The Interview
Shirish Saraf has spent a lifetime remaking everything he acquires. Faced with the Kalizma, the 1906 yacht that belonged to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, he did the opposite: he chose to change nothing. A conversation about ownership, time, and the discovery that keeping something may be the highest form of possessing it.
I boarded the Kalizma at Shirish Saraf’s invitation, for a voyage along the coast of Montenegro. From Tivat to the Venetian walls of Kotor, through the improbable geometry of the Boka Bay, that Adriatic fjord where mountains fall into the water and the sea becomes a lake. A passage like that is long enough for a ship to stop being scenery and become company. And it is long enough, above all, to watch a man inside his own house, which is where people stop introducing themselves and begin, simply, to be.
He receives you without ceremony, which is itself a kind of ceremony. There is no display of ownership, no recitation of provenance. Saraf sits on the aft deck, rose-tinted glasses against the late light, and lets the ship speak first.
There is a word that runs through every conversation of the voyage, and he uses it almost without noticing the weight it carries. Custodian. Someone who holds a thing for a while, knowing it will continue without him. It takes days to understand that the word does not describe only his relationship with a yacht. It describes the way he has decided to live, and that it was handed to him, many years earlier, by someone else.
The Kalizma needs no introduction for anyone who knows the twentieth century. She was born in 1906 as the Minona, designed by G.L. Watson and built by the Scottish yard Ramage & Ferguson at the height of the golden age of sail. She was renamed in 1967 by Richard Burton, who chartered her with Elizabeth Taylor for a Mediterranean cruise, fell in love with the ship, bought her, and assembled the new name from the initials of three daughters: Kate, Liza, Maria. Her official history holds that, on signing for her, Burton put his name down as Richard Taylor, to give the waiting photographers what they wanted. A private word, made public by the two most watched people alive at that moment.
There is a coincidence he enjoys more than he admits. In the same year the ship became the Kalizma, 1967, Saraf was born on the other side of the world. When I mention it, he neither denies nor embraces it. He prefers to speak about what anyone feels when they step aboard. “She carries a soul that is different, and an energy that is different,” he says. “And we all feel that energy as we step in.”
Chapter I
What his father said in Dubai
The family has roots in Kashmir, in the mountains. He grew up in Oman, was educated in England, and now divides his working life between Dubai, Hong Kong and India, though he calls London home. The sea, in childhood, was a rumour, not a fact of life. “I come from Kashmir, from the mountains,” he says. “The sea was alien to me.”
The first encounter with the Kalizma happened in Dubai, where she lay moored, and he was not alone. He went aboard with his father. And it was his father who, standing on that deck, told him this was a yacht to be treasured. It was his father, too, who gave him the only description of her that Saraf still repeats, and that is now her signature: the Orient Express of the seas.
Hold on to that scene, because it explains everything that follows. A father taking a son aboard an object from another century and saying, in effect, that this is not a thing you buy. It is a thing you keep.
At the time, the distance between him and the ship was not measured in money. It was measured in imagination. “When I saw her in 1995 in Dubai, I was a banker earning two thousand dollars,” he says, without vanity, the way one describes a person one used to be. “Would I ever have imagined that thirty years later I would be sitting on Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and their yacht?” And he adds, with the candour of a man who has nothing left to prove: “I couldn’t even dream of a day’s expenses to keep her, even if I were given her for free.”
What came next is familiar to anyone who follows finance in Asia and the Middle East. Saraf co-founded Abraaj Capital, which grew to manage more than six billion dollars. In 2008 he founded his own firm, Samena Capital. In 2013, Asian Investor named him among the twenty-five most influential people in Asian private equity. It is the résumé of a man accustomed to buying, restructuring and transforming. In 2019, he bought the Kalizma. Twenty-four years after standing on that deck beside his father, he did what he had been told to do.
Chapter II
The shirt you wear
Ask him why this vessel and not another, and the answer arrives as an image. “Every vessel is a shirt you wear,” he says. “The vessel has to suit the owner.” It is a revealing metaphor from a man who could have any garment made to any measurement. The Kalizma is the one he chose not to alter, the one around which he decided to reshape himself instead. The shirt, as it happens, has a second half, and it is there that the metaphor becomes a confession: “I feel it like home.”
During the pandemic, he says, the Kalizma was exactly that: the refuge where he withdrew with his family when the world closed its doors. He speaks of that period with a gravity he uses for nothing else, and mentions, in passing, the loss of his father in those years. He does not dwell on it. He does not need to. It is the same father who took him aboard in Dubai and told him to keep this ship. He finished restoring her in 2020, and his father was no longer there to see it.
There is a line, delivered almost laughing, that captures the whole inversion. It was not he who sustained the ambition for the Kalizma; it was she who sustained his. “She made me want to earn more.”
