Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  *

  Captain M. I. Kadir put two ringers in his mouth and released a piercing whistle. In response a large young officer appeared and the captain gave him a burble of orders. Turning to me, he said, ‘Myself, my chief officer and second officer, we are all from Daman in Goa. My chief engineer comes from Punjab and the third officer from Kerala. Mixed bag.’

  Soon after sailing, the captain had invited me to the bridge. I think someone in the Mogul Lines office had told him I was a writer. He had been all over the world, he said, but had spent thirteen years on this run between Goa and Bombay. It was not a profitable route any more; fuel prices were the problem. The Konkan Shakti was a good ship, though, Yugoslav-built, fourteen years old, 2000 tons. Yes, Goa was now a very busy port, but there was a weather problem for small vessels. For example, June, July and August were months of heavy swell and strong winds because of the south-west monsoon. ‘In these months we are not running the ship.’

  ‘Have any ships been lost in these monsoons?’

  ‘Five or six years back, yes. At Malwan. Ships going aground on reefs. Ships lost, not people. In 1977 a cyclone made us put back to Bombay and disembark all the passengers. Now if we have a bad weather report we don’t sail.’

  *

  Mr Chowdury shifted uneasily in his sleep. His black stomach heaved restlessly as his white vest rode higher and higher and his cotton bloomers sank lower and lower. I feared total exposure before morning. A fart overrode the whirr of the fan.

  At a very early hour we anchored off a small port. Coolies came aboard and loaded and off-loaded cargo with a thunderous banging of barges against the ship’s side. Mr Chowdury heaved himself up. ‘Is that a door banging?’ he demanded. ‘Are we sinking?’ I didn’t feel like conversation and feigned sleep.

  At daybreak, while we drank the early morning tea our steward had brought us, Mr Chowdury said, ‘So hot, so very hot at night. Did you hear that amazing noise?’

  ‘What sort of noise?’

  ‘I am referring to a really rude, ill-mannered noise. Almost intolerable, you might say. A gun fired at the porthole, possibly, although that would have been illegal, of course, and would have merited summary arrest.’

  ‘No, I doubt –’

  ‘No, no, not a gun, obviously. But the effect was the same. You didn’t hear that bloody man whistling and shouting at 1.00 a.m.? Dementedly shouting, you might say. I thought we were being attacked by hooligans after our blood. And you, sir, quietly sleeping. If I may say so, like a baby, like an innocent baby.’

  He swung his short legs to the ground. ‘How tall are you, sir?’ he asked. ‘Six foot three? My son is also very tall, six foot, yet his mother is like me.’

  Mr Chowdury said he was from Patna in the north-eastern state of Bihar; he would stay two days in Goa and then fly back. ‘A change is as good as a feast, I always say.’

  ‘That’s very true.’

  ‘Ah, then,’ he said seriously, ‘we are agreeing on a very important thing.’

  *

  Bingo in the second-class dining room. The second officer calls out the numbers to a packed and sweating audience bent over slips of squared and numbered paper. ‘Grandmother’s age – eight zero…. Republic day – twenty-six…. Punjab Day – number five…. A round dozen – number twelve…. Hockey sticks – seventy seven.’

  Sikhs played cards on the perfectly scrubbed deck; Indian families made little picnics. Hippies peeled oranges, slept or studied pornographic pictures in sex magazines. Four miles away the green coastline moved by.

  On time, Captain Kadir brought the ship into Goa in a blue morning mist, passing through a fleet of trawlers with light roofs, ‘We’re going right inside,’ he said, like a surgeon announcing his next probe. An old fort, a white church, land becoming reddish and lumpy, a line of broken water under a cliff.

  ‘Slow ahead…. Dead slow ahead.’ The engines die to a purr. Trees and beach come down to the water. ‘Here the water is very shallow, only thirteen feet, and our draught is twelve foot six.’

  A fine Portuguese jail on a bluff. A lighthouse with a prau in front of it like a postcard. Palms sprouting like unkempt hair, behind them ridges and trees: Mowgli country. A small town on the water’s edge. A wharf.

  In Panaji, Captain Kadir had told me, there were two or three good hotels. One was called Hotel Aroma; the other, Hotel Fatima. Both had nice names, but I found another one, the Mandovi, nearer the water.

