Loneliness of a Mariner

In my younger days, when I was in the Navy, I tried to behave as a gallant officer should. I was always on the lookout for rendering chivalrous services, especially for a hapless damsel or for pretty young things.

Consider this passage:

“..what is a gentleman ? I’ll answer it now: a Royal Naval officer is, in a general sort of way, though, of course, there may be a black sheep among them here and there. I fancy it is just the wide sea and the breath of God’s winds that washes their hearts and blows the bitterness out of their minds and makes them what men ought to be.”

It was written by H. Rider Haggard in King Solomon’s Mines in 1886! He had beautifully captured the underlying character of a navy man a hundred and twenty five years back.

The other day my wife, Sumita beckoned me to the computer.

“Have a look at this.”

I was in for a pleasant surprise. Ryan Skinner, a media fellow whom I had met at Norway had some handsome comments on my writing. He called my blog ‘limpid’. After chatting with me he had deduced that many mariners wrote well because they were lonely at sea.

Ryan had helpfully depicted a serene picture of an anchorage showing a number of vessels in the background. All of them uniformly facing towards the port. The focus was on a lone cargo ship forlornly waiting under the grey skies.

I could imagine there was a lonely second mate doing his 12 to 4 watch on the bridge. We have a private joke amongst Indian watchkeepers. It goes like this –
Who do you generally find moving around in the night?
A Whore, Chôr and 12 to 4.

Chôr, which rhymes with whore, means a thief in Hindi.
Basically it is a mild dig on the second mate who does a 12 to 4 watch for his entire tenure of 6 to 9 months in the ship.

I remember when our ship entered the port I would explore the new place. It was best done jogging on my two feet. It used to give me a lot of pleasure to watch the citizens going about their daily work. I would look at the parents escorting their children to the school. Or a housewife engrossed in buying vegetables, carefully choosing the freshest of the lot which would go on their dinner table later in the day.

I would pass through quiet residential areas, looking safe and secure, and wonder about the people who lived there.

Was I lonely? Yes. Actually I used to consider myself more in the mould of “loneliness of a long-distance runner”. And transformed into a lonely mariner at sea.