Who are these people?
Southern Ocean Series, Chapter: 3
30’s Latitude: Impressions of fellow passengers
As things stood when we sailed out of Port Louis, I was only familiar with two other people in the entire ship – the two people from my own institute. I knew next to nothing about the other passengers on the ship – be it the Indian Scientific contingent or the Russian Officers and crew.
There were 23 Indians in all – 7 women and 16 men, which included two service engineers for all our equipment, plus the extremely hardworking deck hand, cook and cook’s assistant. I spent most of the first week trying to learn the names – particularly of the guys. Terrible as I am with names and faces – I was quiet certain that at least 4 of them were impossible to tell apart. Within a week of starting our work in full swing, I had reversed my opinion altogether. Aside from being very different from each other, the men were all amicable, gallant and a whole lot of fun!
The Russians, meanwhile, were a polite and jolly lot who mostly kept to themselves. On quiet nights, when the ship was stationary for scientific sampling, many of them would come out with their fishing poles to catch calamari (squids are friggin’ huge in this part of the world). The contest between the chief cook and the captain to see who caught more calamaris was no secret. Not surprisingly, many of them were big fans of hindi movies – and when asked who their favorite actor was, most of them would pipe “Raj Kapoor!”
The women on this ship were something of a conundrum – particularly the Indians. I’m not trying to defame my own kind, but I’ve never been with a group of more than 5 women below 30 in a confined area for such a long time without one or more of the following creep into the group dynamic – jealousy, annoyance, crankiness, touchiness, spite etc. (I myself have never shied away from any of this when the occasion called for it. No sir!) And of course, where there are girls forming cliques, the men must take sides. But, this time around, all seven of us got along ridiculously well! Any crankiness was forgotten within a day – and coming to think of it, this is probably what made the trip as breezy and memorable as it was. I remember some days further into the trip when we girls would just hole up in one of our tiny cabins watching Love Actually or some (other) sappy chick-flick and sigh away the time.
The Russian women were something else altogether. For starts, I’d never seen women crew members on ships before. On this ship, all housekeeping staff were of women. One of the stewards, Larissa was so old and so bossy, she constantly reminded me of my grandmother (except for the smoking, of course). Our work was sometimes so hectic that we would barely have time to put or cabins right and there would be piles of wet clothes just lying in a corner – messing up the carpet. Larissa didn’t find it necessary to be polite to us, in matters of cleanliness. Thankfully, her admonishments about the state of our cabins mostly went over our heads because they were in fluent Russian. I remember this one morning, though when me and El got a good telling-off. We had worked all through the very cold night and had just dumped our soaking wet Helly-Hansen suits on the sofa and crashed in bed. We awoke to Larissa vaccuming and muttering away. When she was done and we had abandoned hope of going back to sleep, she scolded us some more, in Russian, before yelling “TWO WOMENS!” in English and gesturing angrily at our cabin. I think what she meant was “I’ve never seen two women live like such big slobs before!” It was at times like this that Larissa reminded me most of my grandmother. Poor as her English was, Larissa was a big fan of Hindi movies and music. One of the guys once told me, he woke up one morning to hear Larissa vacuuming his cabin, dancing to and singing “Murr-murr-ke na dake, murr-murr-ke!”*
As we were all getting comfortable with each other and the ship, there was a fairly dramatic change taking place outside, as we inched closer to the . The sky and air that had been clear when we set out had become a dreary gray, within the first 10 days. We would frequently sail into thick fogs, which limited our visibility greatly. The winds got stronger and the air cold, but the sea was still calm, in retrospect. We spotted some of our first whales of this trip in those first 10 days, but thanks to the fog, we lost sight of them almost as soon as we they were spotted.
—————————————————————————————————————————————
* To wake up in a Russian ship in the middle of the Antarctic Ocean, with a 70-something year old Russian woman vacuuming the floor and singing an old Raj Kapoor song – I guess things couldn’t get more random than this.
