by Gavin Young
*
The second day we were becalmed for long, sun-baked hours. The men lay about on deck, seeking the shade of the lifeless sails. Chandra, Hentry, Nobel and an old man called Ganananam peeled a bowlful of small Indian onions while Darson pumped out the bilges with a small mechanical pump.
Now and again the captain played with a radio. Thin, high Indian singing floated about us. Once we heard a burst of pop music from Colombo; a voice said, ‘I think – don’t you? – there’s no more truly magnificent way to end this evening’s session of “Grandstand” than with this beautiful song by Neil Diamond….’
The sea sparkled, and we watched a school of dolphins playing with the Herman Mary. ‘Do you want to wash your body?’ Darson asked, indicating a kettle of hot water, but I decided to wait until Tuticorin.
With our fishing lines we caught two tuna and a long thinnish creature, which the boys threw into the midday curry and served with rice, onions and beetroot, but which turned out to be all bones.
The wind rose again during the night, and by the early morning we were near the tip of India. Hentry borrowed my binoculars and shinned up the mainmast to scout for lights, and after a short while he came down to announce with a satisfied nod of his head, ‘India.’ Sitting down, he pulled up his sarong and, after some contortions, drew from the recesses of his bathing trunks a handful of sticky green and pink acid drops, one of which he offered me.
*
Under a sky suddenly full of shooting stars, we approached Tuticorin from the east in a wide flanking movement, in sight of the harbour lights for five or six hours before we reached it.
My notebook registers some first impressions:
A long, low line of trees and houses. Fishing boats bobbing around us everywhere; we almost run one or two down, and the captain shouts at the fishermen angrily. A lighthouse ashore, blue and white striped like a barber’s pole.
Our magnificent sails come down. Three boys take in the forward staysails; the various booms are swung inboard and made fast up the centre of the Herman Mary’s deck; the movable boards that served as gunwales are stacked. The captain has put on his shore-going sarong – mauve, black, yellow and red in big patterns. I tell him I’d like to sail to Bombay with him. ‘Bombay, okay,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Why not Karachi?’
End-of-term permeates the air again. Darson says, ‘Tomorrow we all want come see you at your hotel.’
‘You must all come,’ I say.
Invitations follow: to the captain’s house, to Hentry’s, to Nobel’s, to see Chandra’s baby…. All very nice, but I am not sure yet what the reaction of the Tuticorin immigration people will be to my arrival in their port – a port not, I suspect, geared for passengers, certainly not for Europeans on sailing ships, particularly since the German wanted by Interpol passed through. I am glad Tom Abraham gave me a visa, even though technically I don’t need one.
Beaches ahead backed by palms, a patchwork of red roofs, more sails, Arab style, very white. Many church spires.
The last meal – tuna, cabbage, eggs, rice – is served by the little cooks; I can’t complain about the quantity or quality of food on the Herman Mary.
The crew begin to spruce up; the little round mirrors carried by all Asian sailors appear. Nobel has thoroughly greased his hair and combed it into great black, glossy whorls, like black whipped cream. All of them rub their teeth with pink tooth powder they carry in small cellophane bags.
Now the great sails are down, the bamboo booms – their ‘bark’ an inch thick – stowed, the huge mainsail lowered by means of a hand-turned iron winch. Suddenly the Herman Mary has a bare, plucked-chicken look; it is a hulk with two masts, a moth without wings.
Boys catch our lines ashore. The Herman Mary bumps heavily, bow first, into a ruck of sailing ships, and we come to rest in a forest of masts and a solid mass of black hulls.
Twenty
It had been a wise thought of Tom Abraham’s to put an Indian visa on my passport. With equal foresight he had told his attaché to write, in green ink beside the visa, the following words: ‘Permitted to enter India at Tuticorin by sailing boat Herman Mary.’ Even with the visa and those added words, the customs official at Tuticorin was baffled; without them, I tremble to think what might have happened – perhaps an enforced deportation to Colombo. Mr Missier would have been mortified.