He is candid, almost to a fault, about what she is not. “Today’s boats are wider. On a fifty-metre yacht you will have more space, higher ceilings, more luxurious rooms,” he admits, before you can ask. “But what you will not have is the magic of the upper deck, or the warmth of the salon, nor the history that comes with it.” It is the entire case for her, made by the man least inclined to praise her.
“Understated elegance. In an age when everything feels so temporary and so short-term, this is so long-term.”
Restoration is where his philosophy becomes a practical decision. He improves everything he owns; it is the reflex of a career. With the Kalizma, for the first time, the reflex stopped at an exact point, and he set that point himself: his declared intent, going into the work, was that nothing should alter the soul of the ship. Across 2019 and 2020 the finest craftsmen worked on her with the finest materials, under an internationally acclaimed interior designer. The wood, the brass, the proportions of 1906 were preserved with something close to stubbornness, while contemporary comfort went in underneath, invisible. In 2022 the result took the Judges’ Special Award at the World Superyacht Awards, and was nominated as the best rebuilt superyacht of the year. To walk the decks with him is to notice how little he touches, how rarely he corrects. He is not showing you his work. He is showing you hers.
Chapter III
The arithmetic of survival
None of this would carry weight if the Kalizma were merely old. Old is common; surviving is not. She has spent more than a century in what Saraf calls, without exaggeration, the most corrosive substance in the world, and she is still here, which he regards less as a triumph of maintenance than as a kind of almost moral fact.
“The sea is the most corrosive substance in the world, where even steel does not survive. For a yacht that has survived 120 years at sea, it is like one human left in a world of seven billion.”
And the sea, in her case, was not even the worst of her enemies. The Kalizma survived two world wars, and served in both.
In the first, she was requisitioned by the British Royal Navy and served in the Auxiliary Patrol fleet, from 1914 to 1920. She was armed. The record left by Sir Archibald Hurd documents the Minona going to the rescue of four steamers under attack from a German U-boat. A pleasure yacht, built for the leisure of a Scottish vice commodore, facing down a submarine in the Atlantic.
In the second, she served again, from 1939 to 1945, now as H.M.S. Minona, base ship for the Deep Sea Rescue Service at Campbeltown. Her commanding officer, Lt Commander R.D. Robinson, went so far as to christen his own daughter to her bells. The same brass that still sits on deck today, half a metre from where we took coffee in the mornings.
That is the figure worth keeping. Not the fame, not the stones, the survival. Everything that photographs beautifully about her is a consequence of the one thing that does not photograph at all: she did not give in, not to the sea and not under fire.
She also carries, for anyone who knows the history, a gallery of illustrious ghosts. The Burton and Taylor years are the ones the world remembers: the Kalizma was the couple’s refuge, the one address the cameras could not reach. Aboard her, Taylor kept the jewels that helped make her a legend, among them the Krupp diamond of 33.19 carats. And it was on this deck that she received, from a courier’s hands, the Cartier stone the world never forgot, the 69.42 carats bought in 1969, to wear in Monaco at Princess Grace’s ball.
And it was not only Hollywood. In 1983, the Kalizma served as a floating box at the America’s Cup, with royalty aboard. Saraf tells that passage with evident pleasure, and what it reveals is the point: the ship imposes her own rules, and everyone, crowns included, obeys. When it is suggested that comparable ships exist, he corrects you with the patience of a man who has answered this before: “There is no other Kalizma. She carries a value that comes from 1906.”
Chapter IV
The man who writes
Late in the afternoon, he does something nobody expects. He recites a poem from memory. It is Kipling, the lines about meeting with triumph and disaster and treating those two impostors just the same. He does not announce it, does not ask permission. He simply says it, the way one states a law of physics, and concludes: “That is the soul of the Kalizma.”
It would be a quaint gesture if it were an accident. It is not. Saraf has a deep interest in literature and has been writing a novel in verse. It is the piece of information that reorganises everything, because it explains where his language comes from. A man who describes a boat as a shirt, ownership as custodianship, and the sea as the most patient enemy in the world, is a man who spends his free hours looking for the right words. It makes sense that he loves a poem about equanimity: he has crossed both sides of fortune and appears to have concluded that neither deserves excessive trust.
It is no coincidence that a man who writes verse is also the man who decided not to touch a hull built in 1906. Both come from the same place: the suspicion that certain forms are better than any improvement one might make to them.
Chapter V
What he keeps for others
Here the word custodian stops being about the ship.
In 2015, Saraf endowed a scholarship at Charterhouse, the English school where he was educated, for a child from India, covering up to the entirety of the costs. The following year he founded the Samena Foundation, directed at children without means. The foundation supports the Phaya Taung monastery in Myanmar, home to a thousand orphans. He served on the board of the Little Dreams Foundation, created by Orianne and Phil Collins. And there is Go Dharmic, the humanitarian movement with which he distributed food across India during the pandemic. Asked about it, he deflected the credit with the ease of a man who does so habitually: “I’m really touched by how many people they reached out to. We did food distribution together in India during COVID: over a million meals. And it’s just incredible, the scale, the logistics, the passion, the commitment, the sincerity with which he does it.”