  It soon appeared that my troubles had returned. I telephoned Captain Philip Bragg’s contact in a shipping office more than an hour away by ferry and taxi and said I had a letter. A voice whispered, ‘I am so sorry.’ It was a very sad voice. ‘I have a fracture. I’m not sitting down long in the office. But, Mr Young, there is no cargo now for Cochin or Colombo from here. Now we expect iron ore only, and that all goes to Japan, so no ships sail to Cochin or Colombo at all. To Bombay only, and to Japan.’ He would be in touch if he heard anything of interest, but there was no point in my bringing the letter.

  Blocked again, by a voice on a line so poor that I might have been talking to Outer Mongolia in a blizzard. When I suggested telexing or phoning Cochin, Captain Bragg’s contact said, ‘It’s very hard to get a line to Cochin. There’s a Mr George there who may help you. But the line is so bad….’ In the end I rang off in despair.

  At the hotel a barman called Carlos took pity on me and tried to cheer me up with a fenny cocktail; it was, he said, a Goan speciality: a double caju fenny, Rose’s Lime Juice, a dash of fresh lime juice, ice. Fenny is the local liquor, fairly mild, and comes in two varieties: one, called Patrão, made from cashew nuts (caju); the other, Diva Goa, lighter and drier, from coconuts. It makes a smooth, uplifting drink and at seventeen pence is far cheaper than the Indian-made spirits with magnificent names: Carew’s gin, Forbes’ London gin, Hayward’s white rum, Honey Bee brandy, Doctor’s brandy, Bagpipe whisky, Old Tavern whisky, and – my favourite – McDowell’s whisky.

  Over the fenny I considered what to do. Even the news from Cochin was bad. In the bar a man who had just come from there by road told me that the port was closed by a strike of stevedores. Nothing would be going in or out, he said, for days.

  Nevertheless, I wanted to push on, although, from what I could see of Goa, it was very beautiful indeed, one of the loveliest places I had ever seen. It reminded me of Cabinda in the old days, the tropical Portuguese enclave north of Angola on the south-west coast of Africa. After the second fenny I decided to stay a day or two and see the churches and a hippie or two – Goa is famous as a hippie hangout and is the burial place of St Francis Xavier – and then press on somehow.

  In the street outside the hotel I ran into a man I had seen on the ship from Bombay. He was youngish, blond, very tall and slim, with a pale moustache. He was dressed like a Mississippi gambler in a film, in a white three-piece suit and shoes, very elegant. I had watched him at the rail of the ship and, for some reason, had found him sinister, like a villain in literature – Conrad’s Mr Jones in Victory, perhaps.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. Although we hadn’t spoken more than a few words on the ship, he recognized me in the street, and there was no avoiding shaking hands and reintroducing myself. I needn’t have worried because as soon as he spoke his charm was apparent, and I couldn’t think why I’d thought him sinister. He was Richard Wesse, a German, and he and his wife lived in an old and most unusual house, he said, at Naicavaddo-Calangute, some way out of Panaji. He would be delighted if I could come and see it.

  It was indeed an extraordinary house, about an hour away. Thick, silent coconut groves behind one of the biggest hippie beaches screened it from the world. Villa Nunes it was called, and the owl-light of the trees gave it a mysterious haunting look. The date 1904 was carved on a small, overgrown bridge on the grassy, stony path that wandered up to it from a village, and the name ‘John Nunes’ faced you like a curse from the mildewed stones of tall pillars through which you passed into a walled garden and up to a fr
ont porch that had the aura of an Eastern temple about it. There, coloured glass over the porch dappled us in green-blue and blood-red, and a ten-foot double door opened into tall rooms with arched, ecclesiastical windows – the top third of them glowing with the same red and blue glass – and furnished with fine dark wicker chairs, dark wood tables and potted plants. On the walls a print of The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice faced grandly framed and mounted photographic portraits of some of the departed Nunes family: the grandfather stern-faced in evening dress with three medals; his wife, firm, big-bosomed, unkillable (but dead now, of course); his grandchildren in mortarboards displaying their newly awarded diplomas. They were lugubrious; it was like inspecting the photographs, blotched and dimmed by the weather, you find on tombs in Catholic cemeteries.

  As he moved through the gate ahead of me, momentarily a harlequin as he passed under the porch’s coloured glass, Richard Wesse’s lean white-clad figure seemed wholly appropriate; he reminded me of a photograph of R. L. Stevenson on Samoa.