Hentry and Nobel helped me ashore with my bags, and I gave the metal suitcase’s combination lock a whirl to make sure that the spray from Herman Mary’s deck hadn’t rusted the tumblers solid. Two hours passed in a hot, bleak shed before a plump man in plain clothes who introduced himself as a customs officer said, ‘Come with me,’ and showed me to a car. We drove out of the gates of the little port to a two-storeyed building with a barred door and windows, opening into a pitted street full of creaking ox-carts.
A fan turned with maddening sloth in a small room behind a curtain where a large man in khaki sat behind a desk. ‘My superior is at lunch,’ he said. ‘Please be seated.’
‘Can you please clear me through customs? This is my visa, and this green ink –’
‘I am a customs officer, but arriving like this at Tuticorin is most unusual.’ He looked at me like a disapproving schoolmaster. ‘Most unusual. I must consult my superior.’
‘Unusual?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Is your superior in this building? Perhaps we could –’
‘He’s at lunch. He’ll be back at four o’clock or five.’ It was then two fifteen. ‘Have you anything to declare?’
‘Just these cameras. I use them for my work.’
‘That’s customs, then,’ said the plump man, and drove me back to the bleak, hot shed to register the numbers of the cameras in a crumbling ledger. Seeing me glance at my watch, he noted this in the ledger as well.
‘That’s interesting,’ I said. ‘No one worries about watches at Bombay or Calcutta airports.’
‘Here we do worry. We’ve worried about watches for years.’
He couldn’t find a number on the watch, so he wrote down, ‘Omega watch.’
We waited in the shed for half an hour longer, but no officer came from lunch or from anywhere else. I wondered whether we could drive to the officer’s home; he might be having a siesta. But at his house his wife said he had gone to a wedding thirty kilometres away. The plump man drove me back to the office of the man in khaki, who this time offered tea with milk and suggested that I go to a hotel, wash and wait. ‘If there’s anything wrong,’ he said, smiling at last, ‘I am here.’
It was lucky he allowed me to go because the officer didn’t return from the wedding until 10.30 p.m. A sullen man, he called at the hotel, and took me to his office in the port. There he sat at his desk, turning my passport over and over in his hands, reading and rereading the words ‘Permitted to enter India at Tuticorin’ as if he couldn’t believe his eyes, and scrutinizing the official stamp as though I might have forged it.
‘Fill out these forms,’ he said at last and, when I had done so, he stamped me in to India. Suddenly I was another step nearer Canton.
*
The office of Mr E. P. Rayer, the owner of the Herman Mary, contained obvious clues to the main preoccupations of the little port of Tuticorin: shipping and the Church. On one wall was a large, lavishly coloured calendar from Dr Johnson Fernando, Fish Exporter, showing the Virgin Mary with the Infant Jesus, both crowned, on a stylized stormy sea with a three-masted schooner in obvious trouble in the background. The legend under it said, ‘Our Lady of Good Health, Vailankanni.’ On another wall was a board with the names of Indian ports on it – Bombay, Calicut, Mangalore, Veraval – showing the present disposition of Mr Rayer’s fleet.
It was a small fleet for Tuticorin – even smaller since 1977, Mr Rayer said, when two of his vessels went down with all hands. ‘Overloaded,’ he said. ‘Twenty-five per cent above the beam. A heavy sea and they went over.’ Now he had only three thonis (thoni is the Tuticorin word for sailing ship): Her
man Mary, the smallest at 215 tons, Mary Isabel, 350 tons, and Arockya Mary, 370 tons. The last two were both in Calicut loading timber and plants for shipment to Veraval in north-west India. There was, Mr Rayer said, a 500-tonner under construction in Tuticorin at this very minute.
The Tuticorin fleet of seagoing thonis now numbered about forty-seven, and their crews were all local men. From Tuticorin they carried salt and fertilizers to the west coast, returning with ballast. From April to August they took imported wheat, fertilizers and rice up the east coast to Madras and Calcutta.
Mr Rayer was a jovial man shaped like a barrel and wearing thick glasses. He was proud to have been at sea for thirteen years before buying ships of his own. He took me to his modest old house, where his wife brought out home-made cakes and we looked at family portraits and a blown-up photograph of a three-masted thoni under full sail that he had snapped himself.
