It was September 1993 when I first went poking about the abandoned ferry boat at the Ghazi Ghat bridge, on the mighty Sindhu River, between Muzaffargarh in the east and Dera Ghazi Khan on the other side.

A little aft of amidships was a timber structure with Venetian blinds on its windows. The early morning filtered in through the wooden blinds, casting a beautiful zebra pattern on the interior. Cobwebs danced in this magical chiaroscuro. The solitary sofa was without its upholstery, with jute coir and rusting springs uninviting in the timber frame. Once it would have been a comfortable cabin, perhaps for the captain of the ship.

Thinking I was backing into the timber wall of the cabin to get a good frame for my camera, I was set upon by scores of yellow wasps into whose nest I had stuck my head. My photo session came to a swift and painful end as I headed back for Dera Ghazi Khan to get an antihistamine shot and sleep for twelve hours.

The magic of the relentless neglect and the completeness of the hulk, resting in the silt of the left bank of the river, had caught me and I returned, seven years later, to photograph it in detail. Those were the days of the film camera and, somewhere in my collection, I have 35mm transparencies of the 60-odd metre-long steel-hulled boat.

In the 2000 visit, everything except the engines was there. If the 1993 memory serves, there were then also two marine diesel engines manufactured by Gleniffer, the well-known Glaswegian firm of engineers. The capstans, the anchors and chains and another machine — a combination of one large and two smaller wheels, whose purpose I could not understand — were all there. This last had the lettering ‘Hamilton’s Windsor Iron Works Liverpool 1868’. The beautiful steel wheel, in the forward part of the ship, was something I would have happily filched.

A paean for an abandoned ferry boat at the Ghazi Ghat bridge on the mighty Sindhu

In the year 2000, it still had the remnants of a toilet with the bowl moved out of its housing, but otherwise undamaged. Above the tin roof of the captain’s cabin was another timber structure, with remnants of gauze to keep insects out. A timber staircase led up to it and I presumed this was where First-Class passengers lounged during the crossing.

The galley was complete with the cupboard and a heavy cast-iron stove. There was some interesting graffiti too: ‘Now be a good child and go home’, or ‘Are you a djinn that you should be roaming about here’.

After the 2000 visit, I wrote a piece on the nameless ferry boat that had rendered long years of service on the Ghazi Ghat crossing of the Sindhu. My friend Sarwat Ali, whose father served in Dera Ghazi Khan in the 1960s, remembers the crossing by boat. And he told me that passengers lounging in the cabin on the roof could feel the breeze cooled by the river as the boat cleaved the muddy waves.

In the late 1970s, the river was bridged and, having made her final voyage, the boat was beached on the left bank and forgotten. The Department of Highways, which maintained and operated the vessel, was now more concerned with the bridge and the connecting roads. The nameless old boat no longer had any utility. Even in 1993, it was caught fast in the silt for the Sindhu — once the mightiest river of our land that gave its name to an entire subcontinent — would still periodically overflow its banks.

After publication of my piece, my civil servant friend Raheal Siddiqui, then serving in Dera Ghazi Khan, told me that Jaffar Leghari either planned to or had already purchased the boat from the department. He would turn it into a fancy riverside restaurant, said Raheal. I was delighted. At least this beauty would be preserved and, like so many others, would not be left to rot and be cannibalised by vandals.

Years went by and no word came of the boat having been refurbished to become a café. Passing by on a very cloudy September morning in 2016, I paused to look and found the boat as abandoned as ever. The morning was so dull, that I took no pictures. Recently I was there again. And it was a heart-breaking disappointment.

I should have filched the steel wheel back in 1993 or even in 2000 when I had the chance. This time round, save the heavy capstan fixed in the timbers of the deck and Hamilton’s steel apparatus, everything was gone. The anchors and their chains were gone. The timberwork of the toilet and the galley as well as all the fittings were missing. Removing the heavy cast-iron stove would have taken some doing and commitment, but even that was gone.

Of the cabin on the deck, only the outer frame remained. The timbers making up the walls were presumably stolen and burnt for who would have thought of putting first-class seasoned timber to another use? The cabin above the corrugated iron sheeting roof was altogether gone. For more than four decades, the old boat has remained fast in the mud. And that has started to tell on the steel hull, which is now eroded in several places.

The boat was once owned by the highways department and remained their property even after having lost its utility. In another country, no ordinary citizens could have ever imagined removing its fixtures. But here, it is a free-for-all. Leghari may never convert the rotting hulk into a café. And over the next few years, local vandals might even begin cutting the hull to sell the high-grade steel.

In Canada, songwriter Greg Adams wrote a moving tribute to the ageing River Lady on the verge of being phased out and broken up. That boat may not have been dissimilar to our nameless beauty on the Sindhu. Roger Whitaker sang the lyrics with equal passion, evoking goosebump-raising scenes of the boat rounding a bend in a storm.

In Pakistan, our old boat will pass into oblivion unsung.

The writer is a fellow of The Royal Geographical Society and author of several books.
He tweets @odysseuslahori

Published in Dawn, EOS, June 27th, 2021