The Business

I invited Pete Wells back to my place.  He's a research analyst and an old pal/lover, still a good-time guy and up for the occasional friendly fuck, though he is engaged to some lucky lass in Marin and so not for much longer.  We made hazy, stoned, well-tempered love to Glen Gould playing J. S. Bach, listening to the man humming and singing along.

I slept well, apart from a weird dream about Mike Daniels searching my garden for his missing teeth.

The next morning, with Pete already gone and me both a little bleary and not particularly well rested, I repacked my bags — with DKNY, mostly — and took the Buick back to meet its buddies at San Francisco International's Alamo, then it was a JAL 747-400 to Tokyo via Hawaii (twenty minutes late leaving due to two tardy suits; I joined in the Mean Group Stare when they finally stumbled into First trying not to look sheepish and studiously avoiding everybody's eyes.  Sushi very good.  Played both Garbage albums, separated by Mado

I had a feeling that whatever passport I chose for Karachi it would be the wrong one, but I decided on the British one and was pleasantly surprised: whisked through.  The place was packed, the air was thick with a medley of smells, the humidity was stifling and the lighting in the arrivals hall was terrible.  Over the crowds I spotted a board being held up with a rough approximation of my name on it.  I hadn't been able to find a trolley so I held my suit carrier out in front of me and used it to work open a path in the right direction.

'Mrs Telman!' said the young Pakistani man holding the sign up. 'I am Mo Meridalawah.  Very pleased to meet you!'

'It's Ms Telman, but thank you.  How do you do.'

'Very well, thank you.  Let me…' He took my bags off me. 'Follow me, please!  This way.  Out of the way there, coarse fellow!'

No, really, he did.

Hiltonised overnight, and restless, I got up, kicked the previous day's newspapers out of the way, booted the ThinkPad and spent some time on a few techy-oriented news groups before going back to more disturbed sleep.  Mo Meridalawah reappeared mid-morning and drove me back to the airport through some of the most chaotic traffic I had ever seen.  It had been just as bad the evening before but I had assumed then it was rush-hour.

There was no such excuse now, and it was even more terrifying in daylight; unbelievable numbers of bicycles, trucks belching black diesel fumes, garish buses, motorised trikes and cars driven seemingly at random in any direction as long as it was either directly across our path or on a collision course.  Mo Meridalawah waved his hands about and chattered ceaselessly about his family, cricket and the incompetence of his fellow road users.  Karachi airport was almost a relief.

Yet another helicopter: one of those ancient, tall Sikorskys with the engine in the bulbous nose and the flight deck up a ladder.  The cabin was actually quite comfortably kitted out, but it all looked worryingly old-fashioned and well worn.  Mo Meridalawah waved goodbye from the tarmac with a white handkerchief as though he for one never expected to see me again.  We chopped out over the city, across dense green mangrove swamps, along the coast and then across the lines of surf and out over the Arabian Sea.

The Lorenzo Uffizi had been a cruise ship for nearly thirty years; before that it had been one of the last transatlantic liners.  Now it was out of date, its powerful but old engines were hopelessly inefficient and the vessel as a whole was just too old to refit again economically.  It was only worth scrapping, and it was to complete that process that it had come here from the yard in Genoa where its more valuable and salvageable fittings had been removed.

Sonmiani Bay is where a lot of the world's ships end up.  The broad beach slopes smoothly into the sea, so that the vessels can be aimed at the sands, put to full speed ahead and then just run aground.  On the vast beach there's plenty of room for whole fleets of obsolete ships, and in the countryside around there are hordes of impoverished people willing to work for a pittance, cutting the ships up with torches, attaching chains and hawsers to sections of hull and then — if they're quick enough — getting out the way in time when the giant winches further up the shore haul the pieces of ship off.  More cutting, more dragging by winches, then the bits are craned on to rail flatcars and hauled to a quay side thirty miles away, where the scrap is loaded aboard ships bound for anyone of a dozen steel mills throughout the world.

I had heard of Sonmiani Bay, I had read about it in a magazine twenty years earlier and just a couple of years ago I'd seen some TV footage, but I'd never been there.  Now I was going to get to see it first hand, and I'd be arriving by ship.  Tommy Cholongai was a Level One exec who could fairly be described as a shipping magnate.  The first time I'd used this phrase in front of Luce she'd asked, did that make him anything like a fridge magnate.  Normally I'd have said something, but as I recall I'd just asked her if she was still looking for Mr Ca

The Lorenzo Uffizi was still an impressive sight.  It was about fifty klicks offshore, lying still in the water a few hundred metres from the comparatively toy-like shape of Mr Cholongai's own motor yacht.  We circled the liner, level with its two tall fu

The Sikorsky landed on the broad curve of a stern tier still marked out for deck games.  One of Cholongai's assistants, a small Thai called Pran whom I vaguely knew from a company conference a few years earlier, slid the helicopter's door open for me and mouthed a welcome over the scream of the engine.

'I have wanted to do this for years,' Tommy Cholongai said. 'Captain, with your permission?'

'Certainly, Mr Cholongai.'

Cholongai took hold of the brass handle and, with a big grin on his face, moved the bridge telegraph indicator all the way down to the Full Ahead position.  The telegraph made the appropriate ringing, chiming noises.  He brought it back to All Stop to the sound of more bells, and then set it back to Full Ahead again and left it there.  The rest of us — including the Lorenzo Uffizi's captain and first officer and the local pilot as well as Cholongai's personal staff — looked on.  A couple of Cholongai's PAs started clapping enthusiastically, but he smiled modestly and waved them to be silent.

Beneath our feet, the ship began to shudder as the engines spun up to speed.  Mr Cholongai stepped to the ship's wheel, followed by the rest of us.  The wheel was a good metre across, each handle tipped with brass.  When the ship had some way on her, moving steadily across the gentle swell and still slowly gathering speed, Cholongai asked the pilot for the heading and then spun the wheel, watching the compass display in its overhead bi