Details of Biswajit Basu’s first ship posting are
here. In this post, we meet two of his first crew mates. By Biswajit Basu:
One more thing that might interest you of my first voyage is that our Chief Officer was Norman Moses Sassoon. He is from the famous Sassoon family who were the Rothschilds of Bombay and a dock remains named after the family in Colaba to this day.
On the second day, I woke up to the knock of the Deck Serang (head of the Deck crew) who announced "Bada Malim saab aapko yaad kiya hai" (Bada Malim saab is the Chief Officer). Wondering why the C/O would be remembering me, I replied "Saab ko thank you bol dena". Spluttering, the Serang explained that this was a polite way for a senior officer to summon a junior. It was Sassoon wanting to meet me to get to know me. He turned out to be a really wonderful person. Tragically l, he would lose his brother, Flt Lt. Lloyd Moses Sassoon in the 1971 Bangladesh War (he was a crack Canberra pilot).
By the way, the person peering into the radar the previous evening during departure at Madras was the Third Officer, Deepak Malhotra who became a great friend and lives in Bangalore now with his lovely wife, June and two sons. He was the smarty who enabled the Russian Inspector in Odessa to declare our ship had to be disinfected because of the maggots in the rawhide which is how we got a lovely winter vacation in Odessa! 😊
(Blogger Note: You can read about the Odessa anecdote here)
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