Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  As the train pulled out I waved until I thought they’d had enough, then moved back into the compartment and laid the garland on my seat. But I couldn’t resist a final look back. I waved again and instantly, far away on the receding platform a thicket of arms shot up, so I waved again until the sign saying TUTICORIN at the end of the long platform nearly took off my hand at the wrist. I felt a sudden spasm of loss, a feeling as palpable as nausea and so strong that I sat down quickly, sensing the curious gaze of the only other person in the compartment, a clerkish-looking man.

  In a minute I recovered a little, and got up and hung the garland on the wall. It swung there, slowly shedding its small orange petals, already wilting, but filling the compartment with its lovely sweet smell.

  Twenty one

  ‘Why should Pythagoras strangle me?’ Harry Miller asked, lovingly stroking the thick scaly folds of the snake under his bearded chin. ‘He doesn’t want to eat me – why should he?’

  ‘Well, anger. Fear?’

  ‘Anger and fear would be expressed by a bite. The python has over a hundred teeth and, if he becomes angry with you and wants you to leave him alone, he’ll bite you, like a dog or a cat. If you pick up a monkey that doesn’t want to be handled, he’ll bite you, and Pythagoras would do the same. But, having bitten you and hurt you, he’d let you go again. He certainly wouldn’t constrict you, would you, Pythagoras?’

  It was nice to be reassured. Pythagoras was clearly too strong for one European (me) and one small Tamil (Sampath, Harry Miller’s assistant) to control if suddenly he became fighting mad.

  Harry eased the ten-foot python off his shoulders, dropped the sleepy creature back into its box and lowered its glass side. Pythagoras fell back inert; he could have been stuffed. We could see his beady eyes looking back at us, and a blunt nose to the glass.

  ‘Suppose he got into a rage for some reason? That glass doesn’t look very strong.’

  ‘It’s thick enough. He wouldn’t even try to break it.’

  ‘Kipling’s Kaa in The Jungle Book used to hit things with his nose, and he was a python.’

  ‘Kipling was a brilliant novelist, but he was a lousy naturalist. A snake’s nose is very delicate. It can be damaged by striking a hard object, and ulcers form. The last thing they want to do is hit walls or anything else.’

  I had to admit that Pythagoras looked too lazy to punch his way out of a paper bag.

  Harry Miller knows a lot about fish, animals, birds and snakes – particularly the last. Pythagoras lives with him in his bungalow near the Madras Club, and Miller and Sampath often take him out of his glass-lined box and let him have a wriggle.

  *

  Two essential pieces of good news awaited me when I reached the Connemara Hotel in Madras from Tuticorin just before Christmas. The first was that the Indian government’s permit to travel to the Andamans had arrived; the other was that a Shipping Corporation of India steamer would leave for Port Blair, the administrative capital of the Andamans, in a few days. I went to the agents, booked my passage and collected my ticket, which said: ‘Madras to Port Blair – 559 rupees, m.v. Nancowry.’ I tucked it away in my metal suitcase and turned the combination lock on it as if it were a bar of gold.

  The permit, from the Ministry of Home Affairs in Delhi, had been sent on by Tom Abraham in Colombo, and stated that I was allowed to ‘enter and reside at Port Blair for a period of one week’ and that I would ‘arrive at Port Blair by ship from Madras and leave Port Blair for Calcutta by air’. I immediately made three photocopies and put the original beside the sea ticket. Then once more the waiting game began.

  It was lucky that Harry Miller took pity on me. When he was not manhandling pythons, or collecting rat snakes, writing, photographing, or spotting cyclones and eclipses of the sun or moon, he was to be seen at the Madras Club. It was still an imposing Raj building. Colonnades overlooked a sweep of fine lawns, a couple of large, handsome trees and a river. Servants in white carried bottles of beer out to the terrace for Indian and European members and their wives, and turned on the old overhead fans. Gin pyaj (gin, a pearl onion and bitters) was much fancied.

