Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  Richard and his wife took me to Old Goa to see the tomb of St Francis Xavier, another slice of unreality in this gloriously unreal region of India. The Basilica of Bom Jesus, a sign said, was built between 1594 and 1605. St Francis, who lived from 1506 to 1552, lay before us in a silver casket. A glass section of the casket revealed a small grey wizened face staring blindly up at the golden barley-sugar pillars. A tiny, pretty Indian nun gazed at the saint, her head on one side. VOX INIMICA FUGAR, I read over the ornate silver of the casket. Above the altar, a weird apparition leaped from the ceiling: a grotesque golden statue, more than life-size, moustached, obese, aproned, skirted and shirted under a great bulging golden turban, rosy arms raised in benison, or to conduct an invisible orchestra, among the barley sugar. It gave me a foretaste of the astonishing churches I toured later in southern India.

  ‘Stay a few days,’ Richard suggested. ‘They’re making a film in Goa. Roger Moore, Gregory Peck, David Niven.’ But Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo themselves couldn’t have held me. I was beginning to experience intimations of mild panic. Even though Cochin might not turn up a ship for me, I had to get on.

  We said goodbye. ‘Remember Tuticorin,’ Richard Wesse said. I wrote the name down in my notebook, and turned away from the charming creepy house that John Nunes built.

  Next morning I took a seat in the bus to Bangalore. This was what Richard had advised, and I trusted him. I had made inquiries at the hotel and had been warned that Bangalore is in the centre of southern India, as far from the sea as it is possible to be. Why not go down the coast? But Richard had told me that coastal connections by rail, bus or taxi were hopeless. It might seem daft, he said, but the safest way was by bus to Bangalore and then by bus or hitchhiking from there down to the coast again at Cochin.

  It may have been the safest way, but it was not the most comfortable. Bangalore was sixteen hours away; sixteen hours in the seat of a crowded bus, mostly at night. I boarded Super de Luxe bus number MYF 9571 in Panaji. It cost very little, but then it was not de luxe. It was un-air-conditioned, the seats were so close that it was impossible to stretch one’s legs, and the roof was so low that I couldn’t stand upright without banging my head.

  The bus was full, and the journey was one I prefer to forget. Indeed, depressed less by the discomfort and the lack of light to read by than by the mere necessity that had driven me to take this inland route when by now I had contracted a feeling that the sea was my home, I made very few notes of the next twenty-four hours. I remember the corkscrew motions of the bus as it wound its way up from the coast into hills and a plateau, past animal reservations, villages and widely spaced towns. Sitting hunched up with my knees scraping the back of the seat in front, I soon felt the prick of the first insect bite. But rain intervened – heavy, relentless downpours in which no mosquito could fly.

  In the dead of night the bus pulled up in the muddy main street of a small town. Street lights shone feebly on puddles of water. Hunched men with clothes over their heads crept up to look at us. Passengers bought fruit, cakes and tea from stalls. When we drove on, I found a large Sikh next to me, his eyes badly bloodshot. He peeled off his socks and then, to my surprise, his turban. Later he had a nightmare and leaped up with an ear-splitting howl, waking up everyone and causing the driver to brake to a jarring halt.

  Two students said their college was on strike. ‘So we’re taking a tour. Good time to see this part of India.’

  ‘Have a really long strike and see it all.’

  It was not their strike, they explained; only one thousand out of two thousand students had gone out. It concerned the vice chancellor of their college, who, the strikers alleged, had three jobs outside the university, ‘so he has no time to think of the students’.

  *

  At Bangalore the rain fell as steadily as ever. At the West End Hotel, I found a forceful lady called Mrs Das at a travel agent’s office. I was tired and ached all over from the constant motion of the bus. My knees felt as if they would never take me upstairs again.

  ‘I want a train or plane to Cochin, please,’ I said.

  ‘You’d better walk,’ said Mrs Das. Strange talk from a travel agent. ‘There’s no train for a week because of a coal shortage just now. As for planes, there’s no seat for eight days. Fully booked.’

  It seemed incredible. ‘What if my mother was dying?’ I asked.

  ‘You can get an emergency ticket if you can produce a doctor’s certificate.’