  He waved a hand around the shaded and taciturn rooms. ‘The old lady, the surviving Nunes, is widowed and lives in Bombay in a dismal slum on the railway line. I saw her there once, sitting over the railway line with a few sticks of furniture and one plastic table shaped like a kidney. Imagine, after this, she prefers it there.’

  This was how minor Portuguese officials once lived, raising a family, retiring, dying in this obscure and modest grandeur. Outside, black crows flopped about in the palms, and mangoes and hibiscus grew on both sides of the crumbling gate. Except for the squawks of the mynah birds, the heavy silence was unbroken. I supposed John Nunes must be buried near here, not far from St Francis Xavier.

  Wesse’s young wife joined us, a cheerful Berliner whose laughter broke the sombre spell the place imposed. A birdlike black gardener’s boy – he might have flapped down from a tree – trotted behind her, carrying a watering can. He put his head on one side and said, ‘Your country is not like this, sir. Better than this.’

  ‘This is a beautiful country.’

  ‘No, sir, not good.’ He shook his head. ‘Not good.’ Was nobody contented with his country? He poured water on a scrubby plant, then perked up. ‘This is a garden. I am watering flowers here, sir.’ Well, at least he liked flowers.

  Some way down the green bumpy path that ran past the stone gateposts, a little white cross stood near a tiny shrine. Palm branches had been stuck in the earth beside it, and on a palsied stone I saw blobs of candle wax.

  *

  The countryside around Naicavaddo-Calangute was a region of white ornate churches, dotted like pious blocks of sugar icing among the iridescent greenness.

  ‘Every day the churches are full,’ said Richard Wesse. The services were still held in Portuguese, and there was organ music. Elaborate tombs, hull down in the long grass, to people with names like Da Santos and Pinto encircled the churches. Inside there were blue ceilings, blue walls, statues, tumbling scrollwork in gold, and fans on long stalks suspended over light-wood pews. The churches looked as though a lot of money was still being spent on them; they exuded a stifling richness. Yet the bedraggled world of the hippies was only a fifteen-minute walk away.

  Richard had been a hippie. As we strolled down to Andrew’s Bar, a shack near the beach selling beer and fenny, he told me about it.

  ‘Well, hippie is an attitude of mind. It started in sixty-seven – the political thing, anti-Vietnam. All my friends were hippie, so I was too. I tried to run away from home. I liked long hair and to be dirty. It was just – well, something else. Then I didn’t see any point in it any more. For one thing, I like my parents.’

  We drank caju fenny at a creaking wooden table in the open air under palms from which coconuts thudded down. A Frenchman with a thirty-year-old drinker’s face called Paul, and Jo, a plumber from Newcastle, joined us. When Paul went into the bar to buy more fenny, Richard Wesse told me that Paul had once been a successful Vogue model, but had dropped everything to settle here. ‘He’s at Andrew’s Bar all day. Well, not all day because they close from three to six.’

  A plump girl roared up on a powerful motorbike with a long-haired Indian on the pillion with his arms around her. ‘Yοο-hoo,’ she shouted, snatching two hockey sticks from the Indian and disappearing into the bar, ‘Yοο-hoo. Yoo-hoooooo.’

  ‘Spaced out,’ Richard Wesse explained. ‘She’s Lilli, from Berlin.’ In the bar someone began to sing ‘Surabaya Johnny’. A pale man naked to the waist, displaying prominent ribs and skinny arms, slouched by, watching his own feet pushing uncertainly forward on the uneven ground. ‘He’s a real junkie. Neglects to eat. Ninety per cent of the youth are here because of the drugs. Why here? There’s no harassment and it’s cheap. Not that they’re all real junkies. You can take drugs without being an addict. Some are addicts; some just like drugs.’

  Jo the plumber said, ‘You’re English. Let me tell you, this is a really lovely place, this is.’ He hesitated a moment, and then said, ‘Funny thing happened. Like to hear about it?’

  ‘Please.’ He didn’t look like a junkie. He was sipping beer.

  ‘I bumped into a friend here, someone I’d known since childhood in Newcastle. I hadn’t seen him for bloody ages. There was a bloke playing a guitar on the beach here. I said, “There’s a good guitarist,” and I looked at him, like, and all of a sudden I saw it was old Nipper. I don’t know how I knew him, I just did. Truthfully, he’d completely changed. He’s only twenty-three, but as God’s my witness he could be any age. It shocked the life out of me – really shocked me rigid. He used to be a big, solid bloke, Nipper. Now in Goa I saw this skeleton, small, all wizened. You could see all his chestbones sticking out, like that bloke who’s just gone past, his chest sort of caving in.’

