by Mark Morris
Samir waited.
The paperwork on the walls all concerned the ship-breaking, of course. Each vessel had its own hanging clipboard of papers, and a large map of the beach illustrated where they were located with barely legible script, circled numbers, and shorthand symbols, like some mystical chart. The trappings of a spell that summoned wealth. Samir read some of the details, though he’d already done his research. Ships were bought by an international broker, and a suitable captain—a good captain—was hired to beach it properly on the narrow strip of mud-beach like someone else might park a car. Then more people were paid to take the thing apart. A ship had a lifespan of only thirty years or so and then they became too expensive to maintain, too costly to insure. With profits dwindling, each ship became more valuable as scrap, with more than ninety per cent of each vessel recyclable. A lot of the material was resold right away: the liquids, machinery, the easily removed fixtures; it all got sold on to salvage dealers. Engines, wiring. Everything. Samir saw a list detailing all the copper pulled from one of the vessels, and the sum beside it amazed him. The steel would be converted into building materials like rebar, tension devices to reinforce larger constructs. Samir thought of the workers standing in bent shapes or taut with the strain of some heavy task, sticking from the mud; they were like exposed rebar themselves, holding the yards together. Profits in excess of eighty-three million taka, depending on the price of steel, were built upon their strength, and at great cost. He had a list of dead men who knew the truth of that.
He turned from the records when the door behind him opened. A large man stepped into the office. Samir knew already that this would be Mabud Kibria. He barely glanced at Samir, making his way to a heavily loaded desk and rifling through the papers piled there. The foreman who had escorted Samir earlier followed.
“This is the man looking for work.”
Judging by the number of clipboards and the red underlines on the map, there would be plenty of work for those who wanted it. India may have dismantled more ships each year, but here in Bangladesh they recycled more deadweight tonnage than anywhere else in the world.
“I’m not looking for work,” Samir reminded the foreman.
Mabud gave Samir more than a glance this time, clearly annoyed that whatever little time he was going to spare had already been wasted.
“I am here to work,” Samir told him. “Rokeya Begum sent me.”
* * *
Samir fumbled for a handrail he’d forgotten was no longer there as he climbed. He would start from the top and work his way down. He had to be careful; the handrail was missing, but so were some of the steps themselves. The portholes had been taken from the walls, and in many places the walls were gone as well. Inside the ship was an absence that expanded. Samir walked within a steady decomposing of steel. There were no railings on the deck either. Samir passed mounts for missing cranes. Saw signs for lifeboats that weren’t there.
Out to sea, in the fading light of the setting sun, children were playing in the dieselled waters. They swam around a raft of wreckage, clambering up only to throw their young careless bodies at toxic water and whatever scrap metal might lurk submerged there. Despite what they might have thought, their bodies were not made of steel. Each was susceptible to breakage, all too easily opened up and spilt empty, or filled with fluid instead of breath. Samir had to look away from their play, unable to stop imagining the worst.
Port and starboard, the Bangladeshi beach was an open graveyard. The ships here did not sink, they slumped; rotting, rusting corpses alive only by day with the men who took them apart reducing them to rivetless pieces. But in the dark they looked almost whole again. It was easy to imagine each as it might have once been. Their slow progress across the world’s oceans; the sudden climb and plunging fall over waves the size of mountains. Leviathan, each of them, forging paths that disappeared almost immediately behind them as they fell and rose again. These were cruise liners and tankers and container ships from all over the world. Who had sailed them? What had brought them to the ships, and where had each ship taken them? And what else had each ship carried? Here they were now, these amazing constructions, at their journey’s end. Waiting to be torn apart, they spilled silent stories into the mud, into the sea, like slicks of oil, each sinking or getting dragged away with every outgoing tide.
In the bridge, every monitor and machine, every button, every wire, had all been taken. Samir stood where the windows used to be, imagining himself the captain looking out at a vast ocean and a sky full of stars. Now windows empty of glass framed a landscape that was all mud and lights coming on in the city inland, or from the fires on the beach where workers kept the evening chill away burning unsalvageable materials in old oil drums. Burning asbestos and worse, probably.
Samir retrieved a small bound bundle of sage from his bag and wedged it into a tight corner of metal. He lit it and wafted the aromatic smoke with his hands as he recited a prayer. He was combining his faith with “smudging”, a Native American ritual which cleansed a space of negative energy, and with science; sage cleared the air of bacteria.
He would descend now and wind his way through the corridors until he found the “dark heart” of the ship. It was a suitable metaphor. Much of what Samir did was couched in metaphor. That was how faith worked, and it made the supernatural easier to understand. He had grown up Christian in a Muslim country but he knew all the faiths now. He liked the stories. Stories were useful. Powerful, sometimes.
Inside the ship again, it was difficult to remember the noble majesty he’d imagined from the bridge. What he saw here, in the beam of his torch, was decrepit. There was no engine thrumming life through the body of this giant, and no rhythmic movement of tide around it that he could feel. Yet there was something. Some vibration of life inside, something more than silence. Sounds that rose from its own depths. The sudden clank-spank echo from some unseen place as something fell. The metallic groan of steel grinding on steel, like the drawn-out inhalation of a final breath. From somewhere deep came a steady ticking, like a swinging chain striking a wall in a hidden chamber. And always, everywhere, dripping. Wherever Samir touched, his hand came away wet, red-brown with rust.