  Buses went half around the world before reaching Cochin from Bangalore, so I braced myself and ordered a taxi. It would cost the equivalent of eighty pounds, but I wasn’t going to waste time in Bangalore. I stayed in that fine city just long enough to buy Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four in Higginbotham’s bookshop, have a meal and a bath, and to allow time for Mrs Das to flush Andrew, her taxi driver, out of a tea shop.

  *

  Now it seems absurd to me that I had set so much store on getting to Cochin. Once more I bumped for several hours across the Indian landscape. At dawn next day Andrew and I began to descend through Kerala’s coconut forests and paddy fields, now and then giving way to elephants. The nearer we came to the sea the more excited I became, but it was excitement for nothing.

  Andrew deposited me at the Sealord Hotel on the waterfront, then drove away, bent on taking the opportunity to visit relations. I slept, awoke refreshed but stiff, and asked at the reception desk for directions to the port and shipping agents’ offices. In blazing heat and appalling humidity, I staggered, pouring with sweat, into the office of the Cochin Shipping Company. (It was this office that Captain Bragg’s contact in Goa had said it was pointless to telephone.) A man with brows like hairy caterpillars replied to my explanation of my presence, and of my urgent desire to proceed by sea to Colombo, with the unsmiling remark, ‘You can fly from Trivandrum in half an hour.’

  ‘I’m travelling by sea.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’

  There was a strike, he explained, and it would be a long one. It showed no sign of ending; on the contrary, it was expanding to other sections of the labour force. He himself could suggest nothing. He looked at the current list of shipping. A Yugoslav freighter might leave tomorrow, but Yugoslavs never took casual passengers. No hope there.

  A tour in the almost unendurable heat of other shipping offices confirmed this dire news. No ships from Cochin. One man gave me the name of a shipping friend in Colombo. I returned to the Sealord, flung myself down on my bed and let my mind spin like a runaway dynamo.

  I had learned one or two other things from the gentleman with the caterpillar eyebrows. I now knew that Cochin was the only deepwater port in south-west India, and that it exported tea, timber, spices and cashew nuts. I had learned that coastal trade had dwindled year by year; traders now preferred road transport. Possibly I could find a country boat from Tuticorin – I had read this name from my notebook; otherwise he would not, I’m sure, have mentioned the place – but it was a long way, only reachable by bad road. On second thoughts, Caterpillar Eyebrows said he wasn’t even sure that the country boats would take me. He’d only mentioned the place because I’d asked him…. I could telephone a Mr Miranda there, a merchant and a shipper; perhaps he would help.

  I sprang off the bed and badgered the Sealord’s telephone switchboard to connect me to Miranda’s office in Tuticorin. It took an hour to get through, and then someone seemed to be frying bacon and eggs on the line. But at last, with a good deal of shouting and repetition, I heard a voice, which told me that Mr Miranda had gone to Madras. I rang off and made a decision to cut adrift from south-west India, to take a train to Trivandrum and fly from there to Colombo. I would give up this stage of my struggle. Indian port strikes had temporarily defeated me, and looked like driving me crazy. Very well, I would leave them to their victory. I would abandon the Malabar coast, perhaps the most beautiful in all India, to breathe new air and make a fresh start. Colombo – I was on my way!

  Eighteen

  The offic
es of P. B. Umbichy Ltd, Shipping Agents, Contractors, Colombo, took some finding. They were hidden away near the docks in a two-storey row of ramshackle offices and shops off a narrow street in which, on the rainy Saturday I went there, processions of bullock carts, rickshaws and ancient, diminutive taxis crept through potholes and mud. A strong smell of dried fish pervaded the area.

  Umbichy was the name I had been given by a shipping man in Cochin. Having just arrived in Colombo, my immediate concern was the means to leave it for my next major destination, Madras, so I tried Umbichy.

  ‘Upstairs.’ One of two skeletal men crouching in a narrow doorway pointed up a dim staircase. Squeezing up to the third floor, I found a small office and two clerks at a desk. We exchanged greetings.

  ‘Oh, yes, we know Mr Muthukaruppan of Lakshmi Lines, Cochin,’ one of them said when I handed him the card I had brought. ‘What can we do for you, sir?’

