This story received Honorable Mention in the Kyle Douglas Memorial Short Story contest sponsored by New Brunswick Writers Federation. Ship Breaking is done mainly by hand and is gruesome hard work. It was first published in SHORTS Vol.1 which is available at amazon.ca I hope you enjoy my story.
The Ship Breakers.
The Neptune Giant is a VLCC, a
very large crude carrier.
When it was completed in 1979, it ranked among the largest oil tankers in the
world. From bow to stern, 75 Cadillacs could park bumper to bumper. The crews
used bicycles to travel the elongated deck. With a beam of nearly two hundred feet,
five bungalows could be placed lengthwise side by side across the deck; her
keel is six stories underwater. The raw steel is covered with over fifteen
hundred gallons of paint. She’d been given a lifespan of thirty years; instead,
she had sailed every ocean of the world, berthed at every continent, rode many
storm’s fierce waves and trolled the endless seas for thirty-five years. Today
is her final voyage.
Her last port of call,
two weeks ago, was Saint John, New Brunswick, with two million barrels of
Venezuelan crude. Now, the tanker cruises the Bay of Bengal at fourteen knots.
At that speed she requires five miles to come to a dead stop. The ship breaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh,
are only four miles away. The captain brings the ship to starboard, aiming the
aging tanker directly at the muddy beach. The tide is high, which is necessary
to allow the gargantuan machine to ground itself like an aged sea lion, as near
to the shore as possible, where it will die.
The engine that powers
the ship is eighty-nine feet long and forty-four feet wide with twelve massive
cylinders – one of the largest engines in the world. It weighs two thousand
metric tons costing more than the rest of the transport. Its thirst for fuel
demands over fifteen hundred gallons of crude every hour. Its last chore will
be to power the vessel onto the tidal mud banks, where humans who are dwarfed
by its immensity will eventually take it apart, by hand, piece by piece. The
work is extremely dangerous with an exceptionally high mortality rate and yet
there is no shortage of men.
Of the approximately
45,000 ocean-going vessels in the world, about seven hundred per year are taken
out of service for dismantling. Many go to Alang, India, the world’s largest
shipbreaking yard. Or to Gadani, Pakistan, the third largest after Chittagong.
Where the ships go, the jobs go. As difficult as the work may be, ship breaking
is part of the momentum powering the economy of a young Bangladesh. The owners
of this particular ship-breaking yard paid three million dollars for the Neptune Giant.
With torches,
sledgehammers, steel wedges, brute force and painstaking drudgery, it will take
six months to dismantle; one man will die and two men will be injured by a thousand
pound slab of steel cut from the behemoth’s hide. It will net the owner millions
more than he paid when he sells the scrap metal and he will provide no
compensation for men that can’t work. They toil fourteen hours a day, with two
half hour breaks and an hour for lunch, six and a half days a week. The men
will eat their supper when their work shift ends. At least one quarter are
illiterate; one quarter are children. The average wage is $1.25 per day.
*
Azhar Uddin is gently
woken by his father. It’s 4:30 a.m.
“Come my little man,
you must join your brother at the table. You must leave for work soon. Come
now.”
Hafiz Uddin turns from
his son, supporting himself with his only arm grasped upon a homemade crutch;
the other arm is buried beneath the muddy beaches where he once toiled, severed
by falling steel at the same crippling yards where he will soon send his two
sons. He wobbles even with his lopsided support; the left knee and lower leg,
the same side as the missing arm, were wrecked in the accident also. Unable to find
meaningful work with only a single hand, one strong leg and a defeated spirit,
he remains dependent upon his male children: Nur is fourteen; Azhar will be thirteen
next week. Because they are exceptional workers, they earn two hundred and
sixty takas a day, just over three
dollars.
Rising slowly, he sits
up on the side of the bed, Azhar rubs his shoulder. The dull ache in his muscle
reminds him of the steel pipes he helped carry all day. Long straight bangs of
the fiercest black hang over his narrow forehead. His brown boyish skin is
smooth and untroubled, not yet marked by the lines of struggle. A slight dimple
on the end of his nose balances the squareness of his jaw. The man’s work he
does has not taken the childish shine from his eyes. Blinking the sleepy fog
from his brow he rises to find his work clothes neatly folded at the foot of
his bed. His father washed and hung them to dry before he retired for the
night, as he would’ve done for Azhar’s older brother, Nur, also. There are no
women in the house.
Azhar slips on his red
and blue striped shirt, the collar and cuffs worn thin bearing unravelled
threads. Wrapping a green and yellow lungi
around his slim hips, he ties a double pretzel knot to keep it secure. He often
wishes for trousers to protect his legs, but they would be too hot for work,
and he knows there is no money for such luxuries. Every spare taka is sent to his mother, Naju, in
Dhaka. He ponders a moment, thinking of her and his sisters. Rayhana is eleven
and works with his mother; and Tasleema is six. He hasn’t seen them for over
four months. It is for Tasleema that they all work and save whatever is
possible so that she can go to school. As he thinks of her glowing eyes and the
tiny face he remembers her promise,
“When we are together
again, Azhar, I will teach you to read.”
The thought causes him
to bend down to retrieve the tattered comic book from under his bed. In the dim
light of the bare bulb from the kitchen, he scans the torn cover. The masked
man with the flowing cape, he knows, is called Batman. One of his first jobs when he was only ten was to retrieve
any usable items from the grounded ships that could be sold to the recyclers:
rolls of unused toilet paper, cleaning supplies, pots and pans, furniture,
bedding, tools, discarded books, coastal maps, light bulbs, cans of paint,
rope, wire. The comic book had been in a waste basket; it was torn and thick
with many readings. Azhar had seen other comics before but he wondered where
this one came from and how far it had travelled when he found it. His boss
Mojnu told him to keep it, otherwise it was being tossed out. He was always
impressed by the colored pages, the photos of cars, tall buildings, fancy
clothes, fight scenes, smiles and scowls – and he longs to know what the squiggly
words mean. More than anything, he wants to read.
Tossing the book under
the bed once more, he tugs the frugal sheets into place neatly, as his father
expects, before joining his brother at the table. Their home is corrugated
metal divided into two rooms with few possessions, its shape a replica of the
many shanties lining the dirt street where he lives. Theirs is different
because their father keeps it clean. The walls are painted a bright blue inside
and out; their roof doesn’t leak when it rains.
The smell of oatmeal
greets him as it drifts from the boiling pot his father is bent over, stirring,
on the Bondhu Chula, a cook stove. Oatmeal for breakfast is not common in their
home or their neighbours for that matter. Most breakfasts are rice, sometimes
with red or green chillies. Or paratha, a pan fried unleavened flat bread.
Yesterday Old Angus Macdonald, the burly Scotsman that visits them sometimes,
dropped off a bag of rolled oats. They have no idea where he lives or where he
comes from. They only know him from the story their father has told them.
The man was almost
seventy when he commanded the Atlantic Pride, one of Canada’s largest ferries, to
the yards in Chittagong when it was retired four years ago. He stepped onto
shore after he grounded the ship and he never left. When the torches cut a
section of aged steel from the nose of that very ship, a huge chunk crashed to
the ground beside Hafiz, pinning his arm to the sand and breaking his leg. Had
the piece fallen several inches more to the left, Hafiz would`ve died. Maybe
that was why the elderly man stopped by once in a while with his bag of oats or
some other staples and a few taka notes. He never stayed long, spoke very
little Bengali. Always laughing, always a mystery.
Nur sits in front of a
dish of flatbread, resting on a makeshift table which is a piece of discarded
plywood his father has sanded, painted and polished. It’s the same teal that
decorates the home, the same teal Hafiz got for free. Nur looks up with his
usual wide grin,
“Good morning little
brother. Will you be having paratha or paratha for your meals today?”
Hafiz has his back to
his boys, cooking their breakfast. He doesn’t turn around when he scolds his
oldest son. “Be thankful you have food, Nur. There are neighbours who may not
have any today, or tomorrow. Don’t make fun. And Azhar, wash up, do your
morning duties, and hurry. This is almost done.”
Both boys answer in
unison, “Yes, Baba.”
The man that owns the
property their home sits on is the same individual who owns the breaking yard
the boys work at. Not totally without empathy, he provides running water and
outhouses. Perhaps it is benevolence that has him supply these accommodations;
it’s also his desire that his employees should be healthy so they don’t miss
work. Hence the covered latrines and cold, life-giving Adams’ ale. Azhar goes
to the sideboard, where water heated by his father steams from an old porcelain
basin that is storied with nicks and scratches. He washes the sleep from his
face, tames the cowlicks on his head, before taking the bowl outdoors to
discard the soapy residue. Setting it on the doorstep, he rushes to the
outhouse to complete his morning ritual. Returning to the kitchen, he finds Nur
bent over a smoking bowl of hot porridge with the grandest of smiles.
“Azhar, we have brown
sugar this morning. Our Baba is good to us”
Hafiz sits at the
opposite end of the table, his own porridge barren of anything sweet. There is
only enough for the boys, he feels. The
used plastic bag that sits on the table holds about three tablespoons of
crumbly dark crystals. Azhar sits at his seat, an upended orange crate padded
with a cushion his mother made.
“Eat up boys. Divide
that between you.”
As Nur digs into the
bag, Azhar watches his father stir his breakfast to cool it, knowing such a
treat is rare.
“What about you Baba?”
Nur halts his
sprinkling to look at his father.
“No, no, I don’t want
any. Take it. And hurry, Ismail will be along soon with the truck to take you
to work.”
Suddenly the kettle’s
steam whistle erupts. Hafiz sits closest to the cook stove and twists about
with his single arm to lift the heated pot to fill the three mugs for tea. When his father turns his back, Azhar hastily
reaches into the bag pulling out almost half of what is left. He stretches to
sprinkle the sugar about his father’s bowl. Nur grins and tosses in what is left
on his spoon. The boys are giggling as Hafiz turns around with the first of the
mugs.
He stops in mid swing when
he sees what they have done. He guesses it to be Azhar, so much like his
mother. He holds his youngest son’s gaze for a moment before looking at Nur.
Mistaking the look on their father’s face, thinking him upset, the boys grow
quiet. Hafiz briefly studies his sons, soon off to do men’s work, still
childlike in their hearts. He yearns for them to run free, not to need their
strong backs to survive. He is overcome with this simple gesture of love; a
glistening tear zigzags down his haggard cheek.
“Thank you, my sons.
You are fine men.”
With everyone shy, the
meal passes in solitude. The boys hastily finish so they can get ready for
work.
Please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks for visiting.
Next week the Scribbler welcomes Elizabeth Housden of the United Kingdom as she talks about Creating Characters and her novel The Gentlemen Go By. She is a published author and former actress.
This sequel
is a bit longer than the first book, but it still has the short easy to read
chapters, with cliff hanger endings, and is considered at a middle grade
reading level.
