Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  A clerk from Baroda, who had been to the Andamans visiting his girlfriend, the daughter of a government employee, confided, ‘This is my first time at sea, uncle. I am a lonely person. I want to go to Abu Dhabi, or anywhere outside India. Can I get work there?’ Yet another little fish trying to swim westwards….

  The first entry in the ship’s complaint book was signed by a Mr Lal, who wrote, ‘I am glad to certify that the service given me by the staff is really good. I feel just homelike comfort and this is due only from their sweet association.’ Mr Lal had taken the words out of my mouth.

  But there were grumbles, too. An Indian navy lieutenant had written, ‘The standards of “HV” have come crashing down. All the facilities which were taken for granted when you travelled as a De Luxe class passenger have vanished into thin (salt) air.’ A Professor Patel said: ‘I received a piece of glass in my rice plate.’ A Mr Kukherjee fumed that he had found ‘certain indecent and unruly passengers in drunken condition’.

  But the most elaborate complaint came from an irritated Bengali: ‘I request Master of the ship to step in Cabin just for experience…. Stewards attend cabins at their own whims and favours. Passengers boarding ship should be instructed about correct methods to use heads, and socio-economic differences keep some in dark…. I am in habit of taking tea about six or seven times in a day, but saloon refused to entertain my request…. There is a common bath and lavatory for several Second Class passengers and in morning there is a terrible rush and it is difficult to attend to natural call. Also, as it is known, we are Indians and prefer to use water and never paper napkin….’

  *

  I’d had a long-standing ambition to travel up the Hooghly river, and now, on the bridge of the Harsha Vardhana with Captain John and Chief Officer Joseph, I was to do so. The following are jottings from my notebook:

  The great grey-green, greasy mouth of the Ganges. Sun white and bright in the mist. It reminds me of the mouth of the Nile. Mud swirls around us, contributed to by the dredging that is going on at intervals up the channel. The chief officer, Joseph, was with Calcutta Port recently and laid the buoys we see here. He also helped build the artificial spurs of brick and cement into the bank in order to push the water into mid-channel to deepen it. Labour unrest is one port killer; silting is another.

  The water is so thick that another ship in the channel, the Robert E. Lee of New York, makes a sort of milky porridge of her wake. The banks close in, and flat, dusty-green countryside spreads out around us; here and there a red roof, cattle, a sailing vessel with men straining on two long oars. We pick up a pilot. Fifty-five miles below Calcutta the river is amazingly narrow.

  10.30 a.m. The famous Balari Bar lies across our bows like a submerged whale, its brown length clearly visible. We reduce speed and slip across with only two or three feet clearance.

  Diamond Harbour. Palms, houses and a brick factory. Fishing boats scattered about the river like that aquatic insect the water boatman. The pilot focuses his binoculars on the Indian Trust and waves to her bridge, then swings HV diagonally across the river. We zigzag at great speed, overtaking one or two foreign ships.

  I read bits of Appendix C of the Storm Warning Service booklet, sold by the director of marine, Calcutta. Under ‘Special signals used on the rivers of the Ganges Delta’, it says:

  It has been found desirable to arrange a simpler system for the inland waters of the Ganges Delta, as the signals there are used mainly by men of little education. Experience has shown that all that is required in this case is to indicate three degrees of danger.

  Signal I. A storm may affect you shortly.

  Signal II. A storm will soon strike you.

  Signal III. A violent storm will soon strike you.

  Appendix Β reads: ‘… Great Danger Signal indicates the approach of a storm of great intensity. Masters and pilots are cautioned not to … proceed down from Diamond Harbour, and they should make their vessels as snug and secure as possible….’

  The river is like Henley during the regatta. Fleets of small boats. An old man and a boy in a dinghy nearly capsize in our wash, but right themselves and wave up to the bridge, laughing.

  ‘There’s Calcutta,’ Captain John proclaimed. What do I see? Through smog, the whitish gleam of a few skyscrapers. On a bend, chimneys, derricks, plumes of oily black smoke. Flatness, alleviated here and there by archaeological sites in the making: the ruins of ancient jute mills, holed and pocked like buildings bombarded during the Mutiny. Near one ruin, an amazing and sickening concourse of vultures – a hundred or more. There are dark, unspeakable things on the bank: bodies, but whose? The vultures wrangle and tear and gobble. Some, bloated, waddle away too heavy with carrion to fly. How is it that they are so beautiful on the wing?

