Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  Portly and jolly, Sumar joined Khalat and myself on the bridge and posed for his picture, turbaned, arms folded, like a pirate chief. I learned from them that Khalat earned a salary of about fifty pounds a month and Sumar, who was older, a little more. The captain, Gkani Adam, and Hasan, the driver, got the equivalent of a hundred and twenty-five pounds, they said. Al Raza’s owner in Karachi paid for their food, and they also took a share of the value of the cargo.

  Combing and perfuming with a green oil his whiskers that seemed to grow bushier each day, Sumar told me he had been a fisherman once, but for the last four years he had sailed as a seaman on dhows to Bombay, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and all the way up the Gulf to the big ports of Kuwait and Basra.

  ‘Are dhows often lost at sea in these waters?’

  ‘Oooooooh, often,’ said Sumar, waving his arms happily to indicate fatal storms. ‘Big winds – phweee! Big waves – oooooow! They go over. Many, many. Oooh, yah.’

  Just after noon, with Al Raza still belching smoke that again seemed too heavy to clear the gunwales before flopping wearily onto the water, we saw a distant smudge on the horizon behind us. The nakhoda looked through my glasses and said, ‘Larnch.’ It was a launch, all right, and at the rate we were limping it would easily overtake us before long. Immediately the crew broke into song. Above the chanting, the nakhoda shouted orders, and Lal Mohamed, the wrestler, and Shapur, the wild one, dragged a large piece of cloth from a locker under the wheelhouse. It was a huge red flag with a white border, big enough to cover a restaurant table for ten diners.

  ‘It means we need help,’ the nakhoda explained for my benefit, and soon they had hoisted it up the twig-like mainmast, lashed to a bamboo sheet that other crewmen excavated from under a crate of washing machines. The wind had dropped, so the flag hung limply, but later it would attract attention. I looked back and saw the plume of smoke on the horizon standing straight up like the tail of an angry cat.

  ‘When that launch comes up with us,’ said Sumar, bouncily optimistic, ‘they must pull us. Nakhoda will say we have Engleezi on board, so they must give us a tow to Karachi because our engine is so tired. You show your English passport. Very important, ooooooh, yes. Allah kareem!’ He pointed like a contemptuous tourist guide towards the coast. ‘Look at that coast. Half Iran, half Pakistan.’ So at last we were crossing the frontier. ‘Before sometimes I go to fish in there.’ Sumar frowned indignantly. ‘But Irani militia there shoot at me – tuk! tuk!’ He mimed a man firing a rifle. ‘I go away quickly – Khomeini peoples no good.’ He added scornfully, ‘Old man with beard.’

  The sight of the smoke from the launch behind us revived everyone, and things began to happen in a rush. First, Lal Mohamed found a fishing line and threw it over the stern (I had wondered why we hadn’t had a line out long before; most seamen throw them out at the first opportunity). Almost immediately the line snapped taut. Mir Mohamed the cook, who was peeling onions close by, yelled in excitement, and Lal Mohamed bent his great muscular back to grab the line and pull it hand over hand. The old Persian, Osman, had been squatting in the thunderbox, blatantly farting and peering round like an elderly hen in a nesting box, but now Shapur, with one of his wilder cries, chased him out of it with a boathook and took his place, poised to help Lal Mohamed land the fish. It was a big one, and it struggled desperately all the way to Al Raza’s stern. But Lal Mohamed and Shapur between them wrestled it on board, and there it leaped, snapped and slashed with its tail until Lal Mohamed stunned it with a lump of heavy wood.

  The second and much more important event was the transformation of Al Raza into a sailing dhow. Leaving the dead fish to the attentions of Mir Mohamed the cook, the driver and the rest of the crew began to rig two ragged sails in a prolonged burst of activity (this Baluchi crew was not lazy) with two long bamboo poles and ancient sails – both much patched, one large, the other about the size of the ‘need-help’ flag. Within an hour, two pieces of patched cloth, stretched diagonally before the mast, and the red flag with a white border were billowing in a fresh breeze, and the engine had been idled down still further so that the black fumes once more all but dispersed. The catch was that our speed had dropped to a rocking crawl. This was maddening, but we were not nearly so likely to burst into flames and, provided the wind kept up, would not drift helplessly and indefinitely, a passive prey for any passing storm.

