf, the Mogul Line steamer lay waiting, and Captain Bragg handed me the letter he had promised me. ‘May do some good.’
; I thanked him and said goodbye. In the waiting room, passengers gathered slowly. I counted thirty, including two hippies, one of whom, a young man, wore a spangled dress and orange lipstick.
*
A sign in the afterdeck of the Konkan Shakti said, AIRING SPACE FOR LOWER-CLASS PASSENGERS. A tea seller strolled among the deck passengers, announcing himself by clicking little cups against little saucers. Hippies lay about the deck on bedrolls. One of them was a tall, completely bald, middle-aged man in sleeveless undershirt, a belt with a large metal buckle and filthy trousers. I had seen him come aboard, pushing through the ruck of the gangplank, followed by a porter carrying his big rope-meshed bed. Now smoking a cheroot on his wooden bed, bulging obscenely in his tight pants, and totally hairless, there was something villainous about him. ‘We must be careful not to catch louses …’; I could almost hear the calm voice of Mr Pavlides and the disapproving snap of his dentures.
Luckily, my cabin was nothing like Al Anoud’s. It had two fans, white sheets and pillows, two portholes, bed lights and neon strips in the ceiling, and contained, besides myself, a small man shaped like a cannonball and of mild appearance named Mr Chowdury.
The Konkan Shakti glided past Victoria Dock, a small island or two and praus with tattered sails. It was eleven o’clock in the morning of a hot day. A Bombay-registered ship, the Rajendra, dribbled smoke near the forest of cranes made by Jessop of Calcutta fifteen or twenty years before. Soon we passed the Taj and the Gateway to India. I peered at the arch, focusing my binoculars behind it on the Gothic turrets and red tiles of the Bombay Yacht Club so reminiscent of Torquay or Bournemouth. I wondered if Captain Bragg was in his window, his spyglass to his eye, tapping a foot to Victor Sylvester.
