Translated from Bengali by Nazes Afroz
The mission of undocking a ship from the quay is always a matter of pandemonium, a chaotic task. Two things that everyone gets to observe are: a lot of running around and shouting.
Some of you may think that white people perform all their tasks within a cloak of silence, while we cannot do anything without a hue and cry and making life unbearable for our neighbours. This sort of idea is not entirely wrong. You must have seen in films how the English eat at their banquets without making a sound. The butlers come and go silently; there’s a muffled tinkling sound of forks and knives; people talk in low voices; everything is too well organized, well managed.
And what happens at our invitations, at our festival feasts, at our big gatherings?
Do I have the ability to describe that? Especially when my guru Sukumar Ray has left behind this description in his unforgettable words. Listen to this:
Come over, this way, with your dishes full of food,
Stand and watch, it’s a very very chaotic mood—
Someone’s calling for curd; another wants bread,
Some are holding empty plates and crying instead.
Over there, two Lords, with plates in their hands,
Are squabbling as wildly as they possibly can.
They all think they’ve power; for others they don’t care—
They’re dying of hunger in this crazy affair!
What was he saying? Dying of hunger at a feast? Of course. Or how else could it be a Bengali invitation? If you do not like it, you are free to go to Firpo’s. You can eat bland, half-cooked pig’s head or the tail of some other animal.
But much like the howling sounds of all jackals sound the same, the noise when a ship undocks is the same anywhere in the world.
I have seen ships setting sail in Venice—the sailors on board and at the port, both on water and on land are macaroni-consuming Italians; I have seen the same in Marseille—sailors of both sides were authentic frog eating French; I have observed it with full concentration in Dover—the monkeys at both ends were beef-steak devouring raccoon-faced English. And there is no count how many times I have seen this contest on the Ganges, at Goalondo, Chandpur and Narayangunj.* On both sides they were my protégées—beard-waving, lungi-clad Noakhalya or Sylhetya.
The shouts, the uproars, the hullabaloo in all ports are the same. Same smell, same taste. If you close your eyes, you will not be able to tell if you’re listening to Chittagonian in Narayangunj or German in Hamburg.
Standing by the railing on the deck, you may be tempted into thinking that the sailors, both on the ship and on land, should have an agreement to get the ship released from the shackles of the ropes tying it to land. But brother, you will have made a great mistake. Actually the intention of both sides is to start some sort of a war. Unshackling or docking a ship is just a pretext. What the sailor, running from one end of the ship to the other is saying, by making faces at the sailor on land, cannot be heard in the din of the chaos but if you apply some imagination and if you have some knowledge of sailor psychology, you can understand that his simple statement is, ‘You brainless idiot, can’t you see that the rope is tangled on the left side? Do I have to put a mast in your eyes to show this? You’—(again swear words)—
Do not think that the sailor on land cannot give a fitting prompt reply either. You cannot hear his voice; you can only see his wonderful expression or rather contorting face and you have to imagine the rest.
He will noisily spit after looking up at the ship and say, ‘You great primate, wrap your side properly. The pull of the ship will untangle the rope on my side. You don’t know how a rope works and you’ve come to work on a ship? Won’t you be better off going back to your village and picking nits in your granny’s hair? You flat-faced’— (again swear words)—
Armed with the soap of imagination, you can thus blow many bubbles.
On the other side the ship’s horn is blowing ‘toot toot’ over this ruckus—in Michael Madhusudan’s* language, ‘The tumult of chariot wheels—the clamour of great bows’.
It means, if it is a small boat, ‘You lad, move aside. Can’t you see that I’m on my way? You’ll break into thirty-two pieces if I just brush against you. Will you put yourself back together by gluing yourself with the extract from marigold leaves?’ If it is bigger than your ship, then it would mean, ‘Greetings, big brother. Would you mind moving a little to your left so I can slip away from the right?’ The sound of the horn also has a third meaning. If someone was getting drunk in the delight-juice, he will wake up instantly with the sound of the horn and run for his life to catch the ship.
Once I had seen a sailor swim to get to his ship. I had to close my ears and move away after hearing the swear words the other sailors hurled at him. There is an adage in English, ‘He can swear like a sailor.’ If you can avoid their language, you will become famous all over the world for being a sweet-talker.
If you have a friend who has read Farsi, you can ask him the whole story of Iskandar-e-roomira purshid—meaning ‘What Alexander the Great was asked’. The story was like this: Sikandar Shah was asked, ‘Where did you learn to be so well behaved?’ He replied, ‘From ill-behaved people.’ ‘How is that possible?’ ‘I avoid what they do.’
I am not saying that it is a very witty story. But you will benefit if you can avoid the language of sailors, especially the English sailors.