  In a new mood of relief, the Baluchis decided to celebrate the Id holiday by turning on their radios, and soon the vessel echoed to strange clickings, the rhythmic rustling of metal discs, the whirring and thrumming of Eastern string instruments. ‘Baluchi music, yah, Baluchi,’ Khalat shouted, determined that I should appreciate it. Across the empty ocean – the dhow behind us was still far off – gongs and drums from a studio in Quetta provided a background of clashes and thumps for the high whine of Baluchi girl singers. Mir Mohamed produced a meal of rice and fish, and the Baluchis lay back belching loudly in contentment. Once, on my behalf, the nakhoda switched the radio dial to the BBC Overseas Service, and I heard an excited English voice gabbling, ‘… setting yet another record of five minutes fifty-eight point oh five seconds, which is one point oh four seconds better than….’ ‘No, thank you,’ I said hurriedly. He switched it off and moved closer, saying in scrambled Arabic, ‘We will not call at any port here. No launches go out from here in the Id holiday time. Maybe we get a tow from the launch behind us.’

  ‘Good.’ I wanted him to know that I was relieved we weren’t going to abandon Al Raza in some godforsaken fishing port on this coast and – of all humiliating things – fly.

  ‘Sail good,’ he said, seeing my mood and smiling. ‘Flying no good.’ We shook hands warmly on that.

  Yet we didn’t get a tow from the launch behind us, after all. At 10.00 p.m. she caught up with us with surprising suddenness. Her navigation lights appeared out of the darkness as she came alongside. An eighty-footer, she cut her speed to match ours, and we dipped through a mild swell parallel to each other. Khalat had leaped up to shine the torch on the red flag and the larger of our two sails to catch the attention of the other nakhoda and show him we wanted help. And now the two captains were shouting hoarsely at one another across the dark, watery trench between the two vessels.

  It was no good. The captain who had overtaken us yelled back that he, too, had engine trouble, that he was overloaded – ‘carrying two hundred and fifty tons,’ he shouted, spreading his hands apologetically – and that any further strain on his engine would be disastrous. His own weak engine accounted for his delay in catching up with us. Our nakhoda, Hasan the driver, Lal Mohamed and Khalat sat back on the engine housing in dejection and watched the launch throb away and move ahead of us. In the morning there was no sign of the launch, and Al Raza plodded on with the sea to herself again.

  A day and a night went by. Winds rose and fell. Once the engine clanked to a stop, with sparks flying from the funnel. Again Sumar responded with a reassuring volley of ‘Allah karim’ and hopeful stabbings of his finger upwards to regions where, he clearly wished to convey, God the Merciful had our welfare in mind.

  ‘No trouble with the weather,’ Ghani Adam, the nakhoda, said. ‘If a storm comes and the waves are really big, we throw this’ – he pointed to the crates and bales on deck – ‘into the sea.’

  On the morning of the fifth day the wind picked up again and swung behind us so that the crew could rearrange the two sails and swing their sheets out over the sea on either side of the mast in a butterfly pattern.

  ‘Five miles an hour, perhaps six,’ Hasan said, with the satisfaction of a sailor who sees sail again, overcoming, for the moment, the exasperation of an engineer with a faulty engine.

  A large island lay ahead, an impressive lump of rock flat-topped like a giant aircraft carrier two hundred feet up. Later Al Raza threaded her snail’s way through other islands, and with rising excitement the Baluchis began to recognize home territory.

  ‘Snakes and wild goats there,’ Sumar cried, pointing to a couple
of miniature table mountains in the sea. ‘Many fish. Oooh, yah!’

  It was very hot, and suddenly the water was very shallow. ‘The big steamers on their way to Karachi follow a route much further out,’ Ghani Adam said.

  Here the sea was a browny-green, but abruptly, as if we had crossed over the lip of a high shelf in the seabed, its colour and texture turned to a sombre commingling of rust and earth, and the rays of the sun could penetrate no more than six inches below the surface, illuminating clusters of small, pale jellyfish.

  By 2.30 p.m. the dilapidated sails were bulging again, and the failing engine was tuned down to almost no revolutions at all. The smoke panting up from the tin funnel now had the grey, exhausted look of a man who, having survived a near-fatal illness, has been told by his doctor that any over-exertion could bring a disastrous relapse. The wind behind us and the heaven-sent benevolence of the weather were our salvation. A lot of praying had been done on Al Raza; five times a day the believers in the crew had washed themselves and spread their mats in corners of the deck.