  ‘Half ahead.’

  ‘Half ahead, sir.’

  I notice – it’s difficult not to from the click-clacking on the deck – that the ship’s apprentices – young Indians training to be officers – are wearing, of all things, high heels. High heels! They teeter awkwardly and dangerously about as if they were fashion models showing off the latest in naval styles. ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Click-clack, click-clack.

  We have to make dock in the slack water before the ebb, so we almost careen up the last bends. Soon the white dome of the Victoria Memorial. We swing around to the lock mouth – the docks here are tucked away among the buildings, only approachable through locks – scattering a midge cloud of barges and tugs with a basso-profundo blast which echoes through the part of the city that has now closed dingily about us. A city of Victorian godowns with Gradgrind faces, interspersed with occasional unexpected palms.

  The lock. A tarnished tug the colour of an old, soiled tennis ball, the Stalwart, a good tug-worthy name (tugs usually have such names as Titan or Giant), creeps up behind us, at the ready. On our foredeck the passengers are ready to rush ashore. Bundles everywhere, bright clothes, soldiers in khaki again after holidaying in their sarongs. Wooden chests with brass corners, hockey sticks and umbrellas, thermoses.

  ‘Dead slow ahead.’

  ‘Stop. Make fast.’

  A twenty-minute wait in the lock as the water level rises to match that of the dock. We give out four long blasts of the siren, then four short ones. Beyond the lock gate ahead sprouts a forest of derricks, and masts of the ships jammed end to end alongside the quays. The port of Calcutta may not be the glory it once was, but it isn’t empty. A small tug waits for us, fussing about like a matador loosening up his muscles before the bull is released. Gates open. The tug is no longer a matador but a mother duck; back and forth from one side of us to the other, nudging, guiding. We pass through a swing bridge over which a road normally passes. On each side of it cars, rickshaws, motor scooters and pedestrians pile up, waiting for us to pass.

  On either side, the John (Panama) and the Lok Palak (Bombay), her crew gathered on the stern rail to wave to friends arriving from the Andamans. They point at me, a strange foreigner to be coming from Port Blair. I feel elated to have been there. I wish I could go right back with the HV.

  ‘Mid-shee-ips.’ The pilot almost makes an aria of his orders.

  Four short blasts on the siren. ‘Hard a p-o-o-o-rt.’

  We bump against the wharf behind Vishna Vihram (Bombay). Now I can see all Calcutta: skyscrapers, Victorian domes, chimneys, a park. A fusillade of triumphant whistles from the pilot: Calcutta, we are here. The passengers bunch themselves expectantly like an invading horde, longing to storm ashore and sack the city of their dreams.

  Not the city of my dreams, however.

  It was my bad luck to arrive in Calcutta on the eve of a public holiday. Offices would close tomorrow, the pilot said, and remain closed for several days. Long enough to make me try to flee the city.

  With the help of Captain John’s friends ashore, I tried to find a ship leaving within two or three days for Rangoon or Chittagong. They were pessimistic at first, and at last politely but frankly apologetic. ‘It’s just very difficult. If y
ou had a week or two to wait….’

  A week or two could stretch into three or four. But I didn’t want to spend more than two or three days. I was impatient to get on.

  At four o’clock that afternoon I rang the Everett Steamship Company and their travel service: no answer. I called the SCI; nothing doing, they said, from Calcutta to Rangoon or Chittagong. Of course, their regular steamship service would take me to Madras, Penang and Singapore. I told them I already had a reservation on that. Thank God I did, I thought now, sitting on my hotel bed with the telephone book open on my knee. After more abortive calls, it was obvious that the holiday shutters had come down in all offices in Calcutta.