  I explained my presence in Colombo and said, ‘According to Mr Muthukaruppan’ – it was not an easy name to pronounce – ‘the steamer Raj Lakshmi is due to sail from Bombay for Colombo soon. Her destination from Colombo, he told me, might be southern India, Madras.’

  ‘That certainly seems likely. Not Madras, though. Tuticorin might be her destination.’ Again that name. It was beginning to mesmerize me.

  ‘She’d take me?’

  ‘If the captain agrees.’

  ‘Of course, I’d really prefer to take a country boat to Tuticorin.’

  He shook his head. ‘Country boats will not take passengers, certainly not in this weather. We are in the time of the north-east monsoon, and it is very rough. Country boats would not take you.’

  ‘It would be at my risk.’

  ‘Ha, ha. Yes.’ He was amused. ‘But personally, I doubt….’

  ‘To Trincomalee?’

  ‘The east coast is battered by the monsoon gales. Nothing will sail to Trinco until February.’

  The gentleman promised to call me at my hotel when the Raj Lakshmi arrived, but as I splashed from puddle to puddle in the decaying street I was only marginally encouraged. By now I knew I couldn’t put my trust in freighters. The country boats could hardly be less reliable, and they offered a greater adventure. Perhaps I could find a sailing vessel to Madras, Calcutta or Rangoon.

  My itinerary now became a process of elimination. There were four ways ahead, apparently. A steamer to Tuticorin? Unlikely; perhaps the Raj Lakshmi later. A sailing ship to eastern India or Burma? Or to southern India? Hmm. A steamer to Madras or Calcutta? Possible.

  Using an introduction that Angus Wilson, the novelist and biographer of Rudyard Kipling, had given me in London, I met Mrs De Mel, a Colombo hostess and travel agent. Like others, her agency loved airlines and spurned ships, but she put me in touch with the father of the Sri Lankan navy. In vain: Admiral Rajan Kadirgamar politely dismissed the idea of sailing boats to the Bay of Bengal.

  ‘There used to be marvellous brigs – sailing brigs, three-masted, square-rigged, full-fledged sailing ships to Rangoon and Chittagong.’ Dismally I noted the words ‘used to be’. ‘All gone. These chaps used to take salt to the Andamans and bring back rice. All gone.’

  The second weakly soaring bird of hope folded its wings and plunged lifeless to earth. Two to go.

  *

  Meanwhile I looked around Colombo. Someone – a shipping man in Dubai, I think – had told me the city was ‘a dump’. If he was right, I like dumps. Colombo retains the look of an early twentieth-century city. It has a splendid seafront, grand trees and open spaces, and a great many charming or dignified buildings. The heart of Colombo, around the port, is ennobled by handsome rows of awnings and perfectly proportioned pillars outside the Senate, by the red and white arches and decorative cornucopias of Cargill’s emporium, by the vice-regal grandeur of the Chartered Bank guarded by stone ceremonial elephants, and by the towering halls of the post office. In the side streets behind the Taprobane Hotel one might expect to see ladies driving with their grooms in horse-drawn gharries and English tea planters in topees on horseback trotting past the Pagoda Tea Rooms (‘Bare-bodied people not permitted inside’), the offices of Canon, Cumberbatch and Co. Ltd, Agents, and the square clock tower topped by its lighthouse dome and weather vane, sniffing the pungent air of the Toddy Shop and giving the men with mottled noses who staggered from it a wide berth. Now saris and sarongs have replaced the topees and divided skirts.

  The Taprobane Hotel was a perfect lodging for anyone concerned with the port or the sea. From the moment the dark wood-panelled and mirrored lift rose to the Harbour Bar on the fourth and top floor, the Taprobane seemed to me one of the most interesting hotels between Suez and Singapore.

  Taprobane was the Greek and Roman name for Ceylon; the Muslims called it Serendip. Once the hotel had been known as the Grand Oriental Hotel. Mrs De Mel showed me some old advertisements for the GOH, as people called it: ‘The first modern hotel known in the East…. Lift, Electric Light and Electric Fans in the Bed Rooms and Public Rooms…. The Hotel Porter meets all Steamers and takes delivery of Passengers’ Luggage. Hire of Carriages or Rickshaws from the Door Porter.’

