The Arctic Stewardess
The ship that sailed through ice, and the caretaker who humored her oddball passengers.
‘We were the first croose to go through Northwest passage, you know? Iceberg everywhere. Like Tit-aanic.’
Mishka was flipping pancakes on the little earthen stove in the corner of the tin shelter. It was dusk. Far away, the jagged Shivalik hills stood like a tall black wall against the indigo sky, and the tourist town of Nainital glittered like a jewel-encrusted mountain. Miles away from that dazzle and shine, enveloped in foliage, we were sitting in the glow of the stove and a single dim lantern, preparing for a rare pancake-and-burger party: Mishka had some old mayonnaise she wanted to use before it went bad, so earlier that day my brother and I got some buns and ketchup from the little cluster of shops downhill.
‘Icebergs sound scary.’
‘No. Nooooo,’ Mishka said, in her thick Eastern-European accent. There was everything on croose, you know? Helicopter, life-boat. Ice-breaker too: red ships, streaming ahead us. I also saw polar bear.’
Slowly, pancakes began stacking up beside the stove. They looked disappointing. I had never had pancakes before, and I was expecting them to look like something out of a Hollywood breakfast scene: stacks of fluffy brown discs topped with a small cube of butter drowning in its own melt. Mishka’s pancakes, on the other hand, looked like slightly leavened chapatis—bland, colorless, uninspiring.
‘It was beautiful. Everything white and blue: blue sky, blue iceberg, white clouds and white sheet of ice on blue ocean, as far as eye can see. Too beautiful to remain on croose to experience all that, you know. I had to throw tantrum to captain to let me out.’
My brother, who’d been slicing onions for the burgers, stopped, wiped his tears, and asked: ‘Let you out where?’
‘We were near island. They were flying out passengers for a while, and they wanted to fly some staff to island too. Chefs, two officers. They never even thought of cleaners and caretakers. I go to captain office, eleventh storey. I told him, “I don’t even haf single strike on me. I am good worker. I talk to crazies without losing cool, change bedsheets full of shit. I spend my night in window-less bunk at the bottom of ship. I deserve fresh air!” He let me go.’
‘He could have fired you.’
‘You shouldn’t be rude. But sometimes you haf to take risk and be a beetch to get what you deserve. I was good worker. He knew that.’
We heard some loud grunts and stopped talking, and when the grunts faded away, Mishka said, ‘Barking deer, no worries.’ She had flipped and stacked her last pancake and signaled me to hand over my plate of potatoes. I was almost done peeling them. She never bothered with peeling the remaining, mashing them all up for the patties.
‘You mentioned talking to crazies.’
‘Yes, all kind of crazy people on croose ship. They vomit and shit on bedsheet, clog toilet, and you have to still be polite. But such people are usually drunk. It is sober ones you have to…dread. Like English lady with red sock puppet.’
‘Yes, what about that?’ my brother asked, amused and curious.
‘If I talk directly to her, she say talk to puppet first. So I talk to puppet first, then puppet talk to her, then she talk to puppet, then puppet talk to me. Crazy beetch.’
The sound of patties frizzling in oil made my stomach growl. It had been a long day: collecting and hauling sacks upon sacks of dried leaves and pine needles from the forest; hauling crates upon crates of dried, dead oak that Nalin, Mishka’s husband, had been chopping all morning; washing the pillow cases, blankets and bedsheets, working the bean patch, then walking the long trail down to the motor road to get the ketchup and buns and then hiking all the way back up again.
I needed to stretch my legs. I stepped out of the lantern’s dim halo and into the darkness. I stretched my arms and looked above. The sky was crammed with stars. Deep in the forest, an owl hooted, invisible but for its eyes, two fierce beads of light penetrating the thick foliage, keeping watch.
I turned back to look at Mishka’s kitchen: a tin roof propped up by four thin pillars of wood. Her face was lit up by the stove’s fitful fire, which threw huge shadows of her head on the retaining wall, to which Nalin had screwed a spice-rack. That, the stove, a small table and a few wooden stools was all that was beneath that tin roof. Along the ridge above, I saw a couple flashes of torchlight. Nalin spent some time up there before dinner, smoking in peace beneath the stars as he took in the quiet, glimmering Nainital and the surrounding hills.
I saw Mishka walk around and arrange the food on the table: pancakes, mayonnaise, ketchup, a plate of onions, another plate of patties and the packets of buns. She put a huge sooty kettle on the empty stove and then stepped out of the kitchen, vanishing in the darkness until her smartphone glowed: she was calling her husband down for dinner. Up along the ridge, Nalin’s torchlight began flashing among the pines again. Then her dog began barking from their mud hut a few paces away and she walked back into the lantern’s dim light and out again, her footsteps fading into silence for a moment before I heard her faint voice again, yelling at Tiku to shut up and that there was no one around and that he was a good boy. She walked into the light again and I realized what an odd sight all of this was: this middle-aged Slav woman, who, after her years of sailing around the world, did not return to the comfort of her family and hometown, deciding instead to make the alien, faraway, leopard-infested wilderness of the lower Himalayas her home.
She had shown me some photographs earlier—photographs of her adventures around the world: her on the cruise, turned out like a 50s American housewife—short-haired, aproned, smiling; her lounging in a seaside hammock somewhere in South-East Asia; standing beneath a statue of Eva Peron in Buenos Aires; holding a spotless orange on a street in Spain; wetting her feet at a beach in South Africa, and looking out at the wide frigid vistas of the Arctic, of course. Hers was a novel method of guerilla tourism: once the ship docked at a port city, she spent all her wages on taxi fares: zooming from monument to monument, clicking as many pictures as she could in a couple of days before the ship sailed on again. She did not purchase souvenirs.
Hailing from a remote town in erstwhile Yugoslavia, she had no taste for storytelling or slow travel. All those unusual encounters along the way held no meaning for her. It was I who was the richer for travelling through her memories, asking her questions on every leg of her journey, making her relive moments which for her were nothing more than instances of discomfort she had overcome and forgotten about.
‘Malay, boorgers are ready!’ she yelled out, as Nalin walked into the light and sat on a wooden stool. I started walking towards the kitchen, curious what my first pancake would taste like.