  Lal Mohamed was at the wheel staring at the compass so fixedly that he might have discovered the future in its depths. Indefatigable, like a great faithful watchdog – a mastiff with a waterfall moustache – he turned the wheel with strong, decisive movements. ‘Lalu! Lalu!’ Khalat shouted, teasing him, but Lal smiled without looking up and gently pushed him away with a big dark paw, like Baloo the Bear brushing away young Mowgli.

  The crew bathed in the sun, clambering in turn into the thunderbox, soaping their bodies and then pouring water over themselves from the tin can. Shapur pulled in another fish, a tuna like the first one, but this time with a bright yellow belly and steel-blue back.

  That evening was my last on Al Raza. Near sunset the long, quick-eyed face of Mir Mohamed appeared over the steps to the little bridge like a distorted grey moon, and he crept up to me with the exaggerated tiptoe steps of a villain in a Victorian melodrama from the area of the thunderbox, revolving a finger near his temple, closing his eyes and frowning piteously to show me how much he was suffering. It wasn’t aspirin he was after, I knew, so I cured his affliction with two fat fingers of gin. He thanked me with a grin and a lot of nodding, and went down the steps with his palm cupped round the mug like a man protecting a candle in a draught.

  Later I lay on the wheelhouse bunk, watching the moonlight shine through the windows and listening to the Baluchi voices around me. It was odd how, to the half-wakeful brain, Baluchi sounded like English, and once or twice I started up, thinking that someone had said something to me. But it was only Khalat pretending to fight with Shapur, or Sumar telling some rambling tale to the nakhoda, punctuating it with sharp but muted exclamations. By now the hard bunk and its knobbly red and yellow flower-patterned mattress had come to feel as comfortable as any bed I had ever slept in. The pale-blue wheelhouse itself seemed snug and solid, although one big wave could have brushed it overboard like an eggbox. At times Al Raza seemed indestructible, at others horribly vulnerable. But then an illusion of strength masking an incurable inadequacy in the face of overwhelming seas will always be the reality of ship construction. A dhow is a freighter is a supertanker.

  There was no place for enmities or secrets aboard Al Raza. She had no cabins, and no one could steal a little privacy behind closed doors, for there were no doors. The eight men slept, in shifts as their watches dictated, on small wooden bunks in four partitions two feet high and opening onto each other. Every word, every action was public property except in the thunderbox, and even that was not soundproof. But there is no privacy on any Asian native craft between Suez and the Sulu Sea. Asia is no place for privacy.

  At last the cry came: ‘Karachi!’ It was Khalat’s voice. I saw another wedge-shaped island, and behind it a long headland. Ghani Adam strolled up in undershirt and pyjama trousers and said, ‘Karachi seven hours more.’ Hasan had begun replacing the batteries he had removed to keep our lights glowing at least weakly. ‘Lucky we had those cars aboard,’ said the nakhoda. ‘We needed the petrol to keep the batteries charged. Now it’s almost finished. What else could we do?’

  I said, ‘Always be sure to load two or three cars before a voyage.’

  Passing a black and white striped lighthouse, a brown-walled village, and the looming chimneys of the Marupur Power Station, we approached Karachi, and the Baluchis began to prepare for their arrival. Personal preening came first. Mir Mohamed sidled up to ask for a razor blade. Lal Mohamed took a minute pair of tweezers and a small round mirror from his ditty box – a small metal trunk decorated with Swiss lake scenes in vivid green and blue – and, with infinite patience, plucked straggling hairs from his moustache. Sumar shaved, trimmed, washed, brushed, combed and, finally, rubbed strongly scented oil into his whiskers. ‘Ooooh … aaaah,’ he sighed contentedly, examining their silky gleam in Lal Mohamed’s mirror. Khalat washed and put on a new kemis, the knee-length Baluchi shirt, and wide black and white checked trousers. Hasan, the driver, free of oil for the first time for days, was also a changed man. The crew of Al Raza approached their home port dressed to kill.

