Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

Mohit Kadir walked lightly, cheerfully. He smiled at the murky sunrise; glanced affectionately at poisonously bright chemicals in the runoff ditches. A day or two longer as a gang laborer, and then he was out, advancing to apprentice cutter — a promotion so difficult and so rare that strangers had come up and murmured their envious congratulations. Today, Mohit felt like he could haul a ton of steel singlehanded and go back for more.

The foreman, Syed Abdul Farid, yawned at his door.

“As-salaamu alaykum, Mohit.” He had gray hair and the solid build of a more-than-adequate diet. “You appear happy this morning.”

“Yes, saheb.” Mohit felt himself grinning. “A fine day.”

They walked through the slum, collecting other members of the crew. Most lived together, six or seven men in scavenged huts. All came from the same town, Ghorarchar, in the far north of Bangladesh, a region of famine and desperate poverty. Mohit nodded greetings.

“Kamon achhen?”

“Bhalo achhi.”

The men wore similar lungis and cheap shirts, the thin garments uniformly tattered and stained, little more than rags. Their faces were gaunt, their arms thin to emaciation despite the appallingly heavy labor of their days. And they knew they were the lucky ones, the chosen. Ghorarchar offered nothing but slow starvation. Here on the long, trampled beach of Chittagong, they could earn sixty takas a day breaking ships, and be glad for it.

The ships! Five years since Mohit first saw them, colossal hulks of rust and steel, driven onto the strand and looming like mountains overhead. Half-dismembered, in the mist and rain of the monsoons, the dead ships seemed too massive, too huge to have ever been built by men. But now they were scrap, worth nothing but their metal, and other men were slowly taking them apart. For ten kilometers up and down the beach they sat one by the next, thirty at a time, slowly cut down with hand torches and carried away by barefoot gangs.

“How do you feel, Mohit?” Farid said as they crossed the frontage road, a brief pleasure of asphalt before their feet sank back into endless mud.

“Feel, bhaiya?” Mohit could be more familiar now, but Farid was still fifteen years older, and his boss.

“I’ll be sorry to lose you, my best of workers.”

“I will not lie.” Mohit raised his eyes to the hull before them, leaning his head so far back, to see the top of the forepeak, that he stopped walking. “Once I’m up there, my only memories will be of my friends. I am happy to leave this behind.”

“Cutting is dangerous work.”

Mohit laughed. Five years he had worked like a Gulf-states slave; five years he had painstakingly put aside fifteen takas a day; five years he had deprived himself of the occasional glass of tari, or carrom wager, or bit of meat. He had saved 25,000 takas, a fortune by anyone’s standards, all to buy his way into a cutter’s crew. Tomorrow he would be free of the mud, slung high among the beams and steel, with a torch, a tolerable wage — and a better life.

“Pay close attention to Hasan.” Farid was still in his role, father-figure to the young men of Ghorarchar. “He has agreed to take you as his apprentice, and he will teach, but you must learn. Remember, you want to drop the plates onto the beach — not onto your head.”

“Nor yours.”

Mohit, orphaned at three years old, could not say he’d been a lucky child. But unlike so many other men in Bhatiary, he did not have to send money home to his family, for he had none. As a boy he had not a single toy; as a youth he survived by catching small fish from the rice paddies. Conditions that destroyed so many others had somehow granted him, instead, a determination to better himself. Today he was almost there. He had a plan: the cutter’s job would let him save real money. Someday, by the will of God, he would have enough to buy a truck! — and then he would be a rich man, an independent operator ferrying scrap to the rolling mills. His cab would have the finest decorations, the best paint, the most brilliant chrome. Perhaps even... a house of his own. Such dreams were painful, and Mohit did not let himself imagine them often; but they drove him all the same.

Rain spattered lightly, pock-pock on the ship’s hull, a vast, riveted wall before them. The vessel had been driven aground three weeks earlier, and the scavenging crews were just finishing the easy salvage — furniture and fittings and anything loose they could find inside.

“Cables,” said Farid, and a sigh rustled through the men. Hauling the monstrously heavy steel plates, nearly a metric ton on fifteen shoulders, was hard enough. Dragging the metal hawsers up the beach, one man every four meters along the cables — which could be a kilometer long — was agony, as the sharp, pointy bits of galvanized wire shredded their skin.

“Soonest started, soonest done.” Farid began to chivvy them into a line, beginning where the first cable descended from far above, so distant it disappeared threadlike into the mist.