  Jo waited while Richard Wesse went in to the bar to order more beer and fenny. A coconut fell near a family of black-backed pigs rolling in a mud patch.

  When Richard returned, Jo resumed, ‘Well, he peered at me, Nipper did. “Is that you, Jo?” he asked, as if he couldn’t take me in, so to speak. “You want a beer?” he said. He seemed scared and confused, and wanted to get us away from the others…. Christ, he was that nervous. Still, after a bit we started talking of the old days. We saw where he lived, sharing with lots of junkies. Some of them obviously looked after themselves nice and seemed healthy, but not old Nipper.’

  Jo shook his head, seeing Nipper again. ‘His teeth had gone completely rotten, and his hair was all going. I tried to laugh. “Well, then,” I said, “what’s it like to be with the Health and Happiness Group, eh?” I didn’t have to ask if he was happy or wanted to go home. He’d been asked that too often, I knew, and it was too late for that now. He asked me for ten rupees – that’s just over fifty pence – for food, although I doubted if he’d eat with it. He can’t have been eating at all.’

  Jo took a mouthful of beer. He looked as if he wanted to cry. ‘If you could only have seen him aged twelve, and now…. I only recognized him by instinct – nothing but instinct.’

  Paul went for more drinks, and Lilli, invisible in the bar, carolled again, ‘Yoo-hoo.’

  ‘Nipper had been here three years without a break,’ said Jo.

  ‘How did he get into drugs?’ I asked.

  ‘He’d been a junkie in Newcastle years ago. I knew that. He went to prison there, see, for raiding a chemist’s. After that, he’d taken off for Bombay. He got through all his money there – two grams a day of smack cost a lot – and sold everything he had, clothes, everything. He’d become like a lost soul, he said; he even sold his body. Then he came to Goa, and here he was, talking to me. Well, sort of talking; it wasn’t real somehow. I felt I was with someone in a trance. Serious questions seemed to bounce off him, like.’

  ‘How does he live now?’

  ‘I don’t think he has any money. Sometimes he plays in that band at parties.’ He wagged his head again. ‘I’d have given him a hundred rupees when he asked for the ten, but I thought it might seem patronizi
ng, so I said, “Of course, Nipper boy, here’s ten.”’

  When I asked Jo whether he’d stay on here, he said, ‘I’m off tomorrow back to UK. I love it here and I’ll be back on a visit, but I’ve a job. Plumbing, that’s what I do. Good money, so, when I get another holiday, I’ll be back. I may see Nipper again; I don’t know. But what the bloody hell will I tell his family in Newcastle, eh?’

  Paul was back with another glass of fenny; it might have been his fifth or his fifteenth. ‘Some junkies live by selling bad drugs,’ he said. ‘There are some really bad people here.’

  Richard Wesse said, ‘But others – me, for example – live by selling local materials to Europe. Some of the materials here are very beautiful and very cheap. You could stay here for ever doing legitimate work like that, no problem.’

  Paul said, ‘Richard says you’re trying to get to Sri Lanka by sea. Try a port on the south coast of India, at the very tip. A small port called Tuticorin. They have country boats; you’ve heard of them?’

  ‘Paul’s travelled all over southern India,’ Richard said. ‘He has good advice. Try Tuticorin.’

  Seventeen

  I walked back to the Villa Nunes with Richard Wesse, to the twilight house, with its stained glass, fine tiled floors and gaunt but stately windows, that had nothing to do with the bar on the beach. Two little girls in school tunics wandering under the trees sold me a one-rupee ticket for the Christmas draw at their church of St Alex. The ticket told me that the parish priest, Fr. José Francisco Vaz, promised the winner: ‘1 hen, 1 Bottle of Brandy, 2 beers, 1 tin of cheese, 1 tin of Mackerels, 1 Pk. of Toffees.’ I wondered if their parents warned the girls away from the beach where, among the Richard Wesses, Jos and Pauls, other far less human strangers lived and carried on. I had seen young men with taut, pallid skins, thin grim mouths and hair pulled back into buns so that they looked like discontented governesses, and young women from whose faces all youth seemed to have leaked away. There was a little bit of heaven and something of hell here, and the century was immaterial.