  We approached slowly on the engine, sails stowed away. While Shapur took down the red distress flag – we had no wish now to be rescued by a well-meaning Pakistani navy ship – the others, with the excitement of children on Christmas morning, examined the presents they had bought in the bazaars of Dubai for themselves or their families. One or two had radios or record players. There were tins of Vinolia Cream, tubes of ‘Twain’ Budlet lipstick, something called Prophecy Cologne spray mist ‘by Prince Matchabelli’, and a good deal of Brut spray lotion, much of which wild Shapur squirted over us with indiscriminate joie de vivre. There were brightly coloured tins of biscuits, too: Britannia Creams, manufactured in Taratola Road, Calcutta. And there were clothes, most of which – with the exception of the diminutive woollen bootees and jumpers Sumar had bought for his baby – the crew were tugging on like men wrestling with serpents. The idea, they explained, was to wear the clothes so as not to trouble the Karachi customs with unnecessary work. Lal Mohamed had managed to force his massive frame into six T-shirts, and was pulling on loose blue trousers over two pairs of football shorts. Sumar lifted his shirt to show me three undershirts, one of them stencilled with the words ‘Take It from Here’, and two sports shirts. He seemed to be having some difficulty in breathing. Suddenly everyone had put on six inches around the chest, waist and thighs. Shapur was so absurdly swollen with extra clothing that the nakhoda ordered him to take some of it off: ‘Because of you, everyone will be stripped naked in the customs,’ he said severely, whereupon Shapur sheepishly clambered out of enough garments to see two average-sized men through a severe Baluchi winter.

  Peter Barton of the Pacific Basset had said, ‘Funny how the adrenalin or whatever it is begins to move when you return to port, however short a time you’ve been away or how long you’re going to stay there.’ The adrenalin moved in the Baluchis now.

  Ghani Adam, the nakhoda, whom I had come to like and respect, came and sat with me, and Khalat brought us tea. He wore a carefully pressed Baluchi shirt and shelwa, the pleated baggy trousers people wear from the point west of Karachi where the province of Sind ends and mountainous Baluchistan begins.

  ‘Can you find me work in London?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ I said, surprised by his sudden question. ‘Don’t you earn enough here?’

  ‘Three thousand rupees a month [about £185]. Good work,’ he admitted, ‘a living.’

  ‘But tiring,’ sighed Sumar, looming as big as a galleon with his undershirts, moustache and baggy trousers. He wore a cloth like a turban on his head. ‘And no women in Dubai. Before, there were women – Pakistani women, Baluchi women, all sorts; a pound a time; maybe less.’ He shook his turbaned head and looked mournful. ‘Now they’ve all been sent home.’

  Ghani Adam asked, ‘Why do you travel with us on Al Raza when you can fly?’

  I would have liked to quote Graham Greene about �
�the universal desire to see a little bit further, before the surrender to old age and the blank certitude of death’. Or Kipling: ‘For to admire an’ for to see,/For to be’old this world so wide.’ But my Arabic was not good enough, so I said, ‘To see the world. To meet people other than my own.’

  We were turning through the outer anchorage. A large number of ships waited there: tankers, rusty freighters in need of paint, Greek, Panamanian, Cypriot, Liberian. As evidence of what storms could do, two large ships lay beached, and another sat on the bottom of the harbour, only her masts showing above the oily surface. I could see a crowd of bathers on the beach. The Id holiday was evidently not yet over; it had started late in Karachi.

  ‘To meet you,’ I added, and the nakhoda put out his hand to shake mine.

  ‘Good,’ he said, smiling.

  We puttered past a great stone mole, a fort and a very English-looking garrison church. In the harbour ships lined the wharves on both sides of a curved waterway: dredgers, many smart or bedraggled cargo vessels, two blue-grey American frigates, a Soviet tanker. From the complicated superstructure of one of the frigates a group of sailors waved to us. Launches packed with holidaying Pakistani families shuttled back and forth and up and down the harbour; they, too, waved and pointed me out to each other – the tall foreigner with a sunburned face in red and white checked shirt and white trousers standing among the turbaned Baluchis on Al Raza’s stern. Of course, I looked incongruous.

  Past a Pakistani coaster and the Tamy from Singapore, we turned into the dhow harbour, Ghas Bandar. Instantly Al Raza was a galleon sailing into an armada of other galleons: dhows big and small; dhows wide and heavy with polished dark wood, or low in the water with spars grey with age and salt; huge vessels with soaring carved sterns from the era of Drake’s Golden Hind, and with what looked like acres of deck space around the wheelhouse, and with not one but two massive, thick-sided thunderboxes aft.