Companion post to My First Sea Voyage
It was in the year 1957, that the Basu family travelled back home to India after two years in UK. The trip was seemingly not as memorable as their earlier voyage. Yet, it too offers some snippets of history.
The return trip was from Liverpool to Bombay on the SS Circassia, Anchor Lines.
In 1957, Monisha Choudhury was four years old. She vaguely remembers a washbasin in the cabin, perhaps like this B-deck stateroom?
“I remember the ship rolling and pitching and me puking in the wash basin in every room. Fish were slithering on the deck where chairs and tables were chained to the floor. We could see the water level above our round port windows.”
She also remembers it being extremely cold on the deck.
Biswajit Basu, age 9 years old at that time, recollects:
“The trip back on the Circassia was literally nothing to write home about. The ship was more luxurious than the Batory...
(Blogger note: And indeed the Circassia was a very luxurious ship!)
...but the voyage was so unexciting that I cannot even remember where and if we stopped to refuel. My guess is Cape Town but Indians would not be free to go ashore in view of their abominable policy of apartheid. We once stopped at Port Elizabeth to drop a sick sailor in 1970 from the Jalavijaya. He was picked up by a launch. It was a slanging match of vilest proportions for the period we took to drop the sailor. The white S. African community were a nasty lot. I wonder how they ever imagined that could survive in the new world. It was the brilliance of Nelson Mandela from going the India way with Partition. He had the charisma to hold the country together.”
(Picture credits to this website.)
Very nicely written...👌👌👌
ReplyDelete