by Tahmima Anam
A few miles into the Dhaka–Chittagong highway, the gentle hills breaking up the horizon disappeared, and we were suddenly confronted with the complicated detritus of broken ships. Bilal gestured to the vast scrapyards of things that looked like they’d been rescued from a warzone: broken refrigerators, oxygen tanks, rows and rows of lifebuoys, toilet bowls, washing machines, metal cages he referred to as compressors, and then a string of antique shops that housed, he told me, compasses and brass trinkets and lanterns and other things that had been found on board. Then, passing a number of furniture shops, open storefronts displaying battered sofas, bunk beds, filing cabinets, office desks, he said sometimes they pretended the stuff came from the ships when actually it was made right there on the road.
Bilal kept casting curious glances my way, because I had hardly made a sound or exclaimed at the strangeness of the landscape, which must have been rare; he was probably used to people talking about how bizarre it all looked, like a glimpse into an apocalyptic future where everything was salvaged and half-broken. But I was numb to all of it, pleased by the sight of something that matched the chaos I felt within me. It was only when we passed through the gates of Prosperity Shipbreaking, and I saw an oil tanker in the final stages of being pulled apart, a felled dinosaur of metal lying on its side with the curved blades of its propeller exposed, that I was unable to hold back from cursing out loud. ‘What the fuck?’ I blurted out, and Bilal smiled, as if he’d just won a bet.
The Shipsafe office was on a small paved road off the highway and just a few steps from the beach. There were just two rooms – one in front with a veranda overlooking a small patch of grass where someone had planted onions and coriander, and another adjacent to the kitchen that served as a small meeting room. I was assigned a heavy wooden desk with a glass top in the front room. There was a caretaker who was in charge of keeping the place clean who did a reasonable fish curry for lunch. In the evenings I would have to fend for myself.
Bilal filled the kettle and we shared a pot of tea on my new desk. I asked him a few more questions about his wedding, and he showed me another photograph, this time of himself sitting on the dais with his bride under a red-and-yellow canopy. Then he brought up Gabriela, the British researcher who I had been brought on to help.
She had recently landed in Chittagong after four years on the Rainbow Warrior, and was here to complete the initial interviews for the film, after which the director and the crew would arrive in several months. She spoke a few words of Bangla, learned in London before she had set off for Chittagong. ‘Why hasn’t it worked out?’ I asked him. I saw him look out into the garden. ‘She’s foreign,’ he finally said, lifting up his shoulder. ‘She asks too many questions.’
‘Isn’t that why she’s here?’
‘Mind if I smoke?’ he said, taking out a box of Benson & Hedges before I could reply. He brought an ashtray over from his desk on the other side of the room, and then he said, ‘I don’t trust her.’ I tried to press him further, but he withdrew into silence, leaning back in his chair and pulling hard on his cigarette. After a long time he said, ‘It’s a cruel industry. For years we’ve been working slowly, patiently with the owners. Suddenly she comes and tells us how terrible things are. A film isn’t going to change anything.’
I didn’t want to get drawn into a debate about the purpose of art. Bilal had a long scar running along his forearm, which he exposed as he flicked his cigarette stub to the ground. I asked him about the scar and he said his father had taken a razor blade and sliced through his flesh once when he was about twelve because he had been caught kissing his cousin. ‘On the mouth,’ he said, putting a finger on his lip. ‘The servant found us and she dragged me outside by my ear. Abba was shaving.’
The story seemed to relax him. He pulled another chair towards us and stretched out his legs.
‘Sometimes people prefer talking to strangers,’ I suggested.
‘Nobody is going to tell that woman anything,’ he said.
The apartment was much nicer than the office, with windows on two sides, one looking onto the road, the other through to the beach beyond. There were two bedrooms and a small sitting area, a dining table, a chair and a few large square cushions on the floor. I took the smaller, empty bedroom. After unpacking my bag and stringing up my mosquito net, I pulled the chair over to the window and ate the noodles Komola had packed for me, listening to the distant whine of the shoreline smelter. Dusk was quickly followed by darkness, and just as I was about to switch off the overhead light and try to sleep, the front door opened and Gabriela entered.
She stopped for a moment, then, realising who I was, bounded over and threw her arms around me. She was fortyish, tall and muscular, with reddish-brown hair. ‘Thank bloody Jesus you’re here,’ she said. I returned her smile. Without sitting or putting down the large bag slung over her shoulder, she began to bombard me with questions. Why were the workers so young? Where had they all come from? Where were their parents? And why on God’s great earth would anyone choose this beach, with its glassy water and buttery sand, to destroy ships, rather than sunbathe and swim and fall in love? She had been there for a month and the workers had refused to talk to her.
‘It’s like their mouths are sewn shut.’
I knew why already, five minutes into meeting her. The way she dressed, for instance. Her shirt was open two buttons too far. She had rolled up her sleeves past her elbows, revealing the articulated muscles of her upper arms. Her jeans were tight and her ass was exposed because she had tucked in her shirt. How would anyone know where to look, much less open their mouths and tell her anything? She had pierced her nose, and three studs up each ear, and there was a small jewel above her lip, where a mole or a birthmark might be. She reminded me of a vintage cigarette advertisement, with the woman flexing her biceps. A cross between that and a hippy and a biker. I was a little disgusted but also thrilled to be in the presence of someone so completely out of context.