At the dock you can also see a couple of people running up the gangway of the ship as it was being lifted. Why could they not come a little early? It is not like that. Someone was detained by Customs and he could only get through in the last minute; or someone on the wait-list got the news that another passenger had cancelled his trip and he got his berth; or someone got lost after going on shore to see the city and found his way just in time.
The ship was released from the port by saying, ‘Badar, badar.’*
We want to sail the unknown seas, but our heart gets filled with an unspoken pain as we take leave of the shore. You may have all the feelings of freedom while looking around the vast expanse of the sea; you may have all the unparalleled experience of survival going through huge storms and big waves; but there is no comparison to the sweet feelings of coming back to the lap of the land. Hence, the guru of all travellers, Gurudev, had said, after crossing many rivers, seas and oceans:
‘Go back, go back to the shore’s luring
The shore that’s looking up spreading its wing.’
By the time the ship sailed, it had become dark. Leaning on the rails of the ship’s astern, I stared at the megapolis, one of the biggest ports in the world, decorated with garlands of lights. There were streams of lamps in the streets, in the ships, in the fishing boats, or sometimes a lone one here and there, or a cluster as if it were a bunch of flowers.
We celebrate Diwali once a year, on an auspicious day. Here they have Diwali all year long. There’s the auspicious moment every dusk. Their festival is all-inclusive; men and women from all faiths, all creeds—Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Parsi, Muslim, Christian—all take part in it.
I know that scientists say that some small birds are green in order to camouflage themselves in the leaves of the trees so that predatory birds cannot locate and swoop in on them. Like that, unripe mangoes are green too so that birds cannot see them. They become red when they ripen and birds then can snap them off the trees and the stone inside it will grow into another tree.
How can I say that the explanation of the scientists is wrong? How much of science do I know and what do I understand? But my simple beauty-seeking soul says, ‘No, the bird is green because it looks beautiful in that colour and pleases my eyes. Be it big or small, there is no self-interest in it. It is green simply for the sake of beauty.’
Exactly like that I know that there are reasons for which each port gets flooded with evening lights. People get to see each other in those lights; a father can return home seeing those lights; a mother can find her child and get her household chores done. Still, when I see those lights from a distance, I tend to think that they are lit to make Diwali, the festival of lights, look glorious. There are no other reasons for it.
In the vast expanse of the sea, the lost sailor finds his way by looking at the stars. Yet Rabindranath has sung, ignoring that reason:
‘You’ve lit the sky with so many lights
For the festival.’
Looking at the lights of the port, I said to God:
“We’ve lit so many lamps at your feet
At the moment of homage.”
Would that be saying too much?
We had now come far. The lights on the shore were fading. I saw a small fishing boat go past us in the opposite direction. But it did not go by. It was stationary there with its aft towards the sea and we simply passed it.
Was it not strange that they were catching fish so far from the shores this late at night?
What would they do if a storm picked up? If the boat sank, they would not be able to swim to the shore. Yet, why did they risk their lives by straying far into the sea? To make some money? Certainly not. I knew it rather well. I had lived for a few months at a friend’s house on the coast in Madras. There was a fishermen’s hamlet next to it. For six full months I had observed their lives. I was stunned to see their poverty. Poor peasants of our land were richer compared to them. Even our tribal people—Santhals, Bhils—lived more comfortably than them. Those of you who had seen the fishermen in Puri would agree with me.
Did they take so much risk and lead a life stricken with poverty because they could not find another occupation? My friend from Madras said that they so loved to live in the open expanse of the sea that they refused to till the land. During the stormy seasons they would go hungry, as they would not be able to go out in the sea to catch fish. They would venture out, ignoring the storm and die in the deep sea when they could no longer tolerate the cries of the starving children. Yet they would not leave the waters to look for a job on land.
And so it was also true for the boatmen and sailors. Their lives were not that cursed yet that they refused to go back to the land. Even a peasant, whose previous seven hundred generations had tilled the land, was forced to take up a sailing job during the famine and could not be persuaded to go back to farming. There was nothing more to say about the seasoned sailors. Their beard and hair become white; their skin turns bronze by the weathering of briny seawater and the salty air; there is no surety of how long they will live; no ship will give them any jobs anymore; yet they will stay in the congested alleys of Khidirpur and run around from one liner to another searching for a job. They could easily go back home to spend their last days in the company of their grandchildren, sitting under the tamarind tree.
They have an ‘addiction’ to the sea and they are slightly coy about it. I do not know why it is so. If you said to them, ‘So, Chowdhury’s son’—they feel overjoyed if you address them as ‘Chowdhury’s son’—‘you have saved quite a bit. Why do you have to take the trouble of working in liners any longer? Isn’t it better for you to go back home and take God’s and the Prophet’s names thinking about the afterlife?’
