Ship of Brides (2 page)

‘Are you saying you want me to drive, Ram?’ Sanjay asked.

‘No, no, Mr Sanjay, sir. I would be reluctant to interrupt your scintillating discourse.’

The old man’s eyes met hers in the rear-view mirror. Still fogged and vulnerable from sleep, the old woman forced herself to smile in response to what she assumed was a deliberate wink.

They had, she calculated, been on the road for nearly three hours. Their trip to Gujarat, her and Jennifer’s last-minute incursion into the otherwise hermetically scheduled touring holiday, had started as an adventure (‘My friend from college – Sanjay – his parents have offered to put us up for a couple of nights, Gran! They’ve got the most amazing place, like a palace. It’s only a few hours away’) and ended in near disaster when the failure of their plane to meet its scheduled slot left them only a day in which to return to Bombay to catch their connecting flight home.

Already exhausted by the trip, she had despaired privately. She had found India a trial, an overwhelming bombardment of her senses even with the filters of air-conditioned buses and four-star hotels, and the thought of being stranded in Gujarat, even in the palatial confines of the Singhs’ home, filled her with horror. But then Mrs Singh had volunteered the use of their car and driver to ensure ‘the ladies’ made their flight home. Even though it was due to take off from an airport some four hundred miles away. ‘You don’t want to be hanging around at railway stations,’ she said, with a delicate gesture towards Jennifer’s bright blonde hair. ‘Not unaccompanied.’

‘I can drive them,’ Sanjay had protested. But his mother had murmured something about an insurance claim and a driving ban, and her son had agreed instead to accompany Mr Vaghela, to make sure they were not bothered when they stopped. That kind of thing. Once it had irritated her, the assumption that women travelling together could not be trusted to take care of themselves. Now she was grateful for such old-fashioned courtesy. She did not feel capable of negotiating her way alone through these alien landscapes, found herself anxious with her risk-taking granddaughter, for whom nothing seemed to hold any fear. She had wanted to caution her several times, but stopped herself, conscious that she sounded feeble and tremulous. The young are right to be fearless, she reminded herself. Remember yourself at that age.

‘Are you okay back there, madam?’

‘I’m fine thank you, Sanjay.’

‘Still a fair way to go, I’m afraid. It’s not an easy trip.’

‘It must be very arduous for those just sitting,’ muttered Mr Vaghela.

‘It’s very kind of you to take us.’

‘Jay! Look at that!’

She saw they had come off the fast road now and were travelling through a shanty town, studded with warehouses full of steel girders and timber. The road, flanked by a long wall created from sheets of metal haphazardly patchworked together, had become increasingly pockmarked and rutted so that scooters traced Sanskrit trails in the dust and even a vehicle built for breakneck speed could travel at no more than fifteen miles an hour. The black Lexus now crept onwards, its engine emitting a faint growl of impatience as it swerved periodically to avoid the potholes or the odd cow, ambling with apparent direction, as if answering some siren call.

The prompt for Jennifer’s exclamation had not been the cow (they had seen plenty of those) but a mountain of white ceramic sinks, their wastepipes emerging from them like severed umbilical cords. A short distance away sat a pile of mattresses and another of what looked like surgical tables.

‘From the ships,’ said Mr Vaghela, apropos apparently nothing.

‘Do you think we could stop soon?’ she asked. ‘Where are we?’

The driver placed a gnarled finger on the map beside him. ‘Alang.’

‘Not here.’ Sanjay frowned. ‘I don’t think this is a good place to stop.’

‘Let me see the map.’ Jennifer thrust herself forward between the two men. ‘There might be somewhere off the beaten track. Somewhere a bit more . . . exciting.’

‘Surely we are off the beaten track,’ said her grandmother, viewing the dusty street, the men squatting by the roadside. But no one seemed to hear her.

‘No . . .’ Sanjay was gazing around him. ‘I don’t think this is the kind of place . . .’

The old woman shifted in her seat. She was now desperate for a drink, and the chance to stretch her legs. She would also have appreciated a visit to the lavatory, but the short time they had spent in India had taught her that outside the bigger hotels this was often as much of an ordeal as a relief.

‘I tell you what,’ said Sanjay, ‘we’ll get a couple of bottles of cola and stop out of town somewhere to stretch our legs.’

