Gadani

Where Ships Go To Die

Among ships, this name is only whispered — their word for death: Gadani

Gadani (Pakistan) is the world’s third largest ship breaking yard. It is where old ships, no longer fit for the seas — or deemed so by their owners (perhaps maintenance and by now ongoing repairs harm profits) — are brought for slow slaughter.

Yes, it is possibly true that ship breaking is harder on the underpaid (I’d go so far as to say exploited) ship-breaker than the long-suffering breakee; still, the breaker does return home come evening whereas the breakee lies immobilized and broken all through the night awaiting more hammers and pain come dawn to twist and pry open sores, and to cut new ones.

To come to such an ignoble end.

What thoughts and longings shiver through those massive hulls? What dreams still linger among twisted iron and rusty decks?

Avoided by the living, these enormous, friendless cadavers.

Even birds avoid them now. So often pursued in days now distant by gulls and other airborne creatures, as death makes slow but sure inroads it’s as if the birds know and do not want to venture too near it case it’s catching.

Even the morning dew steers clear of these suffering giants, perhaps in league with a punishing fate, no succor to be granted, no cooling of wounds for these monsters.

Some say they sing.

Songs so deep that only other ships can hear.

Songs of warning, songs of despair.

If there is a ship’s heaven, songs of prayer.

They sing through the night for with the arrival of hammers and oxy-acetylene flames they fall silent: no song can be heard above the constant, feverish onslaught, soon resonating across the entire beach, across the continent, across the seas, heard by some even from the moon.

Many a ship who started its journey in Newcastle, Liverpool, Turku, Bordeaux, Dunkirk, Bremen, Viareggio, Ulsteinvik, Vishakhapatnam, Kolkata, Kochi, or Mumbai end its voyage in Gadani, run at near full speed through shallower and shallower waters to then plow into hungry sand, never to know water again.

Gadani.

© Wolfstuff

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