  I decided to give the impasse two days of thought and exploration, but two events crushed hope in my breast. First, the city of Calcutta was in a state of revolutionary ferment all the next day – which is to say that the various left-wing and communist parties of West Bengal took to the streets in those mammoth demonstrations involving the hundreds of thousands that only India can produce. They overwhelmed the centre of the city; the streets were impassable, with armies of chanting men and women carrying red flags. They overflowed onto the grassy park called the Padang, stopped all traffic to and from the port, and almost blocked the door of my hotel. The holiday and this human deluge put the seal of despair on any thought that shipping agents would take the time or trouble to help an unaccountable Englishman travelling for pleasure down the Hooghly in a ship. There would be no more ships from Calcutta – ever.

  This may seem like hysterical pessimism now but, whatever it was, it received a palpable boost from a newspaper article that fell open before my eyes as I lay on my bed waiting for a telephone call that never came. The Amrita Bazar carried a story headed ‘Foreign Shipping Lines By-passing Indian Ports’:

  Mr. V. P. Punj, Chairman of the Engineering Export Promotion Council [meeting with the representatives of the two national shipping lines, SCI and the Scindia Navigation Company] said that Indian ports had never been free from problems like labour unrest, low productivity, inadequate and outmoded handling equipment. These problems had assumed such alarming proportions that the entire economy of the country was in jeopardy.

  For instance, he said, the Calcutta Port was virtually closed since mid-September 1978 because of strikes and other forms of agitation by the port and dock workers. Once one group of workers called off their strike another group bobbed up and started agitation….

  The words I have italicized above danced before my eyes like liver spots on the morning after. I thought of all those ships inert behind their untended lock gates: no swing gates opening, no tugs moving. I thought of that sluggishly swirling water like milky porridge. I thought of silt.

  Going down to the lobby, I took another look at the Ganges-like, mud-coloured flood of human beings seething past the door, and then made a beeline for the hotel telephone operator. ‘How long would it take to make a call to Madras?’

  ‘Can you wait an hour?’

  ‘Not possibly.’

  ‘Well, you can make a lightning call, but it’s expensive – two hundred rupees for three minutes.’

  ‘I’ll wait an hour.’

  I waited half an hour. The shipping agent’s office in Madras was open. ‘I want to confirm my passage on the sailing to Singapore,’ I said.

  This accomplished, I begged the concierge to send a boy through the human flood, if necessary with a lifeline round his waist, to the railway ticket office to buy me a sleeper ticket on the Coromandel Express for the following night’s train to Madras. I had two days in which to catch the steamer from Madras to Singapore; to miss it would mean a delay of two weeks.

  *

  The next day I had lunch with an old acquaintance, Lindsay Emmerson, the English editor of the Statesman, a great Indian paper. We had pink gin and beer and curry in Amber’s, one of India’s – the world’s – finest restaurants. I hadn’t seen Lindsay for several years. He had grown older, of course – he must have been in his late sixties – and reminded me as always of an old but comfortable armchair bursting its seams. He had spent all his life in India; his father had been a pilot on the Hooghly.

  He said, ‘You once wrote that, when you came to my flat, you could hear the jackals howling from the cemetery.’

  ‘What a memory.’

  ‘No longer do they howl in my hearing. I’ve a new flat, very grand, very … well, Victorian, very … Balmoral.’

  Lindsay told me a political joke about the time in 1975 when Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, had declared a state of emergency and herded the leaders of her parliamentary opposition into jail. ‘This is true, on my honour. Someone I know went to a big bookshop in Delhi during the emergency and asked for a copy of the Constitution of India. And the bookseller said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t stock periodicals.”’

  I asked Lindsay about something that had puzzled me in the Andamans. ‘The Japanese behaved so oddly there,’ I said. ‘They captured the Andamans from the British, and then, instead of befriending the population, they brutalized it. They even treated their Indian collaborators badly. Can you explain that?’

  Lindsay had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese in Singapore. ‘Well, they are peculiar,’ he answered. ‘They’re a bit like the Dead End kids with tommy guns. Sometimes you could fool them, though, or make a successful appeal to their better nature. For instance, you had to salute Jap guards if you had a hat on, and kowtow if you were hatless. You could be very roughly handled if you didn’t. But I saw one of my chums, a Scotsman, smoking a cigarette – another thing you were never supposed to do because it affronted the emperor – as he strolled past a sentry. The sentry, of course, shouted, “Come here,” and, when my friend went over, the sentry put his little face close to his and barked, “Why are you smoking that cigarette? Why?”