Gabriela offered me the bigger room, but I declined. ‘Come and lounge on the bed for a few minutes at least,’ she said. ‘There’s nowhere comfy to sit.’ She opened a bottle of tequila and insisted I take a swig. ‘This shit is the only stuff that keeps me sane.’ I was going to say no, but then I thought, what the hell, it’s not like I’m pregnant. I tipped the bottle into my mouth and it burned a hole all the way down to my stomach. She kept telling me how glad she was to see me. ‘Tell me what we’re going to do. I’m at a dead end here.’
‘I don’t know yet,’ I said, replying honestly. ‘Give me a few days to think about it. Humans aren’t really my specialty.’
‘Really? Rubana told me you were good at this kind of stuff. She said you were unusually perceptive. And she said something else, I can’t remember what.’
‘I’m a palaeontologist.’
‘You’re joking,’ she said, slapping her hand on the bedcover.
‘My subjects are mostly dead.’
‘You’re wasted.’
‘I am, actually. Just a little.’
‘No, I mean Rubana – she said you were wasted. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I assumed you were in some dead-end job or something. But you’re into dinosaurs, that’s not what I expected.’
I laughed, leaning back on the bed. ‘Well, Rubana and my mother have a very specific definition of a meaningful life.’
‘And you are way hotter than I’d imagined.’
‘I had a miscarriage,’ I said, confessing before I realised what I was doing.
‘Oh shit, I’m sorry.’
She passed me the bottle and I took another swig. I leaned back further and saw the ceiling swimming above me. When I was too tired to keep my eyes open, I made my way to my own bed, my head throbbing, and retreated under the mosquito net.
The next morning Gabriela took me to the beach. It was my first proper sighting of the Prosperity Shipbreaking. You are reading this now and so your image of the place is as fixed in your mind as it is in mine. What I remember thinking
, when I first set eyes on it, was that it was a place where I could punish myself as much as I liked without anyone noticing, because it was the least alive landscape in the world, not because it was ugly, but because it was beautiful, and ruined.
The ship I had caught sight of the day before – its name, I was later told, was Splendour – was still lying on its side, its propeller pointing towards the sky. Its bridge was gone, its hull sliced away like meat from a carcass. On the shoreline, the smelter was going at full speed, and the air was thick with the astringent smell of burning metal. I stood there for a long time with a sense of being at the edge of the world, where a person might see, or do, anything. Gabriela pointed out a man in the distance, suspended from the deck of a skyscraper-high ship with only a rope around his waist. ‘Can you believe this shit?’ she said.
The shipbreaking yards consisted of narrow rectangles of oceanfront. From the highway, you could see a high wall with double gates every hundred yards or so. But once you entered one of the yards, you could look across the whole expanse of the bay, at one ship after another in various states of decay. You could look east or west and see a mile-long oil tanker, or a container ship, or a fragment of something that used to be seafaring and was now only a collapsed stretch of metal. And if you looked closer, if you really concentrated, you would see the tiny shapes of people hanging from the ships, breaking them apart with blowtorches and hammers.
My first look at this scene made me profoundly sad. Or, rather, it took the sadness that already existed within me and magnified it. I felt I was made of something unmalleable, something hard and alien. It took me time to realise what I was really mourning, and perhaps I am only coming to an understanding of it now, all these years later. It was the pregnancy, of course. I hadn’t reckoned with my need to be of the same blood as another person – I had never thought about that before, and being presented with the possibility, and having that possibility taken away, made my longing acute in the multiplied hit of a desire for something that is a new, but also very old.
But more than that, I recalled the initial feeling of bitterness when I saw those two blue lines and realised that it wasn’t that I didn’t want a baby, it was that I didn’t want a baby with Rashid. I had allowed myself to be carried away for a moment by the prospect of a child bringing us together, but fundamentally I did not want to be heavy with a being that would bind us together for ever. Rashid was not that man. The knowledge, earned on that first day on the beach, was a little grain of doubt that added, hourglass-like, to everything else. And like all the other little grains of sand, I pushed it aside and went on as before, refusing to add everything up.
Although Gabriela tried to persuade me to meet the workers right away, I wanted to become a familiar figure on the beach before approaching anyone. I spent most of the first week at the Shipsafe office reading through the documents Bilal had gathered on the industry. There were apocryphal stories about how it had all started – a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal, a ship banked on the shore, a group of scavengers, the discovery of steel, and then, eventually, businessmen who turned ill-fortune into profit.
Mirza Ali, the manager of the shipyard, was my first point of contact. He worked out of a narrow building with a corrugated tin roof and windows that faced the beach. Inside, he and his staff drank tea and argued about whatever ship they were taking apart. I waited for Ali to invite me to meet him, and when he did, I knew what do to – my year as Rashid’s wife had prepared me well. I dressed in a sari and sipped tea with him, setting him at ease by complimenting him on his operation. Ali reeled off statistics of how many tons of steel his yard had sold to the construction industry. I listened politely, taking in his long white tunic and his prayer cap, the shiny bruise on his forehead that marked him as a man who prayed five times a day. He asked me repeatedly if I was comfortable, hinting at the unsuitability of the accommodations in the Shipsafe flat, but I smiled and assured him all was well. I could see why Rubana had sent me here, and it was of course because of class, because Ali would be flattered by my presence, his natural suspicion averted, and I would ease Gabriela’s way onto the beach.
