They had said we should go to the graveyard of the dhows at dusk. The moment I heard the name, I knew it was a place I had to see. I didn't know dhows could die. I didn't know they had graveyards. I had to see it with my own eyes.
We went at dusk. It was a holiday and everywhere was crowded. Dhows that had accompanied fishermen daily for a lifetime, dhows that had hauled fish from the heart of the sea, dhows that had carried cargo back and forth — there they were, side by side, a fleet run aground.
It was a strange sight. Old wooden dhows, rotting, half-collapsed, leaning on one another or standing utterly alone — and packed with people. Men and women, old and young, climbing aboard from wherever they could, peering into what remained. Poking their heads through holes in the hulls and decks, taking photos. Talking loudly and laughing.
The graveyard of the dhows was truly a graveyard. Except that people had invaded the solitude of the dead — dead things that had been dead for years. They ran their hands over the bones that remained and looked to see what time had done to them. When they should have stood quietly and gazed with respect at this astonishing scene.
Dozens of dhows whose good days had passed, now surrendered to water and mud in a half-dry inlet, condemned to have their solitude polluted by people who took souvenir photos with their death.
When the sun neared the horizon and its reflection fell on the water, the crowds thinned. The dhows were scattered. You could walk among them and imagine what each one had once looked like. What color they had been. How long they had lived and how far they had sailed the Persian Gulf before finally coming to rest in this inlet.
A little further from one of the dhows came the sound of an axe, and fresh, fragrant planks of wood lay beside it on the ground. With scaffolding, they had straightened the dhow as much as possible, and a gray-haired man was replacing the rotted planks of the hull with new ones. I stood and watched. The man worked calmly, without hurry, laying the planks side by side. He had decided to bring one of the dhows back to life.
In the midst of all that ruin, it was as though Noah himself stood there, indifferent to everything happening around him, building his boat. Half the boat had been renewed and the other half still bore the color of age. On the old walls of a boat that had been beached for years, people had scrawled graffiti. The man didn't care. He did his work. The sound of the hammer on nails replaced the laughter and murmurs of the people wandering among the dhows. For a few brief moments it was just sunset and the sound of the hammer. Tap tap tap… a sound that narrated life.
The man had come to tell the story once more, in a different language. Perhaps this time the ending would be better. The dhow would no longer be stuck in the mud. It would go and go and vanish forever in the distant blue horizons.
*Title of a book by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi