Once a ship, not always a ship

Some time ago, travelling on the coastal road leading out of Bhavnagar, for instance, I stopped at Alang. The ship breaking yard of Gujarat has long been the object of both controversy and curiosity in India and outside. The controversy has centred mainly around allegations concerning the poor working conditions in which the labourers, mostly cheap migrant workers, involved in the business have to toil. The lack of adequate safeguards and the growth of an industry that encourages the dumping of potentially toxic waste on Indian shores has also drawn condemnation from local critics.

Curiosity, on the other hand, has led to countless photo features and articles on the subject, attracting visitors from far and wide. On the day of my visit, I saw a couple of young westerners trying hard to obtain the necessary permissions to enter.

The effort, if it paid off, was probably worth it. For the yard is an awesome sight to behold. Vast ships as high as tall buildings and as wide standing next to each other on the seashore. Ships of forty to sixty thousand tonnes costing fifty crores and more. ‘Very Large’ carriers and ‘Ultra Large’ carriers — all in various stages of vivisection.

The first thing that hits you is the silence. The silence with which the man-made whales are being stripped, broken up and reduced to scrap. Men, an army of them — over two hundred to a ship — swarm the beach with glistening shoulders and hard hats. They break, they cut, they tie metal ropes to the scrap and pull with creaking cranes and pulleys.

And when the blocks of metal come off the ship, they hunch over them with blow torches, one tube for the Liquified Petroleum Gas and the other for the oxygen — canisters of both piled up around — filling the humid air with an acrid smell. A small ship takes about two months to cut up. A hoarding nearby shows a man in a shirt, trousers and a hard hat playing with his son. ‘Mere Babuji Alang Ustad’, says the caption.

While the scrap is used to make steel rods and other products, the rest of the disemboweled vessel finds its way to large, open shop cum godowns that line the way to the shore. The innards of the ship are items of sale. The machinery: the pipes, the chains, the motors, the engines, etc, lie piled up in open sheds. Displaced. Disabled till someone can find a use for a part. More evocative, however, and a sight that catches you completely unawares, is the long line of stalls that sells the other stuff. The software, not the hardware. The stuff that makes human existence possible and bearable on a ship out at sea.

The most visible commodity are the doors. There are hundreds and hundreds of doors. Narrow doors, wide doors, wooden doors, red doors, doors with round and diamond shaped windows cut into them. Then there are chairs, swivel, straight backed, padded and coated with maroon and gold covers. There are wash basins and refrigerators, washing machines and lockers, cupboards and mattresses. From a cardboard box, a framed Gauguin reproduction peeks out from next to a desolate dart board.

In one shop, a whole kitchen with its array of giant steel juicers, mixers, hot plates, ovens and counters gleam mutely at the stray visitor. In another, a dozen pale blue old-fashioned telephones with rotary dials sit around a table. Fine hotels, I am informed accurately or inaccurately by an eager bystander, visit the stores to snap up the mounds of China and glassware. There are buyers galore, I assume, also for the rows and rows of clocks, table fans and television sets. In one corner, somebody has made a display of the items taken off the walls. There are two framed copies of the Safety and Quality Policy of the Southern Ship Management, a plaque announcing that the ‘Port of Kitakyushu Point Lisas welcomes the MV Loa’, another from the Port of New Orleans and a sign ordering in big black letters: LIGHTS OFF. And in the last store, next to mountains of orange safety floats, ropes and cans of paint, are two deck chairs slung with striped blue and yellow cloth. Throwaway luxury in the middle of nowhere.