Word: boatman
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...want to see the world," I told a boatman in Dubai Creek, and pulled out my map. He waved me on board his little wooden boat with no hesitation. I could have told him I wanted to sail up the river Styx, and he would have agreed. Times are tough in the Persian Gulf emirate, and my Bangladeshi boatman had spent hours chugging up and down the creek looking for a fare. It was his bad luck that his passenger appeared to be crazy...
...boatman shook his head madly. "Not possible," he muttered. With sign language - the universal drawing of the finger across the throat - he made it clear that no matter how much money I was offering (and frankly, it wasn't much), he wouldn't sail into the maze of islands. The World was a pet project of Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, and it was patrolled by security guards in fast boats. Illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and nosy foreign reporters entered at their peril...
With a relieved wave, the boatman let me off at a souk filled with Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos and Yemenis - the immigrants who built Dubai and keep it ticking. But even there the mood was grim. The best-selling items were suitcases. At the rate of 5,000 a day, workers are heading home. Once, the world came to Dubai. Now all that's left of the World in Dubai is hundreds of empty islands...
...terrorists entered Mumbai without detection by taking a sea route. Starting from a base in Gujarat to the north of Mumbai, they made their way to the Gateway of India at Mumbai's southern tip and another landing point on the peninsula 14 nautical miles away; they killed one boatman in the process...
...family shrine.It is hinted that other figures will come to have their portraits hung next to the Ibis in the shrine—Zachary, the light-skinned freedman who rises from carpenter to first-mate on the Ibis during its disastrous journey from America; Jodu, a young boatman who grew up in the household of an aristocratic Frenchman; Neel, a fading maharajah—but by the end of this novel they have only just come together onboard the real ship. The volume’s closing image is of Deeti and Zachary on the deck of the Ibis...