Alang, India
September 1, 2004
The annoying noise of the rooster next door roused Mandhatri, pulling him from his restful sleep. “Work,” he mumbled, pushing the sheets and his wife away as he stumbled to his feet.
“Mandhatri, it’s not even light outside,” his wife said softly. He turned back to see her beckoning him back towards the thrown together cot, barely able to hold both of them in the tiny ramshackle room.
Keshini threw a hard bargain, but he knew he couldn’t risk his job for a few more minutes of napping. “Avinash needs to be fed,” he told her. “I bought some milk yesterday, make sure to make it last for the week.”
His wife pouted, and Mandhatri sighed before he walked into the other room. Their infant son Avinash was asleep, thank the Gods. Maybe Keshini could sleep a few minutes longer. As he pulled on his clothes he watched the boy with love, wondering if he would become a doctor or a law maker one day, instead of staying in Alang and throwing his life away to the ships.
He hurried outside to the growing mass of workers on their way to the beach. Mandhatri untied his bicycle from a tree and hopped on it, pedaling furiously, trying to beat the people coming down from the hills. It was always best to try and get a safe spot instead of being stuck cutting beams and getting hit by fumes from cutting steel and other metals.
“Srinivasan!”
Looking around, Mandhatri grinned when he saw the other bicycle riding along side of him carrying his friend Rupin.
“You need to look where you are going there,” Rupin reminded him, chuckling as he swerved to avoid a woman carrying a jug of water. “Has Shyam got you cutting beams again? He says he is going to put me in charge of the old boat at yard 19. Give me and Parvati a few more rupees a month, some more food on the table.”
“Good for you,” Mandhatri said in a happy voice, even though he was faking it. He hated Shyam for getting a promotion to being a crew leader. It meant more money, however small the amount. “He hasn’t given me exact orders. I just do whatever I do.”
Rupin nodded, swerving again to avoid pedestrians. “Well, you will get something good sooner or later. How are Keshini and Avinash doing? Parvati has been sick for the past week and they haven’t seen each other.”
“Fine, fine.”
“That’s good. Parvati has been throwing her stomach up all week. I think it is morning sickness, but she denies being pregnant.”
“Maybe she really is sick.”
“I can’t take her to the doctor. I don’t have enough money after paying the rent. If it comes to it I can send her back to Hyderabad and my mother. She might know what to do in this situation.”
They were silent all the way down to the start of the beach, tying up their bicycles to old posts and left over steel before hurrying to sign in and find their gear.
“Boys, we have trouble today,” Shyam, the old manager for the Choudry Plots told them as they walked into the pieced together trash and steel that was the office. “Those green people are out there, off the beach. Don’t talk to them, don’t let them take pictures or film of you. We don’t need bad publicity.”
“Do you mean Greenpeace?” Mandhatri asked.
Shyam threw up his hands. “I don’t care who they are, just don’t talk to them!” The man shoved them out as more workers came in. “Go get to work. Plot eighteen is getting a new victim at midday, go do something constructive until then.”
Their blowtorches were where they left them, in an old cubby made from steel and scrap. “Another day on the beach,” Rupin noted. Plot nineteen held what was left of a cruise liner, about half of it left after five weeks of daily beatings and burnings. Mandhatri remembered the old captain saying in English, “Such a pretty old boat,” as he arrived on the shore in a lifeboat before leaving the city.
“You working for me today?” Raj was the crew leader who Rupin was supposedly the replacement for. Mandhatri had heard he was going to New Delhi to take over his family’s shop with his wife Padma and their nine children. When the two young men nodded, he grumbled under his breath. “Go with Hiranya and cut out the engines. You two are working the beaching today?”
“Or so Shyam tells us,” Mandhatri told the man.
Raj didn’t reply before he scuttled off, gripping his old clipboard in his hands.
A few minutes of creative climbing and clambering later, they were in the dark reaches of the engine room of the ‘Ambassador I’ with their counterpart Hiranya, a tall lanky man from Punjab with a stern dislike of the sunlight.
He didn’t have to receive orders to get to work, cutting the old pipes leading to the boilers and old propulsion lines from the turbines. From years of work since he was a boy he knew the workings of these boats, and Mandhatri enjoyed quizzing himself while he took everything apart. Engines were among his favorites.
“What is this?” he muttered to himself, tapping on a pipe with his torch. “Ah, yes. Steam vent leading to the smokestack.” Mandhatri averted his eyes as the flame roared to life, cutting the metal cleanly and making it clang to the floor.
There was a loud metallic clanging above him, followed by a crash as a huge chunk of steel fell through the ceiling into the engine room. Rupin cried out, jumping out of the way before it crashing onto him, but Hiranya wasn’t as lucky. The man was crushed beneath the piece of metal, another casualty of life as a ship breaker.
Rupin hurried forward, but knew there was nothing he could do to help Hiranya. Someone would have to tell his wife that he had succumbed to Alang’s beaches, like hundreds of others. “Stupid idiots!” he screamed through the hole in the ceiling as people clambered from the decks above to look.
As Mandhatri hurried forward to help Rupin remove the steel from Hiranya’s body, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye that did not seem to belong. A curved blue and green object sat inside one of the boilers, just inside an old rusted grate that allowed viewing of the fire inside.
“What is that?” he whispered, transfixed. Hiranya didn’t need help from them, he needed someone to scrape his body from the floor. Whatever was inside the boiler was more important. Maybe it was a giant remnant of years of fires that had become a great jewel, something that could save his family from life in Alang.
The door swung open easily, and Mandhatri stuck his head in. A fire had not burned there for weeks, and the metal was cool to the touch. It was not a jewel he had seen, or anything that would bring him much money. It was just a giant egg. A giant blue and green egg sitting inside the boiler.
“Mandhatri, what are you looking at?” Rupin asked him, annoyed.
“Nothing, just something peculiar inside the boiler.”
The other man growled and walked over, pushing Mandhatri aside so that he could see. “My Gods, that is an egg! A giant egg!” Rupin tried to push him out of the way, but Mandhatri wouldn’t budge, instead grabbing the egg and pulling it through the grate.
“Help me,” Mandhatri said as it began to weigh at his arms. Rupin finally gave in and helped him move the egg to the ground. They both panted, their arms strained from the weight of it. “That egg is heavy!”
Rupin leaned against the wall, bracing his hands on the old metal. “That thing is not from India,” he managed to say. “What are you going to do with it? It would make a mighty fine meal.”
“I’m not going to eat it,” Mandhatri snapped. “But I am going to take it home. It does not belong here, it’ll break if it stays here much longer.”
“How are you going to do that?”
That made Mandhatri think. “I am we will be missing the beaching of that boat,” he said. “That is the only time where almost everyone will be preoccupied. Shyam and Raj will not notice us not being there. We’ll take the egg to my house in the basket of my bicycle. It’s the only plan I’ve got.”
To be continued....