  ‘The club has the finest mulligatawny soup in India,’ Harry Miller said, introducing me to it. ‘The name comes from pure Tamil, millagu tunnir, meaning simply pepper water.’ I looked up ‘mulligatawny’ in Hobson Jobson, the famous dictionary of Anglo-Indian slang, and, of course, Harry was quite right. The dictionary cited a song composed in 1784 by ‘a gentleman of the Navy, one of Hyder Ali’s prisoners’:

  In vain our hard fate we repine,

  In vain on our fortune we rail;

  On Mullaghee-tawny we dine,

  Or Congee, in Bangalore Jail.

  A note added that congee meant rice water.

  On the wall of my hotel room, an old eighteenth-century print showed catamarans drawn up on the beach at Madras (they still are), and the dictionary also gave an Indian derivation for that word. ‘Catamaran’, it said, came from kattu, meaning binding, and maram, wood. Hence, a catamaran was a raft formed of three or four logs of wood lashed together.

  At last there was time for reading, and in the club I found the Observer, which told me about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. It also carried an interview with the English poet Philip Larkin, who was quoted as saying, ‘Thrift, hard work, reverence … those are the virtues, in case you wondered.’ I liked the ‘in case you wondered’. They were virtues I associated with the crew of the Herman Mary, and the last line of a Larkin poem quoted in the piece, ‘What will survive of us is love,’ seemed to fit the sailors of Tuticorin too.

  *

  My arrival in Madras and the imminence – I thought – of my departure for the Andamans drove me to The Sign of Four, the Sherlock Holmes novel I’d bought in a rainstorm in Higginbotham’s bookshop in Bangalore. Lunch with Harry Miller reminded me of the first chapter, Holmes’s dissertation on the science of deduction. Harry’s cigar case was in front of him, and I asked him what he was smoking.

  ‘Phipson’s Club Number Three,’ he said. ‘Made in Worur, a tiny village near Trinuchinapalli – the place we know as Trichinopoly.’

  ‘Listen to this, then.’ I read from the book an extract from Sherlock Holmes’s monograph Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos, in which he listed a hundred and forty forms of cigar, cigarette and pipe tobaccos: ‘To the trained eye there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of bird’s eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato.’ (Harry’s ash didn’t seem particularly dark, though.) ‘If you can say definitely that some murder had been done by a man who was smoking an Indian lunkah, it obviously narrows your field of search.’ A lunkah? Harry didn’t know the word, so I resorted again to Hobson Jobson: ‘A strong cheeroot much favoured in Madras,’ it said. ‘I should have known that,’ said Harry.

  *

  Bad news. The Nancowry was delayed by a strike at Port Blair. There were nine more days to wait in Madras, the agent said.

  ‘Never mind,’ Harry Miller said. ‘Let me tell you about the turtles of the Coromandel Coast. They come ashore to lay their eggs in the first months of the year, so if your ship’s delayed long enough we can go to see them. They’re worth seeing. Coromandel fishermen regard them as sacred, and won’t kill them or take their eggs. Did you know that, when a turtle crawls up near a fisherman’s house to lay its eggs, the fisher people make garlands for her and worship her? You might like to see them doing this. These turtles are the Olive Ridleys – quite small, about a metre in length, not the huge “boat turtles” that sometimes accidentally overturn dinghies at sea. Hang around a few weeks and we’ll see some turtles.’

  Harry gave me a passionate cri de coeur he had written for the Indian Express on the subject of turtles:

  I often wonder why the animal protection societies turn a blind eye to continuing atrocities against turtles. The earnest but futile people who run these societies enjoy holding meetings, passing resolut
ions, publishing foolish, sentimental journals, and they can be severe with coolies who beat their bullocks or even the rich who starve their dogs; yet when pigs are ritually sacrificed by having a crowbar thrust through anus to mouth, or are beaten slowly to death so that their bleeding will not spoil the meat, when the eyes of living animals are torn out for ‘eye medicine’, or when turtles from the cool seas are roasted upside down for hours in the hot sun before being ripped up alive, they remain strangely silent.

  Strong words, and why not?

