Mid-Sea Splendour

The Maiden Voyage Of India’s First Cruise Liner Between Mumbai And Goa Captures The Ineffable Romance Of The Ocean.

- Bhavya Dore

THE nice thing about getting on board a cruise for the first time, is that everything smacks of novelty. Doors open on to unseen decks, a foghorn blast augurs good times and the expanse of ocean unwraps itself like a quiet mystery. The real magic though, transpires in the navigation room—and I don’t just mean the mundane act of steering the ship—I mean the bewitching movement of vessels on screens, the crackle of radio interceptions and the drama of knobs and dials at work.

On this particular day I am in the navigation room of the M.V. Angriya, a vessel charting the route from Mumbai to Goa, the Arabian Sea spreading out in front of us like in a 17th-century Flemish painting. Captain Nitin Dhond, a bearded, avuncular man is at the ship’s helm and is telling me how he got seduced by the sea as a child. It was in fact traversing this very route on transport vessels like the Konkan Shakti and Konkan Seva that plied through the seventies and eighties before the advent of the Konkan Railways. “Many of us have the memories and the nostalgia of those trips,” he says. “A group of us thought, one day we must start this again.”

That is how we are aboard the Angriya, cutting through the shimmering surfaces of the sea at 17 knots per hour on a hot October day, about 10 kilometres off the coastline. On its first official journey, its 104 rooms filled to capacity, its corridors populated by revellers, its kitchens briskly sending out food, Dhond hopes this will be the start of many journeys for the country’s only domestic cruise ship owned by an Indian company. “We had been thinking about this for a long time,” he says. “Cruising has not been an Indian way but it has been picking up recently.”