‘There are fewer thonis now,’ he said, ‘because the cost of building and maintenance has gone up, although of course the cost of fuel is even worse. Another problem is the constant strikes in the big ports.’
I complimented Mr Rayer on his captain and crew, and asked how much money I could give them as a parting present.
He became quite agitated. ‘I don’t want you giving money to the crew. I don’t like that.’
‘Then can I give it to you to pass on to them?’
‘Mr Young, I will never take money from you. I don’t want your money, I want your love.’
‘At least let me pay for the food I ate.’
‘Love is better than money. It is a pleasure to have you on my ship.’
The great man of Tuticorin, Mr Missier had told me, was the chevalier Machado. ‘You certainly must see him,’ he had insisted. ‘He is a most important man. A fine person.’ ‘Chevalier’ was an impressive title; I’d never come across a papal knight before.
I found the chevalier in his office on the dusty street nearest the port; from his door I could see the masts of the thonis sticking up like black asparagus. A notice announced the name of the building as ‘Captain Machado’s Building’, and polished plates and painted boards informed all concerned that the chevalier was the highly approved agent for the Maersk Line, the Hansa Line, and the Mogul Line, as well as the representative of Harrisons & Crosfield.
The chevalier’s offices were arched, cavernous and venerable, with high beamed ceilings. His personal sanctum was decorated with photographs of Gandhi and Nehru, a Catholic mission calendar and a head of Jesus. Neatly dressed in spotless white trousers and patent-leather shoes, the chevalier was a pleasant, dignified man of about fifty-eight, with black eyebrows and hair, who rose to greet me with a warm smile. Evidently he was the patriarch of the shipping community – not only of the shipowners, but of the families of the captains and crews as well. Tuticorin’s population consisted of Hindus and Muslims as well as Catholics, he said, but the non-Catholics were shopkeepers or workers, while those involved with the sea were, to a man, members of the Church.
The chevalier himself was obviously wealthy. Someone, perhaps Mr Missier, had told me that his money had been made in salt. Tuticorin is surrounded by flat land as white as snow. ‘We drill down, take out the salt and let the seawater evaporate. The salt here is marvellously pure,’ the chevalier said. ‘In fact, one third of India’s salt comes from Tuticorin.’
He went on: ‘You may be interested to know that Tuticorin has been a port for only one hundred years. The Portuguese and Dutch had another one not far away, near Cape Comorin, the very last point of India, but it had a very low draught.’
The Catholic community was his overriding concern, the chevalier said. ‘We were once all fishermen – paravan is the caste name for that – and we were all – our ancestors, I mean – baptized by St Francis Xavier. We’ve had our own bishop here since 1923.’
He invited me to his house, Fátima Lodge, a rather grand yellow and white building in a quiet street of pleasant, ageing villas.
‘You’ll see our church, I hope, Our Lady of Snows. It’s very fine. We hold four or five services there every Sunday, and all of them are overflowing.’
The chevalier showed me a photograph of himself in his uniform, brass-buttoned, wide-striped trousers, with cockaded hat and ceremonial sword. I said I’d certainly see his church and perhaps attend a service.
‘I’d like you to see the clinics I paid for, too.’
When I said goodbye, the chevalier’s last words were, ‘God bless you. Happy Christmas.’ Christmas? I had forgotten time. Christmas, I realized, was only a week or so away.
The Church of Our Lady of Snows was like a gorgeous slab of marzipan; lavishly decorated with statues of the Virgin, Christ and the saints, lit by neon, with slabs of white marble here and there, it was high-vaulted, with a planked ceiling of delicate sky-blue. Chirping sparrows flew in and out of the doors at the back, and the sides were left permanently open to catch the cooling breeze.
More extraordinary than the church itself was its congregation. As the chevalier had said, the attendants at early-morning mass on Sunday, the next day, overflowed into the courtyard outside. It is difficult to describe the rainbow spectacle presented by the women. They looked like so many Madonnas in their saris, which covered them from head to foot except for the oval of their faces, unveiled to reveal clear skins and big long-lashed eyes. There were saris of every conceivable shade and mixture of colours: mauves, yellows, white with the palest blue, deep reds and purples gleaming with gold and silver thread. They trooped in as a heavy bell pealed overhead and a bellows-operated organ began to play quietly. The chevalier had done Our Lady of Snows proud: an electrically operated curtain around the altar of a statue of the Virgin sighed open on runners, and the statue shone out at the congregation, bejewelled, gold against white.