‘Is this, like, a junkyard town?’ Jennifer squinted at a heap of refrigerators.

Sanjay waved at the driver to stop. ‘Stop there, Ram, at that shop. The one next to the temple. I’ll get some cold drinks.’

‘
We
’ll get some cold drinks,’ said Jennifer. The car pulled up. ‘You all right in the car, Gran?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. The two of them sprang out of the doors, a blast of hot air invading the artificial chill of the car, and went, laughing, into the sunbaked shop.

A short way along the road another group of men squatted on their haunches, drinking from tin mugs, occasionally clearing their throats with nonchalant relish. They eyed the car incuriously. She sat in the car, feeling suddenly conspicuous, listening to the tick of the engine as it idled. Outside, the heat shimmered off the earth.

Mr Vaghela turned in his seat. ‘Madam, may I enquire – what do you pay your driver?’ It was the third such question he’d asked her, every time Sanjay was absent from the car.

‘I don’t have one.’

‘What? No help?’

‘Well, I have a girl who does,’ she faltered. ‘Annette.’

‘Does she have her own quarters?’

She thought of Annette’s neat railwayman’s cottage, the geraniums on the windowsill. ‘Yes, in a manner of speaking.’

‘Paid holiday?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not sure.’ She was about to attempt to elaborate on her and Annette’s working relationship, but Mr Vaghela interrupted.

‘Forty years I work for this family and only one week’s paid holiday a year. I am thinking of starting a trade union,
yaar
. My cousin has the Internet at his house. We have been looking at how it works. Denmark. Now, there’s a good country for workers’ rights.’ He turned back to the front and nodded. ‘Pensions, hospitals . . . education . . . we should all be working in Denmark.’

She was silent for a few moments. ‘I’ve never been,’ she said eventually.

She watched the two young people, the blonde head and the black, as they moved within the roadside store. Jennifer had said they were just friends, yet two nights previously she had heard her granddaughter sneak along the tiled corridor into what she assumed was Sanjay’s room. The following day they had been as easy with each other as children. ‘In love with him?’ Jennifer had looked appalled at her tentative question. ‘God, no, Gran. Me and Jay . . . oh, no . . . I don’t want a relationship. He knows that.’

Again, she remembered herself at that age, her stammering horror at being left alone in male company, her determination to stay single, for quite different reasons. And then she looked at Sanjay, who, she suspected, might not be as understanding of the situation as her granddaughter believed.

‘You know this place?’ Mr Vaghela had started to chew another piece of betel. His teeth were stained red.

She shook her head. With the air-conditioning turned off, she could already feel the elevating temperatures. Her mouth was dry, and she swallowed awkwardly. She had told Jennifer several times that she didn’t like cola.

‘Alang. Biggest shipbreaker’s yard in the world.’

‘Oh.’ She tried to look interested, but felt increasingly weary and keen to move on. The Bombay hotel, some unknown distance ahead, seemed like an oasis. She looked at her watch: how could anyone spend nearly twenty minutes purchasing two bottles of drink?

‘Four hundred shipyards here. And men who can strip a tanker down to nuts and bolts in a matter of months.’

‘Oh.’

‘No workers’ rights here, you know. One dollar a day, they are paid, to risk life and limb.’

‘Really?’

‘Some of the biggest ships in the world have ended up here. You would not believe the things that the owners leave on cruise ships – dinner services, Irish linen, whole orchestras of musical instruments.’ He sighed. ‘Sometimes it makes you feel quite sad,
yaar
. Such beautiful ships, to become so much scrap metal.’

The old woman tore her gaze from the shop doorway, trying to maintain a semblance of interest. The young could be so inconsiderate. She closed her eyes, conscious that exhaustion and thirst were poisoning her normally equable mood.

‘They say on the road to Bhavnagar one can buy anything – chairs, telephones, musical instruments. Anything that can come out of the ship they sell. My brother-in-law works for one of the big shipbreakers in Bhavnagar,
yaar.
He has furnished his entire house with ship’s goods. It looks like a palace, you know?’ He picked at his teeth. ‘Anything they can remove. Hmph. It would not surprise me if they sold the crew too.’

‘Mr Vaghela.’

‘Yes, madam?’

‘Is that a tea-house?’

Mr Vaghela, diverted from his monologue, followed her pointing finger to a quiet shopfront, where several chairs and tables stood haphazardly on the dusty roadside. ‘It is.’

