Shirish Saraf and the Kalizma, the last floating legend

The Interview

She was the refuge of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, survived two world wars and hosted royalty at the America’s Cup. Today the Kalizma, a yacht from 1906, has a new custodian: Shirish Saraf, the man who rebuilds everything he owns, and who, faced with her, chose to change nothing.

In 1967, Richard Burton bought a yacht for Elizabeth Taylor. They chartered her first, on a Mediterranean cruise, fell in love with her, and Burton bought her, signing as Richard Taylor to give the paparazzi what they wanted. He renamed her with the initials of three daughters, Kate, Liza, Maria: Kalizma. Aboard, away from the cameras, the most watched couple in the world found the one address nobody could reach. It was on this deck that Taylor received, from the hands of a messenger, the 69.42-carat Cartier diamond bought in 1969, to wear in Monaco at Princess Grace’s ball.

But the Kalizma was already a legend long before Hollywood. She was born in 1906 as Minona, designed by G.L. Watson and built by the Scottish yard Ramage & Ferguson, at the height of the golden age of yachting. She survived two world wars, serving in both. In 1983 she was a floating grandstand at the America’s Cup, with royalty aboard. She has had many owners in more than a century. And she is still here.

• 1906 built
• 1967 becomes Kalizma
• 2 world wars
• 120 years at sea
• 3 daughters in her name

I boarded at the invitation of Shirish Saraf, the man who keeps her today, for a journey along the coast of Montenegro. From Tivat to the walls of Kotor, through the Bay of Boka, the Adriatic fjord where mountains fall into the water and the sea becomes a lake. A crossing like this is long enough to watch a man inside his own home, which is where people stop introducing themselves and start being. And there is a coincidence he likes more than he admits: in the same year the vessel became Kalizma, 1967, Saraf was born on the other side of the world.

He receives without ceremony, which is already a form of ceremony. He sits on the aft deck, rose-tinted glasses against the evening light, and lets the boat speak first. “She carries a different soul, and a different energy,” he says. “And all of us feel that energy when we step aboard.” There is a word he uses almost without noticing its weight. Custodian. Someone who holds a thing for a while, knowing it will carry on without him. The word describes not only his relationship with a yacht. It describes the way he has decided to live, and the fact that it was handed to him, many years earlier, by someone else.

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 life between Dubai, Hong Kong and India, though he calls London home. The sea, in childhood, was a rumour. “I come from Kashmir, from the mountains,” he says. “The sea was strange to me.”

His first encounter with the Kalizma took place in Dubai, where she was moored, and he was not alone. He went aboard with his father. And it was his father who, on that deck, told him this was a boat to be kept. It was his father, too, who gave him the only definition of the vessel that Saraf still repeats: the Orient Express of the seas. A father taking a son aboard an object from the last century and saying, in essence, that it cannot be bought. It can only be preserved.

At the time, the distance between him and the boat 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. “Would I have imagined that thirty years later I would be sitting above Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and their yacht? I couldn’t have dreamed of the cost of a single day of keeping her, even if she had been given to me free.”

What came next is known to anyone who follows finance in Asia. Saraf co-founded Abraaj Capital, which came to manage more than six billion dollars, and in 2008 founded his own house, Samena Capital. It is the résumé of someone used to buying, restructuring and transforming. In 2019 he bought the Kalizma. Twenty-four years after climbing onto that deck beside his father, he did what he had been told to do.

II. The shirt you wear

Ask him why this vessel and not another, and the answer comes through an image. “Every vessel is a shirt you wear. The vessel has to serve the owner.” A metaphor from someone who could have any garment made to any measure. The Kalizma is the only one he chose not to alter, the one around which he decided to shape himself. And the metaphor becomes a confession: “I feel her as a home.”

During the pandemic, the Kalizma was exactly that: the refuge where he withdrew with his family. There were months between the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Goa, father, mother and Aria, his daughter, all aboard, three generations on board. He sums up those days in a single word: magical.

His father’s health was already fragile. Even so, last summer, with the Kalizma restored, he insisted on going aboard one last time, in the south of France, and spent a month on the boat he had told his son to keep, thirty years earlier, on a deck in Dubai. He died in April, shortly after the two had returned together to Kashmir, the family’s homeland. For five years he saw the Kalizma sail. He lived to see his son do exactly what he had asked: not buy a legend, but preserve it.