Notice what he did in that sentence. He was asked about his own part, and he answered by describing someone else’s work. A million meals arrives in passing, like a logistical detail. It is the same movement he makes on deck when the Kalizma comes up: he steps out of the way, and lets the thing appear.
Assemble the pieces and the portrait changes. A scholarship he will not use. A monastery he will not inhabit. Meals he will not eat. A ship he insists he will not own forever. Shirish Saraf has built a life standing between things and their futures, holding them for a while, and passing them on. He learned it, perhaps, on a deck in Dubai, with his father beside him.
Chapter VI
The refusal
There comes a moment when you ask him, directly, whether he owns the Kalizma. And here is the heart of it, because he refuses the question. Gently, but entirely. “How can I say that I will always own the Kalizma?” he replies. “History tells you she has found many owners, and over time you have been nothing more than the custodian of the Kalizma, while she carries on her own journey.”
He reaches for a watch to explain, because the watch is the object we most easily forgive for outliving us. The comparison, from a man whose instinct is to remake everything he touches, is not modesty. Modesty is performance. This is a concession.
“You never really own a Patek Philippe. You just leave it for the next generation. I don’t want to have the ego to think I will own her for life. She will find her new owner when the right time comes.”
There is a kind of luxury that is loud and fast and gone by the following season. And there is this one, the luxury of time that refuses to hurry. Saraf arrived, late and by an improbable route, at the second kind. It is the harder of the two, because it requires the owner to accept that he is the passenger.
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Chapter VII
Life aboard
Not everything, of course, is philosophy. The Kalizma is also a house that moves, and sailing her teaches that better than any conversation. The routine has the quiet precision of a well-governed household: coffee served on deck while the Boka is still smooth as glass, afternoons when the ship glides between the Venetian walls of Kotor and the mountains that close the bay like an amphitheatre. At no point in the voyage did the ship feel like an object of display. She felt like what Saraf insists she is: an old house, extraordinarily well kept, that happens to float.
He speaks of recent crossings the way one describes the seasons: Amalfi, France, Sri Lanka, and Turkey, of which he is especially fond, from the warmer waters at Kaş and Kalkan to the Roman ruins one can reach from the deck. He speaks of his daughter, Aria, who sings and rides, with the disarmed pride of any father. And it is here that his argument about longevity finds its simplest translation. The things he keeps, he keeps for someone. The watch, the scholarship, the ship. The next generation is not a rhetorical abstraction in his mouth. It has a name.
Asked about occasions aboard, he offers, unprompted, an idea he formulates himself: that Cartier might one day meet the Kalizma again, since the maison’s stone once rested on these very decks. The idea is his. We merely wrote it down.
Chapter VIII
The soul, and what remains
As the light drops and the blue of the Boka takes the place of the gold, the conversation changes register. Saraf, who is Hindu, offers an image that captures, better than any other, his relationship with the ship. “In Hinduism, we say the soul lives on and the vessel dies,” he says. “In this case, the vessel has lived on, and the soul goes with her.”
You can hear, in that sentence, the entire shape of the relationship. He is not her improver. He is her witness. It is a smaller role than author, and it suits him better than author ever did. The man who remakes everything has finally found the thing that remade him. And he describes her as one would describe a person, because at some point she stopped being describable any other way.
“A very elegant old lady, refined in taste, who has seen a lot come and go, like life, and has met many triumphs and many disasters along the way.”
The legends who owned her are gone. The captains who took her to war are gone. The father who took him aboard in Dubai is gone. He will go too, and says so without hesitation. The ship, as always, remains.
At the end of the voyage, I stepped off the Kalizma at Tivat with the opposite feeling to the one I arrived with. You board her thinking of Burton, of Taylor, of the diamonds, of the century. You leave thinking of the man who keeps her now, and of his father, who thirty years earlier stood on a deck in Dubai and told his son that this was a thing to be kept. We were talking, the whole time, about two things at once: a yacht built in 1906, and a man who, holding the power to change anything, spent a lifetime discovering what should not be changed. She carries a different soul, he says, and everyone feels that energy as they step aboard. After a passage on her decks, it is impossible to disagree. It is more impossible still not to notice that the sentence describes him too.
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Gabriel Silveirado boarded the Kalizma at the invitation of Shirish Saraf, on a voyage along the coast of Montenegro, between Tivat, Kotor and the Boka Bay. Interview conducted with Amanda Ford, for WAYFARER. Photography by Anna Sereda.