Throughout the ship, Samir inhaled the thick smell of the saltwater mud sump it sat in, breathing in the sharp odours of steel and copper and whatever else remained to oxidise. He could smell oil and some pungent chemical that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. He fancied he could feel the odours on his skin, and the dark he moved through, too. He rolled his sleeves down against it.
Samir explored. He found a galley stripped of its sinks, seeing only rectangles in the metal where they used to be. He cast the beam of his torch over holes where once there were pipes. He found sockets and vents in a long line—a laundry room, maybe, or somewhere for computers or some other kinds of machines, all of it gone now. Yet for all the absences, the atmosphere was still oppressive. The passages were tight, and stepping through doorways stripped of their hatches seemed to take Samir into closer confines instead of opening up into empty vacant spaces. He was walking a labyrinth of steel that seemed to narrow around him.
He needed some air. What he was breathing was thin, like others had exhaled it countless times before, leaving little for him. It was metallic and sharp like blood. And though what he breathed in seemed thin, the air around him seemed dense. A thickening of atmosphere that pressed against him. He had experienced such contrasts before, such oppressiveness and shortness of breath, but even in Dhaka it had never been as severe as this. He took a small canister from his bag, fixed a plastic piece that would cover his mouth, and pumped a deep fresh breath from it. Another.
Stepping aboard the Karen May had been like stepping into the inhalation before a scream. Some had told him the ship was brooding, waiting for someone to come aboard, and he’d felt that. Now he felt like he walked poised on a pendulum at the highest point of its swing, waiting to plummet.
He descended walkways that hadn’t felt footsteps for months,
maybe a year. The sound each step made was strangely muted, stifled before it could echo fully. Surprised to find a handrail at one section, he had taken it, only for it to come away from the cancerous sheet metal. He dropped it in surprise and it made only the briefest noise in falling. Even with the torch beam cutting a way ahead of him, Samir felt like he barely had any presence of his own. Like his passage through the dark was a temporary unseaming of the shadows he walked through, shadows that sealed up again behind him, and for a moment he couldn’t shake the impression of having been swallowed whole. Like Jonah in the body of Leviathan.
The thought brought him comfort. The whale had swallowed Jonah to protect him from a storm.
All the same storm.
As if to mock Samir’s train of thought, the ship released a sudden low groan and, on the tail of it came a soft stuttered sound. Like someone sobbing in the dark.
“Peace be with you,” Samir called. It came back to him only in part, a repetition of peaces—
Pieces?
—and then a sudden scream. Shrill, and brief, like wrenched metal.
“Samir?”
The voice came quietly.
“I’m here,” Samir said. He set his bag down and swept his torch behind, and up, and down. It showed him only narrow passageways like ventricles and walls red with rust, and he thought again of being held inside the body of a beast, only now he thought of the other Jonah, the one sailors thought bad luck. He took another puff of air from the canister and flinched at the hiss of it. Thought he heard it come back to him, closer than it should have been, and sharper. A gasp of sound. He swept the torch behind again and was startled when a shape pulled away from the wall. A body peeled from the gloom, dark but for the wide eyes and the teeth suddenly grinning.
“You frightened me!” said the boy.
“Abesh!”
The boy spoke again before Samir could admonish him fully.
“I want to see my brother.”
Samir sighed. “He’s not here.”
“Then where is he?”
“He’s with you.”
“But what if he’s here as well? Like the others?”
Previously, Abesh had feigned to not believe the stories. He had scoffed at the idea of a haunted wreck and, according to Mabud, was not only unafraid but actually keen to work the ship, though nobody would work it with him. Now, though, it seemed the stories had convinced him, at least partially. Only partially, because still the boy was unafraid.
“Will you help him?”
Samir nodded. “I will help him. Now go. Back to the boat. It’s dangerous here.”
Abesh did as he was told. Samir only stopped him when he heard a quick rasp and saw the sudden flare of flame that came with a lit match. The boy held it aloft to light his way but dropped it, startled, when Samir yelled at him.
“Dangerous!” he repeated, and handed the boy his torch. He had another.
“You’ll help him?” Abesh said again, shining the beam close enough to Samir to see his face. “You promise?”
“I’ll do all I can,” Samir said.
He watched the child carry the light away until it was gone.
* * *
Rokeya Begum had served Samir choddo shaak almost as soon as he’d arrived at her house. It was a vast dish, made up of fourteen different vegetables, but he was hungry and thankful for the meal and did not care that this was not the right time to eat it, that this was not Bhoot Chaturdashi. She had prepared it thinking of how it might help him, but he ate only to satisfy his hunger. He would welcome the protection, but he had other wards, other charms. Symbols of his faiths, which were all the stronger for being plural.
He had in his bag a selection of photographs he’d taken of the ship after speaking with Mabud Kibria at the breaking yard. He’d zoomed in on the vessel after downloading the pictures to his laptop, and had printed several copies of what he’d found. He retrieved them now, as he ate.