  Harry Miller has lived in India since the war. He is an excellent naturalist, a useful writer, knows a good deal about such subjects as stars, eclipses and cyclones, and practically all there is to know about southern India. He is a humourist, a professional photographer, and writes a regular column called ‘Speaking of Animals’ for the Madras edition of the Indian Express. It was there that I met him. I had been in Madras a few days waiting for a ship to the Andaman Islands, and Harry’s hospitality had taken charge of me. Thereafter I spent my days sightseeing and listening to Harry Miller’s stories – sometimes both at the same time.

  For instance, while driving to St Mary’s Church, where Robert Clive was married and Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, worshipped, Harry said, ‘Do you know the story of the old lady who had two pet monkeys, male and female? The male died and then the female pined and died too. The old lady called a taxidermist. “Please stuff these two dear things,” she said, “and please be sure to take good care of their little bodies. They were so fond of each other.” “Certainly, lady,” said the taxidermist. “Would you like them mounted?” “Oh, no,” said the old lady, “just holding hands.”’

  Harry restrained himself in silence under the marble effigies of dragoons and fusiliers in the old church the East India Company had built by the sea. Plaques commemorated early nineteenth-century British generals and brigadiers struck down young – aged only thirty, perhaps – by cholera, wounds or simple coups de soleil. ‘Affection weeps! Heaven rejoices!’ the inscriptions on the marble scrolls read.

  *

  My departure for Port Blair was delayed yet again; there were another three or four days to wait.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Harry. ‘We’ll go to the snake farm.’ There he walked about an enclosure full of cobras like a gardener in a bed of tulips, the snakes rearing upright around him, hoods open, forked tongues flicking. I could only stand with a crowd of Tamil tourists and watch him ignoring my pleas to come out.

  ‘Look,’ he said as we drove back to Madras, ‘India has two hundred species of snake, and of those only five are dangerously venomous to man. Of the five, the king cobra is so rarely encountered that you might as well make it four.’

  ‘Vipers, kraits?’

  ‘Vipers are venomous, yes. You’ve heard of the big, fat Russell’s viper – that’s the Sherlock Holmes chap in ‘The Speckled Band.’ The krait is India’s most venomous land snake. But I say again, snakes are not aggressive to human beings at all. They’ve no reason to be; they don’t want to eat you. You saw me walking among those cobras just now, and nothing happened. All snakes want is to be left alone. They hiss or strike to say, I’m dangerous. Of course, if you hit them or tread on them, what can you expect?’

  *

  In default of a departing ship, kindly officials drove me around the harbour breakwaters of the port of Madras expounding on its growth and traffic. It is an entirely artificial port. The coastline here is flat, swept clean of sheltering wrinkles and comforting indentations by the terrible currents and swells of the Bay of Bengal. In the hall of the Port Trust, charts show the steady addition of breakwaters by which the port has now expanded to handle a thousand ships, including containers, a year, overtaking Calcutta in importance on the east coast.

  ‘Calcutta has many political problems,’ a Port Trust director, a Tamil himself, said. ‘Here we have too large a labour force, but less troubles, partly because Tamils are quieter characters.’

  Unlike the Hentrys of India or the Walids of Pakistan, officials at the managerial level in India have no desire to emigrate west – I assume because they are doing nicely where they are. Another factor is that, if they have been acquainted with Britain in the recent past, they find differences there now that horrify them. The director, an extremely polite man, was moved by his overpowering disappointment to say, ‘People in the West – the UK, especially – are so lazy. I don’t like going there. Four years ago I was in a posh London hotel, just arrived, very early in the morning. I rang room service for coffee. The waiter said, “What do you want with coffee at four in the morning? The kitchen opens at seven.” I said, “Just some hot water. I’ve got some instant coffee here.” “I can’t serve you,” he said. In the morning the girl who brought my toast and tea was lazy and exhausted. I don’t know if she’d slept or not; she just dropped it in front of me. When you see things like that in London your heart just fails. Maybe Mrs Thatcher will change them – but no, it’s too late.’ He looked at me mournfully and shook his head.

  I discovered from this director that a Shipping Corporation of India vessel still plied regularly between Madras, Penang and Singapore, mostly carrying Tamil and other Indian settlers in Malaysia back and forth. The settlers usually had heavy baggage that would cost too much by air, which was why the sea service survived.