‘Then would you be so kind as to take me and order me a cup of tea? I really do not think I can spend another moment waiting for my granddaughter.’

‘I would be delighted, madam.’ He climbed out of the car, and held open the door for her. ‘These young people,
yaar
, no sense of respect.’ He offered his arm, and she leant on it as she emerged, blinking, into the midday sun. ‘I have heard it is very different in Denmark.’

The young people came out as she was drinking her cup of what Mr Vaghela called ‘service tea’. The cup was scratched, as if from years of use, but it looked clean, and the man who had looked after them had made a prodigious show of serving it. She had answered the obligatory questions about her travels, through Mr Vaghela, confirmed that she was not acquainted with the owner’s cousin in Milton Keynes, and then, having paid for Mr Vaghela’s glass of
chai
(and a sticky pistachio sweetmeat, to keep his strength up, you understand), she had sat under the canopy and gazed out at what she now knew, from her slightly elevated vantage-point, to lie behind the steel wall: the endless, shimmering blue sea.

A short distance away, a small Hindu temple was shaded by a neem tree. It was flanked by a series of shacks that had apparently evolved to meet the workers’ needs: a barber’s stall, a cigarette vendor, a man selling fruit and eggs, and another with bicycle parts. It was some minutes before she grasped that she was the only woman in sight.

‘We wondered where you’d gone.’

‘Not for long, I assume. Mr Vaghela and I were only a few yards away.’ Her tone was sharper than she’d intended.

‘I said I didn’t think we should stop here,’ said Sanjay, eyeing first the group of men nearby, then the car with barely hidden irritation.

‘I had to get out,’ she said firmly. ‘Mr Vaghela was kind enough to accommodate me.’ She sipped her tea, which was surprisingly good. ‘I needed a break.’

‘Of course. I just meant – I would have liked to find somewhere more picturesque for you, it being the last day of your holiday.’

‘This will do me fine.’ She felt a little better now: the heat was tempered by the faintest of sea breezes. The sight of the azure water was soothing after the blurred and endless miles of road. In the distance, she could hear the muffled clang of metal against metal, the whine of a cutting instrument.

‘Wow! Look at all those ships!’

Jennifer was gesticulating at the beach, where her grandmother could just make out the hulls of huge vessels, beached like whales upon the sand. She half closed her eyes, wishing she had brought her glasses out of the car. ‘Is that the shipbreaking yard you mentioned?’ she said to Mr Vaghela.

‘Four hundred of them, madam. All the way along ten kilometres of beach.’

‘Looks like an elephant’s graveyard,’ said Jennifer, and added portentously, ‘Where ships come to die. Shall I fetch your glasses, Gran?’ She was helpful, conciliatory, as if to make amends for her prolonged stay in the shop.

‘That would be very kind.’

In other circumstances, she thought afterwards, the endless sandy beach might have graced a travel brochure, its blue skies meeting the horizon in a silvered arc, behind her a row of distant blue mountains. But with the benefit of her glasses, she could see that the sand was grey with years of rust and oil, and the acres of beachfront punctuated by the vast ships that sat at quarter-mile intervals and huge unidentifiable pieces of metal, the dismantled innards of the defunct vessels.

At the water’s edge, a few hundred yards away, a group of men squatted in a row on their haunches, dressed in faded robes of blue, grey and white, watching as a ship’s deckhouse swung out from a still-white hull anchored several hundred feet from the shore and crashed heavily into the sea.

‘Not your usual tourist attraction,’ said Sanjay.

Jennifer was staring at something, her hand lifted to shield her eyes against the sun. Her grandmother gazed at her bare shoulders and wondered if she should suggest the girl cover up.

‘This is the kind of thing I was talking about. Come on, Jay, let’s go and have a look.’

‘No, no, miss. I don’t think this is a good idea.’ Mr Vaghela finished his
chai
. ‘The shipyard is no place for a lady. And you would be required to seek permission from the port office.’

‘I only want a look, Ram. I’m not going to start wielding a welder’s torch.’

‘I think you should listen to Mr Vaghela, dear.’ She lowered her cup, conscious that even their presence at the tea-house was attracting attention. ‘It’s a working area.’

‘And it’s the weekend. There’s hardly anything going on. Come on, Jay. No one’s going to mind if we go in for five minutes.’