There is a line, said almost laughing, that sums up the inversion of everything. 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 frank about what she is not. “Today’s boats are wider. On a fifty-metre yacht you will have more space, higher ceilings, more refined bedrooms,” he admits. “But what you won’t have is the magic of the upper deck, or the warmth of the saloon, or the history alongside.” It is the whole argument in her favour, made by the man least inclined to praise her.

Understated elegance. In an age when everything seems so temporary and so short-term, this is very, very long-term.

Shirish Saraf

The restoration is where his philosophy turns into practical decision. He improves everything he owns; it is a career instinct. With the Kalizma, the reflex stopped at an exact point: the intention, when work began, was that nothing should alter the soul of the boat. Through 2019 and 2020, the best craftsmen worked on her with the best materials. The wood, the brass, the proportions of 1906 were preserved with something close to stubbornness, while contemporary comfort came in underneath, invisible. In 2022 the result won the Judges’ Special Award at the World Superyacht Awards. Walking the decks with him, you notice that he touches very little. He is not showing his own work. He is showing hers.

III. The arithmetic of survival

None of this would carry weight if the Kalizma were merely old. Age is common; survival 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.

“The sea is the most corrosive substance in the world, where not even steel survives. For a yacht to have survived 120 years at sea is like a single human being remaining in a world of seven billion.”

And in her case the sea was not even the worst enemy. In the First World War she was requisitioned by the Royal Navy and served in the auxiliary patrol fleet from 1914 to 1920. She was armed. Sir Archibald Hurd’s historical record documents the Minona coming to the aid of four steamers under attack by a German submarine. A pleasure yacht facing a U-boat in the Atlantic. In the Second, she served again, from 1939 to 1945, now as H.M.S. Minona, base ship for the offshore rescue service at Campbeltown. Her commander, Lieutenant R.D. Robinson, even named his own daughter after her bells. The same brass that is still on deck today, half a metre from where we take coffee in the morning.

She is six years older than the Titanic, and was born of the same world: the same British shipbuilding industry, the same decade that believed steel would beat the sea. She was, incidentally, one of the first steam vessels to have electric light. The Titanic proved the opposite of what that age promised, and proved it in four days. The Kalizma will soon be 120. Two vessels of the same promise, and the ocean kept one.

It is the arithmetic worth holding on to. Not the fame, not the stones: survival. She did not give up, not at sea, not under fire. When it is suggested that comparable boats exist, he corrects it with the patience of someone who has answered this before: “There is no other Kalizma. She carries a value that comes from 1906.”

Timeline: four names, two wars, 120 years

• 1906, launch, Leith, Scotland. Named Minona. Designed by G.L. Watson, built by Ramage & Ferguson for a vice-commodore of the Royal Eastern Yacht Club. One of the first steam vessels with electric light.
• 1914, First World War. Requisitioned by the Royal Navy. Armed, she serves in the auxiliary patrol fleet until 1920. Documented rescuing four steamers under attack by a U-boat.
• 1939, Second World War. Serves as H.M.S. Minona until 1945, base ship for the offshore rescue service at Campbeltown. Her commander names his daughter after the boat’s bells.
• 1947, peacetime. Returns to civilian life. Renamed Cortynia, then Odysseia. Between 1954 and 1955 the steam engine gives way to diesel.
• 1967, Burton and Taylor. Richard Burton buys her for Elizabeth Taylor and renames her Kalizma, from the initials of Kate, Liza and Maria. Aboard, in 1969, Taylor receives the 69-carat Cartier diamond.
• 1983, America’s Cup. Under Peter de Savary, then owner, the Kalizma is a floating grandstand for the regatta, receiving Prince Philip aboard.
• 2019, Shirish Saraf. Acquired at auction in Sri Lanka in poor condition. Restored through 2019 and 2020 under one rule: nothing should alter the soul of the boat.
• 2022, World Superyacht Awards. Wins the Judges’ Special Award and is shortlisted as best rebuilt superyacht of the year.
• 2026, today, Montenegro. One hundred and twenty years after launch, the Kalizma is still sailing. Her soul, as always, stays with her.

IV. The man who writes

Near the end of the afternoon he does something nobody expected. 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 or ask permission. He simply says it, and concludes: “That is the soul of the Kalizma.”

It is no accident. Saraf has a deep interest in literature and has been writing a novel in verse. It explains where his language comes from. A man who describes a boat as a shirt, ownership as custodianship and the sea as the world’s most patient enemy is a man who spends his free time looking for the right words. It makes sense that he likes a poem about equanimity: he has lived through both sides of fortune and concluded that neither deserves excessive trust.

