At first, I laughed. A Malayali on the Titanic? It sounded like one of those WhatsApp family legends where someone’s “great-uncle met Gandhi at a railway station.”
But my mother looked up from her crossword and said, “Ah yes, he was on that ship.” Just like that as if she were talking about a bus to Ernakulam.
Then she told me the story. Here it is--
Raman Nair was from Kozhikode, born in 1886, when the British Raj was still painting maps red. He grew up near the Beypore shipyard, where the Uru boats were built by hand. He started as a dock boy and learned his English from Irish engineers who cursed more than they spoke.
In 1911, he signed a Lascar Agreement in Bombay — a colonial labour contract that shipped Indian seamen to work on British liners. The pay was twelve shillings a month. The recruiter had promised, “Plenty of food, no storms.”
By January 1912, Raman had been assigned to the RMS Olympic as a greaser — one of the men who kept the ship’s engines oiled and running. His name still appears faintly in the Board of Trade Register No. 104993 (Southampton) under “R. Nair,” nationality: Indian (Malabar).
When Titanic prepared for her maiden voyage that April, crew shortages were common. Several Olympic hands were transferred — Raman among them. That’s how a man who barely spoke English found himself below deck in the grandest ship ever built.
He probably never saw the chandeliers or the grand staircase. His world was the engine room, seventy feet below the surface a hellish cathedral of noise, heat, and iron. His duty was simple and endless: to oil the crankshafts and keep the pistons cool.
On the night of April 14, 1912, at 11:40 p.m., when the ship brushed the iceberg, Raman was off-shift, drinking weak tea in the stoker’s mess. The collision sounded, he would later say, “like a coconut breaking.” The alarm bells rang, and within minutes the lower decks began to flood.
He helped his mates open watertight doors, guided women up the companion ladders, and even lifted a crying Irish child into a lifeboat. He remembered the number — Boat No. 13, lowered on the starboard side. He never knew her name. He only said, years later, “She had red hair and white hands.”
At 2:20 a.m., the ship broke apart. Raman and a few others jumped into the sea. He was pulled aboard Collapsible Boat D by a fireman named Barrett one of the last survivors rescued by the Carpathia. His name, misspelled as “R. Nayar,” appears among the Foreign Crew – Recovered Survivors in the Carpathia’s landing log in New York.
He stayed in England for two months, working briefly at the White Star Line dock in Liverpool. The company refused to renew his Lascar contract, saying his “English was insufficient.” He took the long way home ,Liverpool to Port Said, then Aden, then Cochin.
Back in Calicut, he married a quiet girl named Devaki and never spoke much about the Atlantic again. When people asked, he would say, “That was a ship that would not float.”
He kept a small glass vial of seawater in a tin trunk — labelled April 1912, North Atlantic.
When my grandmother once asked what it was, he said, “A reminder that even oceans can freeze.”
He died in 1957, on a humid June evening, still smelling faintly of oil and salt.
And here I am — typing this on a glowing laptop, sipping masala tea, alive because one Malayali greaser from Calicut didn’t drown in the North Atlantic. If he hadn’t survived, there would be no Amma, no me, no one to tell this story.
It’s strange, the arithmetic of life — how one man’s breath in icy water can ripple through generations.
When I look at that photograph now, I don’t see a hero. I see a tired man in a wool cap who did his job, helped strangers, and made it home. Perhaps that’s heroism enough.
And if he could see me today writing his story in English, on a machine powered by the same science that sank his ship he would probably chuckle and say,
“Too much pride, too little prayer.”
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Author: Somalatha Source : WhatsApp university
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