SANCTA MARIA ORA PRO NOBIS. Under an arch with this painted injunction to the Madonna, a man in rags pressed himself against a wall near me, his hand grasping the pierced and bleeding feet of a statue of Jesus. From his attitude and stillness it seemed as if he himself was suspended from the nail.
I couldn’t see the chevalier in church because near the altar the crowd was very thick. I slipped out before the service ended, while the priest, a brisk young Tamil, assisted by two small boys, moved through the congregation dispensing wafers among the believers in their unbelievable saris, walking in black through a shimmering field of gold, silver and many-splendoured colours.
Later I met the captain, Chandra, Wilson (the captain’s small son), Hentry, Nobel, Ignatius and Darson in the sunlight outside the church. They had all attended the service and were spruced up in their Sunday best. The captain wore a gleaming white shirt over his white ankle-length sarong. In fact, he gleamed all over, and his eyes shone as if he had used make-up. For some reason, Tamil eyes often seem larger and brighter than other people’s. Like all Asian seamen, Tamils seem to be compulsive washers; I had seen Hentry, Nobel and Ignatius painstakingly scrubbing and preening themselves on the Herman Mary’s deck and, on the second evening ashore in Tuticorin, Hentry had come to the Ashok Bhavan, the tiny, shabby but friendly hotel in the heart of the bazaar where I was staying, and had spent at least ten minutes rubbing my Johnson’s Baby Powder into his shoulders, neck and face. When we stepped over the sleeping bodies in the corridor outside the room to see a Tamil comedy at the local flea-pit, he still had a clown’s smudge of powder on one cheek.
Now we were going to visit the crew’s houses one by one, starting with Hentry’s. His was very small; in Europe it would, I suppose, be called a slum, and possibly be condemned. Despite this, it was remarkably clean. There were two small, low rooms – I had to duck to get through the door – for which Hentry paid forty-five rupees a month (less than three pounds). The ceilings were beamed, the floor cemented, the walls of flaking whitewash. Photographs of Hentry’s sisters in communion dresses hung on the wall, and a couple of coils of ship’s rope lay in a corner.
I am not sure how many of the assembl
ed men and boys in the house were Hentry’s brothers, cousins, nephews or friends. His father, a smaller, stout version of Hentry, showed me the certificate issued by the port office announcing to whomever it might concern that he was permitted work ‘in the registered Harbour crafts plying at Tuticorin, a Minor Port in the State of Madras’. He was a sokani, the father said – that is, a licensed helmsman of a sailing ship, with the basic pay of four hundred and fifty rupees a voyage. Romans, Hentry’s youngest brother, had already made several voyages, although he was only sixteen. On the baptism card he showed me, his caste was given as paravan.
All the houses were much the same size and rent, all overflowing with giggling children, staring women with babies, and hospitable men showing their work permits and certificates, while cats, dogs and chickens ran underfoot. I copied down their addresses, they took mine, and all of them, from the captain down, whispered into my ear their dream of work in London.
*
On the third evening I took a train to Madras, about three hundred and twenty miles away, and the whole crew came to the station to see me off: the captain, Mr Rayer, Hentry’s father, Hentry, Hentry’s brother Romans, Nobel, Ignatius, Chandra, Darson, the chevalier’s son-in-law Winston Corera, and even the immigration officer, who was suddenly no longer sullen but smiling.
At the last minute, Hentry rushed onto the platform with a box of mixed Tamil cakes and sweets tied up with string. Darson, too, had a present, a garland of white, orange and red flowers; he put it round my neck and pressed a small lemon into my hand – a Tamil sign of respect, Chandra told me in a quiet aside. ‘Don’t forget my address,’ said Darson.
Just before the train moved away, Hentry ran into my compartment to check my luggage – ‘One bag, two bag, okay’ – his head wagging back and forth, tears running down his cheeks. At the last minute, as I shook hands with them all through the window, he grabbed my hand and kissed it.