Dying with the Indus Queen
25 September 2015
‘I am now about to die.’ (Main hun murn vala aan.) Qadir Buksh who, more than two decades ago, would pronounce his name Bushk, said in a wheezing squeaky voice. It was not a sad plaint; it was a statement of an imminent event. It was as if one would squint skyward on a dull day and say, ‘It’s about to rain.’
Qadir’s utterance destroyed me inside. I had come to talk to him of days gone by; of the glory days of the Indus Queen when he captained that beautiful river boat. I had wanted to tell him of the lie I had then told knowing full well he would never read the piece I would write. I had imagined we would together remember those far off days and laugh. And perhaps even shed a tear or two at the fate of the Queen. In my mind’s eye I saw the man still as he was then in his forties with the same thick mop of tousled black hair and a heavy walrus moustache in his coloured laacha and white kurta. On his feet he had finely worked khussas that were all the worse for wear.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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‘Guard knows Batter!’
14 October 2013
Four years ago I went looking for the ferry Shireen Pasha, the film maker, had used in her excellent documentary Before it is too Late. I found it plying between Mithankot and Chachran in southern Punjab. But when my story was published in Herald, a friend called to say (incorrectly) that Pasha’s ferry worked somewhere in Sindh. And so, in December 1994 when I was in Sanghar two friends and I decided one morning to go ferry hunting. That story was never written, but recently as friend Raheal Siddiqui drove me over the Moro bridge, it all came back. And since it is not time-barred it needs be told.
Leaving Sanghar we made for the National Highway so as to be as close to the Indus as possible. Driving north, we stopped at tea stalls to ask about the ferry. Nobody had ever heard of it. We drove through village after nondescript village, even side tracking towards the river. But blanks were all we turned up.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Ferry Tale
22 July 2013
The lettering on the prow declares her to be the Indus Queen, and she certainly has known better days. But now, well into her fifties, she seems not to have very long to live. One day, not far in the future, the bridge spanning the great width of the Indus flood plain between Mithankot and Khanpur in southern Punjab will be built. Then she will either be beached for the last time to rot away, smothered by cat tails and reeds as has been the fate of at least two other steamers on the Indus, or they’ll come with their blow torches, crow bars and sledge hammers to break her up and cart her off to some foundry or other.
Then commuters will not be crowding the sandy, sun-baked banks of the Indus attracted by the pounding of her engines as she comes around the island where the grass grows tall. Then the clanging of her brass bell will resound no more. Then, barely a thousand metres south of where she now berths, commuters will be zooming across the Indus over the new bridge in less than ten minutes as opposed to her unhurried one hour. After almost six decades the Indus Queen will finally have become redundant.
Read more »Labels: Ferry, Prisoner on a Bus: Travels Through Pakistan, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:00,
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