  ‘“Because I can’t bear a pipe,” replied my friend. And to my amazement – to this day I can’t think why he did it – the sentry appeared to consider this and then after a pause said, “Yes, well, get along. Go.”’

  We talked of the poets Lindsay liked – Betjeman, Kipling – and in his Cambridge-accented voice he recited Kipling’s ‘Cities and Thrones and Powers’.

  Our lunch lasted a long time, and then I had to prepare for the journey to Madras. Lindsay, in tweed jacket, food-stained, nondescript tie and voluminous trousers, climbed into his shaky little car, his hand waved, his creased old face smiled. A few months later, in England, I saw in a newspaper that he was dead.

  Almost all I remember of the Coromandel Express is its speed and shining-chrome newness. There was a farting baby, and a sweet brother and sister who laughed over their holiday studies, and a guards van just behind my sleeper full of bowlegged Assamese soldiers with ruddy round faces and slanting eyes.

  Harry Miller said, ‘You’re lucky I’m still here.’

  ‘Why? Travel plans?’

  ‘No, a krait got into my snake bag!’

  It turned out that a gardener had caught a krait not knowing what it was, and put it into a bag Harry normally used for storing rat snakes before taking them to the snake park. Rat snakes are perfectly harmless. ‘I give the local boys a rupee or two whenever they bring me one. But a few days ago I noticed a bag with a snake in it in Pythagoras’s crate, so I picked it up and squeezed it all around to discover how big it was. It was, I thought a medium-sized rat snake but then Sampath asked, “What shall I do with the krait?” I looked in the sack and, sure enough, there was a healthy half-grown krait. As I explained to you, the krait is India’s most venomous land snake. So you see, snakes don’t want to attack you if they don’t have to. I’d squeezed it all over, and even then it didn’t bite me. Isn’t that a tribute to the snake’s docility?’

  Before I left to find out about my sailing time to Singapore, Harry invited me to watch him feeding a long white-bellied snake that hadn’t been in his house the last time. Feeding consisted of pushing three mice into the snake’s crate. It seemed to inspect the mi
ce like a housewife selecting a ripe grapefruit in a supermarket; then it seized one and began to squeeze it.

  ‘A rat snake crushing a mouse?’

  ‘Let’s say,’ said Harry, ‘a cat snake preventing a mouse from breathing. A cat snake is common but harmless.’

  ‘Cruelty to mice.’

  Harry laughed. ‘No mice would be cruelty to cat snakes.’ From his crate window, Pythagoras looked on with an eye like the head of a hatpin.

  *

  When I collected my ticket from the agents, they said the ship, Chidambaram, would sail on time next day.

  That evening I telephoned my friend Dennis Bloodworth, the Observer’s man in Singapore and the author of bestselling books on South-east Asia and China. I had written to him from Colombo, asking him if he could get in touch with the operations manager of the Straits Steamship Company and find me a passage east from Singapore. Straits Steamship is one of the oldest shipping houses in the East. I knew it had passenger ships plying from Singapore to Borneo, in particular a famous old ship called the Rajah Brooke. My letter to Dennis had also suggested inquiring about a ship heading up to Borneo or Bangkok – either place would do.

  On the telephone Dennis was apologetic. ‘Bad news, I’m afraid. The Rajah Brooke is being scrapped this month, so she’s out of it. They have no other passenger carriers left, except to Australia. Bangkok seems very difficult from here, but I’ll keep trying.’

  I thanked him and told him of my date of arrival in Singapore. ‘The ship’s name is Chidambaram.’

  ‘Shit damn bum what?’ the great Orientalist shouted across the Bay of Bengal. ‘Kindly spell that.’

  Twenty four

  The voyage of the Chidambaram to Penang and Singapore was an uneventful glide over submissive blue waters. She had formerly belonged to Messageries Maritimes, and had plied between Dunkerque, Le Havre and the Canaries. Since her maiden crossing of the Bay of Bengal and the Malacca Strait in 1973, she had carried hundreds of holidaying Malay and Indian students, workers and businessmen back and forth with stabilized aplomb.