“Please, look at these. I took these this morning. What do you see?”
Even enlarged, the pictures showed little more than the ship. Presented in a state of partial deterioration, it held shadows like blemishes, and looked in places as if the picture had not developed fully. There were many dark spaces. But if you looked long enough…
“Faces,” Rokeya said. “I see faces.” She pointed. “There. And there. And—there are so many of them.”
Samir noted how she would not touch the photograph. Didn’t poke them when she pointed, hadn’t picked up a single one, just looked at where they lay on the table amongst the dishes of food. “Are they all…?” But she didn’t finish her question. She looked at Samir and said again instead, “So many.”
“Your son?”
She nodded.
“Where?” He tried to hand her one of the pictures but she recoiled, albeit subtly; she half-stood and leaned across the table to fetch him more water.
“Will you help them?” she said, refilling his glass.
Samir gathered up the photos.
“I’ll do all I can.”
“Muhammed Goswami said you helped him. In Dhaka?”
Samir touched the scar on his face but turned the gesture into a rub of his beard, remembering. “Yes.”
It had been difficult, but yes, he had helped.
“You are Christian?”
“I am.”
Less than one percent were in this country, but Samir had been taken in by missionaries after Aila and though they hadn’t forced any of their teachings on him, he’d learned from them anyway.
“Christian,” she said. “Not Muslim.”
“Muslim too.”
What did it matter, he felt like asking. God is the ocean, and religions are the ships that carry us.
But of course, it did matter.
He drank some of his water. It tasted salty. “I can help.”
Rokeya sighed. She had little choice but to let him try, at least. They always had little choice by the time they were requesting his help.
“I want you to free my son’s spirit,” Rokeya told him. Samir knew this already; she was only saying it to hear it herself. “Release him from that terrible place.”
It was likely that the only ones he would be setting free were those left behind. Those who grieved and held on so hard that it hurt. Like squeezing a handful of keys. He would ease them of that, at least.
He looked around the room as he closed his bag on the photographs. There were many pictures of her son. He was well-remembered. This was good. It would help him more than the choddo shaak.
“Tell me about him.”
She nodded again, but said nothing for a long time. “There was an accident…” she managed eventually.
“I know. Tell me about him before then.”
She found that much easier.
The Bengali word for ghost is bhoot or bhut. It is also the word for past. So Samir listened to all of her stories, and he ate all of the vegetables she gave him, and he hoped it would be enough.
* * *
Samir had been told once, by a man in Jamalpur, that ghosts could only exist for as long as it took their body to decompose. Samir could understand how such a belief might be born, how it could stand as a metaphor for the grieving process. He could see, too, how it might appeal to those who’d had little time to prepare for a great loss. A transition period in which loved ones could linger but not be trapped, able, still, to pass on to whatever it was that came next. For the brief time he had known Dr Shahid, a missionary he’d met in Dhaka, he had come to recognise a different belief. That the dead remained, in some form or another, for as long as there was someone else to remember them. This was how Christ could still be with us, she’d explained, and Samir had nodded like he was supposed to, and stored the story away with all the others that made up the different faiths he carried with him.
When it came to the Karen May, he was more inclined to believe Dr Shahid’s version than what he’d heard in Jamalpur. He thought of Abesh’s brot
her, incinerated in a blast; what had remained to decompose in a case like that? He thought of Nasir, Rokeya’s son. He’d fallen through a hatch, plummeting deep into the vessel’s hold. Enough water had flooded the wreck that the fall didn’t kill him, but he broke so many bones on the way down hitting struts and part-walls that he couldn’t keep afloat or swim and the man had drowned before anyone could help him. His body had been recovered. It had been cleaned, shrouded, and buried, as according to Islam. No doubt something of him still remained in his grave, though for many he was already forgotten. Rokeya remembered him for who he had been, Rokeya and Abdul, but Mabud Kibria in the ship-breaking office hadn’t even remembered the name, was reminded only when Samir explained how the man had died. That’s all he was now. A death. Like all the others. Every dead worker had become the method of their ending: the one who fell, the one who burned, the one who suffocated. The one crushed flat beneath tonnes of freed steel. The one thrown and broken by an unexpected blast. Each of them united in that their work had killed them.
And that this ship had taken them.
The ship wanted him too; Samir could feel it. Not Samir specifically, just someone; it had been so long. Nobody would work the vessel anymore. It was the only reason he had been allowed to even take a look. Often Samir would need to convince people to allow him to complete his work, persuade them with a mix of cajoling or something spiritual if they seemed that way inclined—he knew various faiths well enough to talk about them with authority. This time, though, he had been granted permission with little hesitation or reservation. The men in charge were more interested in profits than prophets and didn’t care what had to be done, so long as people would work the ship again. Whether Samir could cleanse the ship or not didn’t matter. So long as they had been seen to try, the workers would be less afraid.
Samir found a suitable spot for his purpose and stopped. He estimated he was near the middle of the ship, both regarding its length and his position between decks. Where he stood, the passage branched off in two directions. Taken with a missing wall opposite, he was positioned at an improvised crossroads. Not exactly the points of the compass, but it would do.