  This news stirred me out of a deep depression; I was growing more worried by the delays. I foresaw others – perhaps from Port Blair, almost certainly from Calcutta with its strikes, cyclones and red tape. I felt no confidence in a possible passage to Rangoon, so I booked a berth to Singapore from Madras. It was two weeks hence but, with South-east Asia yet to cross, I preferred safety to more disappointments. I felt better for having that ticket in my metal suitcase. When Harry Miller took me down to the Madras Club for dinner, I was less depressed and marginally less obsessed with my failure to get to sea again.

  Harry was his usual cheering self. ‘For God’s sake, have another pink gin, and I’ll tell you about the octopuses around Madras. We trawl them up often. Have you ever felt the suckers of an octopus on the back of your hand? Each of those hundreds of small but powerful suckers attach themselves to you like glue, with a delicate tickling sensation, as though you were being plucked at by a multitude of tiny wet hands. Stay on here another month and we’ll catch some octopuses and see the turtles, too.’

  But the next day the agents telephoned me to say the Nancowry would sail for Port Blair the day after. Would I be aboard by 5.0c p.m.?

  *

  Harry drove me to the docks and said goodbye. A wharf inspector took me aboard – sent, he said, by the Port Trust director – and wove through the wharfside crates, dodging pools of rusty water and scurrying coolies, incongruously chattering about religion. ‘I want to work for God, sir. I’m Anglican Church of South India. Follow me, sir, and watch that puddle. And what church are you?’

  The last barrier on my way back to sea, a sleepy man in an office on the dock, blinked at my ticket which he had to stamp. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘Why are you going to Port Blair? Why are you not flying?’

  ‘Could you please just put your stamp on this ticket?’

  ‘Oh, yes, stamp. Of course, a stamp.’

  Four hours later, the Nancowry moved across the harbour basin from the west quay and through the narrow jaws of the breakwater.

  Two hours later still, I was talking in his cabin to Captain Balasubramanian of Madras, a man who, like three successive Shipping Corporation of India masters, would become and remain my friend. His first words after pouring whisky for us were, ‘Look here, sir, I have something of importance to propose. You are unlikely ever to be able to pronounce my name, leave alone remember it, so why not call me Bala. Everybody calls me Bala. Does that strike you as a sensible thing, sir?’ And so Bala he became: jolly, no-nonsense, generous, friendly Bala. A portly figure in smart whites, greying but not above fifty, with a quickness of speech
that matched the rattle of a Gatling gun. An old hand with bubbling humour that seemed a match for any misfortune.

  I learned all about the Nancowry from Bala over that first tumbler of whisky. Built in 1949, an ex-British India Company ship, 10,300 tons, with capacity for 950 passengers. He liked her: ‘She’s a sweet thing,’ he maintained. What if she was old? Her oil-fuelled steam turbines were virtually inaudible; she moved along in stately style without so much as a tremble. ‘Look at the whisky in your glass, sir. Is it trembling? Is it so much as shifting slightly? No, sir.’ Thirty years old, moving like a dream at eleven knots, the Nancowry left my whisky unshaken and unstirred.

  I shared a cabin with a doctor travelling to take up his new posting at Port Blair. Bala had said that most passengers were government officials, workers or their dependents, and doctors and teachers, all from the mainland and assigned to the islands. The Andamans were still jungly and sparsely populated. Like Australia, their population consisted of aborigines, who mainly lived hidden in thick forests; newly arrived mainlanders; and settlers descended from the convicts of the great penal settlement established during the Indian Mutiny.

  The doctor, a tubby man, who had studied medicine in Madras, opened my Vintage Wodehouse paperback. ‘Ah, my favourite author. English is such a beautiful language.’

  We drank whisky together and he invited in three young men who put their heads around the door – two of them his pupils and one, called Francis, a teacher at the government college in Port Blair.

  ‘Mud in your eye,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Fluff in your latchkey,’ I replied, and then had to explain that I was only repeating a favourite toast of Bertie Wooster.