He will say with a sad face, ‘No sir, it’s not like this.’ He would then scratch his beard and say, ‘It will be all right if I work for two more years. Without having some savings, it doesn’t look good to become a burden on your grandchildren.’
Utter rubbish. The old man had taken up his job in a ship when he was eighteen. He would be seventy now. For fifty-two years he had sent home money to build a proper house and acquire properties. Members of his family were now so well off that they could easily lend money to the landlord. And the old man was saying that his son-nephew grandchildren would not give him two meals!
A few captains loved the sea so much that they built their house next to the sea in their old age. The shape of the house would be outlandish too. It did not look like a house but rather like a ship—to the best extent it could be on land. He kept stashed, in his penthouse room, a compass, binoculars, maps, steering wheels and other tools to run a ship. The old man would not allow anyone to enter that room because in a ship no one was allowed there without the proper uniform. Sitting there, he would bite his pipe and scold his ‘seamen’. All the better if there were a storm. He would then be the superman—stomping around the ‘bridge’ to save the ‘ship’; he would instruct the ‘engine room’ via the ‘telephone’ by shouting ‘faster’, ‘full speed ahead’; and at times he put on his mackintosh and went out on the ‘deck’ to supervise and came back fully drenched. He would not have a moment’s relief, let alone go to bed to sleep, until the storm died down. After the storm passed, he would say, ‘Gosh, we had a close shave. All would have died sinking if I weren’t here. The lads these days don’t know how to steer a ship.’ And then he would sit at the table to squiggle notes, thanking the crew of the ‘ship’ for saving it by executing his orders properly. After that he would take the bearing of the ‘ship’ by calculating latitude and longitude as it had strayed from its original course due to the storm. Finally, he might go down on his knees to thank God and go to bed, yawning, in his ‘cabin’ as a content man.
After three days, he will plod down from his ‘ship’ to the local public house to chat—as his ‘ship’ had just docked in the port. After giving a full hair-raising description of the killer storm, he will say, biting his pipe, ‘No, it’s enough. This is my last voyage. These old bones can’t take such storms any longer.’ Everyone will jump in showing sympathy, ‘What’s this, captain? This is no age at all.’ The captain will come back happily to his ‘ship’ with smiles.
I know two more types of people who refuse to settle down.
I have seen gypsies in many countries. They will be here today and then there tomorrow. Day after tomorrow, they will be far, in another place. Which fair will start and close when and where—they know it all. They will visit those fairs to buy merchandise, dance and sing, tell your fortune by reading palms, but they will not stay in one place for long. They move in the blazing heat of the summer or during the non-stop rains of the monsoon. Who knows what attracts them. They have no urge to send children to school; they will not care to call the doctor if their children fall ill. Come what may, they will never build homes. They do not know the charm of home and will never find it.
In England they have been trying to settle these people for two hundred years. They were offered money, but they would never ever become the slave of one place. It is because of these gypsies that England has not been able to attain hundred per cent literacy. Finally the British have started travelling schools for them. Meaning the teachers are chasing them with pencil and board, but all is a waste; they are exactly what they are.
They are the children of unbound nature—they do not want to be get cloistered inside certain limits.
But do you know who far exceed them?
Rabindranath has written about them:
‘I wish I were an Arab Bedouin
The vast desert under my feet fades into the horizon.’
We were heading towards the Aden port and crossing the Arabian Sea. They were the people of that land. From the dawns of Creation, they had been roaming the deserts of the Arab land. While moving about, they came close to the fertile green valleys of Iran or they had heard the songs of the leafy forests of Lebanon but they were never attracted to settle down in these places. On the contrary, the harsh reality of caravans perishing for want of water while crossing the desert from one oasis to another was not unknown to them, yet they walked those roads. The idea of settling permanently in one place is akin to getting struck by lightning for them.
I knew that the Arab land was very poor once. As it did not have the required resources, it could not set up artificial irrigation. As a result, they could never have agriculture. But recently the king of Najd-Hejaz Ibn Saud made so many hundreds of millions of dollars by selling oil to the Americans that he did not know what to do with it. Finally, by buying modern equipment, he lifted groundwater to create farmlands and offered them to the Bedouins, saying they should quit the extreme nomadic lifestyle and settle in those lands.
But who listened!
Weeds the length of palm trees had grown on those lands.
The Bedouin was still roving here and there with his camels, mules, donkeys and horses. He was still spending the nights under the tent made of camel hide. Facing acute thirst, he would cut open the throat of his dear camel to drink water saved inside it. Finally he, along with his wife, children and animals may perish from thirst. Yet he would not grow roots and settle somewhere.
*This essay is excerpted with the permission of the publisher Speaking Tiger
