Velociworld

Waterfront Tales: the Indians

I used to get one container ship a week from the Indians, and one breakbulk ship a month. Containerships are great. In and out in eight hours, the cranes can move 40 or 50 containers an hour. No chance for the crew to even go ashore, and contract cruel diseases. The Life at Sea ain't what it used to be, poor lads.

The Indians stuffed 20 foot containers with manhole covers. That is all they shipped. They would cram 50,000 pounds of manhole covers in these containers, because you couldn't put 100,000 pounds in a 40 foot container. No crane could lift it, no truck pull it. As the covers were on wood pallets, USDA always wanted to inspect them for boreworms, and such, Indian wood being notorious for such parasites.

I used to have a friend, a USDA inspector, black guy named Joe, who was the salt of the earth. But he would call me up and chew my ass. Every time he opened a manhole container they were wedged in such that about 3,000 pounds of manhole covers would pour out, and damned near kill him. Just a fucking eight foot tall cascade of manhole covers, lethal as holy hell.

"Ha ha ha," I would say. "You should leave my cargo alone, Joe." He did not share my sense of the absurd, unfortunately.

The breakbulk ships were better. Filled with jute carpet backing for the mills in Dalton, and steel pipe for the mini-mills in Birmingham. Breakbulk is almost a thing of the past, except for the huge stuff like jute that can't fit in a container, and bulk product like grain or petroleum. The bulk ships would stay for three or four days, and you could get to know the captains. As I've said before, the Sikhs traveled alone, and I had to conjure parties with American girls for them. The Hindus generally traveled with their wives, and so you could interface with them more.

Indians are the greatest, most polite, peoples on the earth. They took the best of the colonial Raj, the British sense of correctness, and eschewed the baser instincts. Of course, I must confess the Indian class system leaves the British behind. Even the Brits don't have Untouchables. But that is a class nuance I never really understood, and the Untouchables prepared the food, so there you have it.

Wonderful folk. Lavishers of gifts. Scotch, saris, shoes, sandals. There is nothing more eye-opening than a breakfast of curry eggs at 4 am too, by the way. Especially if you crack the Johnny Walker Black upon docking at 3 am. Glorious.

Jute. Pipe. Manhole covers. Old School. Now they are famous for tech work, and customer service centers. Which is great, because they used to have to pack 50 people on a vessel to feed them. So the next time you are forced to ask "How's the Black Hole?" as you are waiting for an answer to why your Windows crashed, remember: they could have been packing jute.