  My room was immense, a relic of those days, with high ceilings and a bathroom as big as most hotel bedrooms. It looked down on Colombo’s old harbour, horseshoe-shaped, an artificially made haven full of vessels of all kinds, with godowns (or warehouses) all around and a lighthouse where a plaque said, ‘This great work Projected by Governor Sir Hercules Robinson KCMG … was completed April 1885.’

  From the Harbour Bar and Restaurant above my room, wide windows looked down on the same scene. The restaurant specialized in curry ‘tiffin’ (the Anglo-Indian for ‘luncheon’), and the bar was a delightfully old-fashioned place, something like the snug, unpretentious wardroom of an old sailing ship. From it, the harbour very much resembled a photograph Mrs De Mel showed me that had been taken ninety years before. Here and in the rest room of the Mission to Seamen Hostel (or Flying Angel Club) I had a few odd encounters.

  There was the English ship’s engineer, for instance, who had been put ashore by his captain with instructions to the company’s agent to get him aboard a flight to London without delay. But delays there had been. At first the engineer had refused to go; then, when the unfortunate agent managed with great difficulty to drive him to the airport, the airline captain refused to take him, on the ground that such a dishevelled and liquor-soaked apparition would terrify his other passengers.

  I found myself sharing a table with the engineer in the Harbour Bar. His arm was heavily bandaged. He commented that the bar was ‘nicely put together; must be some carpenters around’. A drink or two later he asked, ‘What’s “a whopper” mean?’

  ‘A whopper? Well –’

  ‘I’ve fallen a whopper. That’s what I’ve done. What’s tha’ mean?’

  His bandages hid a wound, a big bad one, I could tell. ‘Is it painful?’

  ‘Not yet. Delayed shock must follow a thing like that, mustn’t it?’

  ‘Caused by a human or an inanimate object?’

  He liked the long word. A grimace altered his features into a brief smile. ‘Inanimate … inanimate … very, very inanimate. A glass door.’

  His face twitched as he took a long gulp of beer. He had very pale blue eyes, completely expressionless. Some people would have called them killer’s eyes.

  A youngish man with yellow hair lurched over and sat down with us. He, too, I saw, had been drinking for a long time. He held out an uncertain hand, which I shook; the engineer ignored it, or perhaps he didn’t see it.

  ‘Monro Stahr. Tycoon Lines. Know what I’m talkin’ about?’ the newcomer asked. (I have changed the names here.) He had an American accent, Midwestern. I’d seen his ship, a big container vessel, in the harbour, and I ordered him a whisky (a dram was the official measure in Colombo). ‘God is love’ was tattooed on his right forearm.

  ‘An instant in time,’ the engineer said, as if the American didn’t exist. ‘Who said that?’r />
  ‘God knows,’ I said and the word God seemed to press a switch somewhere in the American.

  ‘God,’ he said in a loud, dramatic voice. ‘God is beginning to fade on the Monro Stahr, I’m tellin’ you. God has gone below.’

  The engineer ignored him. ‘The moment of birth, that’s what an instant of time is,’ he said. ‘A sad moment. Or it could be the moment of death, I suppose. Another sad moment. Or the time in between. Sadder still. What’s the important thing about dying?’ His cheeks sagged, and he seemed to be looking for the answer under this chair. Or preparing to vomit.

  ‘How to avoid dying full of tubes in a hospital bed,’ I suggested.

  This cheered him. ‘Yes. How right. To avoid tubes.’ He looked at me and demanded, ‘What carries oil to an engine?’

  ‘Tubes?’

  ‘Tubes, yes.’ He raised his eyes and his glass. ‘Glorious tubes.’ He toasted them gaily.

  The American said, ‘Let me also inform you that God is now back on that ship. I have brought him back – in full strength. It just don’t matter no more what the devil tries.’ He pointed at me. ‘I’m tellin’ you. Even if the devil opens all the valves and tubes on the ship, it ain’t goin’ to matter one shit. That son-of-a-bitch ship will keep goin’. Because why?’

  The engineer looked at him but was silent.

  ‘Because those fuckin’ valves and tubes would not be really opened, no sir. God’s will ain’t goin’ to be stalled – know what I’m sayin’? Those open tubes would be a goddam illusion, nothin’ more.’

  ‘Are you leaving tonight?’ I asked, turning to the engineer. I’d heard that the agent might make a second attempt to extricate him tonight.