It is no coincidence that a man who writes verse is also the one who decided not to touch the lines of 1906. Both come from the same place: the suspicion that some forms are better than any improvement that could be made to them.

V. What he keeps for others

Here the word custodian stops being about the boat. In 2015, Saraf created a scholarship at Charterhouse, the English school where he studied, for a child from India. The following year he founded the Samena Foundation, aimed at disadvantaged children, which supports the Phaya Taung monastery in Myanmar, home to a thousand orphans. He was an adviser to the Little Dreams Foundation of Orianne and Phil Collins. And there is Go Dharmic, with which he distributed food in India during the pandemic. Asked about it, he deflected the credit: “We distributed food together in India during COVID: more than a million meals. The scale, the logistics, the passion, the commitment and the sincerity with which he does it are incredible.”

They asked about his role, and he answered by talking about someone else’s work. A million meals appears in passing, like a logistical detail. It is the same movement he makes on deck when the talk turns to the Kalizma: he steps aside and lets the thing appear. A scholarship he will not use. A monastery he will not inhabit. A boat that, he insists, he will not own forever. Shirish Saraf has built a life standing between things and their future. He learned it, perhaps, on a deck in Dubai, with his father beside him.

VI. The refusal

The moment comes when you ask him, directly, whether he owns the Kalizma. And here is the heart of everything, because he refuses the question. “How can I say I will always own the Kalizma? History shows she has had many owners, and, in time, you were nothing more than the custodian of the Kalizma while she goes on with her own journey.”

He reaches for a watch to explain, because a watch is the object we most easily forgive for outliving us. The comparison, from a man whose instinct is to redo whatever he touches, is not modesty. It is a concession.

“Nobody really owns a Patek Philippe. You simply leave it to the next generation. I don’t want to have the ego of thinking I will own her for life. She will find her new owner when the right time comes.”

There is a kind of privilege that is loud, fast, and has already moved on to the next station. And there is this one, the privilege of time that refuses to hurry. Saraf arrived, late and by an improbable road, at the second kind. It is the harder of the two, because it requires the owner to accept being the passenger.

VII. Life aboard

Not everything, of course, is philosophy. The Kalizma is also a house that moves. The routine has the silent precision of well-run homes: coffee served on deck when the bay is still glass-smooth, afternoons when the boat glides between the Venetian walls of Kotor and the mountains that close the horizon like an amphitheatre. At no moment did the vessel feel like an object on display. She felt like what Saraf insists she is: an old house, extraordinarily well cared for, that happens to float.

He speaks of recent voyages with the ease of someone describing the seasons: Amalfi, France, Sri Lanka, and Turkey, which he especially likes, from the warmer waters of Kaş and Kalkan to the Roman ruins reached from the deck. He talks about his daughter, Aria, who sings and rides, with the unguarded pride of any father. The things he keeps, he keeps for someone. 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: for Cartier to meet the Kalizma again, since the maison’s stone once lay on these decks.

Vessel particulars

• Design: G.L. Watson · Yard: Ramage & Ferguson
• Launched: 1906
• Length: 50 m · Beam: 6.3 m · Tonnage: 278 GT
• Hull: steel · Maximum speed: 12 knots
• Names: Minona · Cortynia · Odysseia · Kalizma

VIII. The soul, and what remains

As the light drops and blue takes the place of gold, the conversation changes register. Saraf, who is Hindu, offers an image that sums up his relationship with the vessel better than any other. “In Hinduism, we say the soul goes on and the vessel dies. In this case, the vessel went on, and the soul goes with her.”

He is not her improver. He is her witness. The man who rebuilds everything has at last found the thing that rebuilt 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 great deal come and go, like life, and 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. And the father who took him aboard in Dubai, and who lived to see her restored, is gone too. He himself will go one day, and he says so without hesitation. The boat, as always, remains.

At the end of the journey 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 diamonds, of the century. You leave thinking of the man who keeps her today, and of his father, who thirty years earlier climbed onto a deck in Dubai and told his son this was to be kept. A yacht from 1906, and a man who, having the power to change anything, spent his life discovering what must not be changed. She carries a different soul, he says, and everyone feels that energy when they step aboard. It is impossible to disagree. More impossible still not to notice that the sentence applies to him too.

Gabriel Silveirado boarded the Kalizma at the invitation of Shirish Saraf, on a journey along the Montenegrin coast between Tivat, Kotor and the Bay of Boka. Interview conducted with Amanda Ford, for WAYFARER. Photography by Anna Sereda.