My arrival coincided with the purchase of a new ship called Grace, and soon Ali was inviting me to witness the ship’s arrival. ‘The beaching of a ship is a unique experience,’ he said. ‘A combination of skill and God’s will.’ He invited me to come and see it for myself, agreeing reluctantly to let Gabriela accompany me. ‘As your guest,’ I said, knowing that Ali would want to appear hospitable in my eyes.
On the morning of Grace’s arrival, Gabriela and I were instructed to wake up an hour before dawn and make our way to the shore. Outside my window all was black, except for a few bursts of orange from the kerosene lamps of the workers’ dormitory. In the distance I could hear the sound of water swooning towards the bay.
I knocked on Gabriela’s door. There had been a brand-new moon during the night, and the tide had grown higher by the hour. ‘Is it time already?’ she called out.
Grace was a decommissioned cruise ship. At almost a thousand feet, she was the biggest passenger ship ever to arrive on Prosperity’s beach. Ali had shown me a photograph of a white zeppelin with red trim, gleaming decks and rows of tiny windows. It would take them three, maybe four months to take it apart. Passenger ships were few and far between on the beach; a photograph had been passed around the office and there was much excitement around its arrival. For a few days the ship had been waiting in Chittagong Harbour, its customs inspection passed, for the tide to reach its highest peak. The reason they beached ships in this particular location was because the water was shallow for almost a mile out and then suddenly very deep, making it easy for the vessels to wedge themselves firmly into the sand while the tide was high. Then, when the water retreated, the ship would be marooned, ready for the workers to cut into its hull and begin taking it apart. This was the answer to Gabriela’s question that first night.
It was because of Ali’s boss that Gabriela and I had been allowed on site. For years, Shipsafe had been campaigning for a ban on the whole industry. Rubana had won a few injunctions in court, but this had only slowed the work for a few months; soon the appropriate palms were greased, and the court orders were ignored and the ships began to arrive again. When Gabriela and her film crew proposed to tell the story of the shipbreakers, Rubana decided to try a different tack. She went to Prosperity, the biggest shipyard, to suggest a compromise: if Shipsafe was allowed access to the site to observe and report on the working conditions on the beach, she would recommend the grant of a compliance certificate by the environment ministry. As a part of this agreement, the company would allow Gabriela’s team to make a film about the workers.
This proposal appealed to the owner of Prosperity, a man called Harrison Master. Harrison had, from humble beginnings, built a series of industries on the Chittagong coast: garments, cement, natural gas, fertiliser. He had bought a hill at the edge of a lake – a far bigger hill than Bulbul’s – from where he oversaw his empire. He liked the idea of being the only shipyard to be chosen as the subject of a film, swayed by the thought of rising above the other companies in the area, not just in the size of his business (he had already done that), but in the quality of his operation. Which is how I had been given my job: Gabriela and I would interview the workers and report on the breaking of one ship, Grace, and submit our findings. Gabriela would make her film and Harrison would get his certificate.
I knocked on Gabriela’s door again, and she bolted out, her hair packed tightly into a headscarf. I took in her tight T-shirt and jeans that ended a few inches below her knee. I had mentioned something to her about her clothes, but she had somehow taken this to mean that she should cover her head.
Morning was on the horizon, and Ali was waiting for us on the beach. A few of the workers had come as well, and they formed a small party, some with their hands held up to their eyes to see who could spot the ship first. Ali brandished a bottle of non-alcoholic sparkling apple juice, ready to twist
it open when Grace’s crew descended. Further along the beach, a tent had been pitched and breakfast was being readied. The captain would weave Grace into the Prosperity yard, making sure she remained perfectly upright as she was beached. It was a particular skill. Ali had explained all of this to me the day before, pointing to a red flag in the water. ‘Once Captain crosses the flag, he’s home safe.’
The light came in as we waited, and then there it was, a sliver on the horizon. We watched as it grew. More of the men arrived, wiping the sleep from their eyes. The curve of the ship began to appear, and now we could see the gleam of the hull, a poem of curves rising out of the remnants of dark, and suddenly it was before us, as if it had turned a sharp corner, white, immense, violent. ‘It will seem to run us over,’ Ali said, ‘but that is just an illusion.’
Grace became audible, her high whine tempered by the rush of water as she approached; then there was a pause for a long minute before the final push to shore, the grunt of the slowing engine, the scrape of metal against sand; and all the while Ali and the others had their hands up in the air as if they were summoning her from the sky; then she banked, parting the shoreline, suddenly immense, her heaviness exposed, tons and tons of steel without the sea to buoy her up. Against Grace’s enormous hulk, we were tiny and frail. Ali muttered a prayer under his breath, then blew the air out of his cheeks, spreading the blessing.
