BABA AND THE BOAT

August 2022

Little grey fish nibble at my toes as I stand knee-deep in the river looking at the old boat waddling with the wavelets.

I wonder if the two burly men will come again today.

This fishing canoe, an unfussy compilation of wood, lay heavily on its belly on the riverbank all these weeks, a breached creature in restful slumber.

The two men had worked on it all day yesterday. They had turned it, pulled it into the river, and washed it for hours in quiet devotion.

Today the boat lies lightly on water, on its back, waking up. The river steals away, rubbing its sides, nudging it back into the journey.

One of the men comes every day in his golden yellow shirt riding a golden yellow scooter. He has been named Baba by my associates in deference to his bushy grey beard and his quietness.

I like to believe that there’s some Babaness in me also. My beard is as grey and the quietness is coming.

Baba creates varying routines with the same set of rituals. He cleans, smokes, rests. He doesn’t care for company and barely talks. He can do this for hours.

He doesn’t own the place, he doesn’t even use it as much as many others in the village do. He might not even own the boat he has been cleaning.

A few days ago he was digging out weed for two hours. He was all by himself.

Another day, once the water had receded from what was once a ferry landing, he spent an entire afternoon rinsing the platform under the tree, using the river water to remove river clay. Exhausted, he lay there for a while, quite still, head propped on one hand. Then he got up, smoked, and rode off.

Yesterday when I saw him in the boat, I ran down from my fourth-floor balcony to the riverbank. I waited for him to look up. I wanted his permission to take pictures. He nodded without smiling.

The river was in a hurry and the boat kept straining at the rope. After a few tugs, the knot loosened. The boat began to drift, carrying Baba with it.

The boat did not have oars, Baba had to jump into the river to claim it back. He stepped off the boat and dropped – put a foot out the stern and just dropped – with a muffled splash.

A kingfisher perched a few feet away, the only creature here that wasn’t brown or grey, glanced once and then went back to gazing at the water. Tiny tickling fish may as well stay at my feet.

The fisherman, a gaunt man who is also a regular, looked up. He had been struggling with a cord which was attached to a basket he was lowering into the water. He wanted the fish he had caught to stay alive while he fished some more.

I have seen the fisherman mutter to himself and leave whenever other fishermen arrive. The world has become a little too crowded, a little too noisy, for people like him.

Baba disappeared into the browning charging water for a few seconds. I did not know that only two ferry steps from the bank, the river furrowed so deep. He emerged, coughed, wiped his face, and then swam, pulling the boat ashore.

He waded up the steps, nodded at the fisherman, and tethered the boat tightly. He went back into the river for a bath.

To the River

This boat, this river, makes me think of my parents who not long ago, after some years of caring and cleaning, sailed away somewhere.

I see mother as a raft, not taking much space. Father is a ship, he likes making waves. I am a coracle, that round basket which spins around in one place, easily persuaded in any direction.

Something starts happening as I stand in the river watching Baba's boat and the preparations for another journey.

My mental debris, a heap of weighty what-ifs, begins to drip away, the unquiet mind begins to settle, a plotless life begins to find its place.

My head feels like a theatre empty of characters and props. The light is dim and the stage clean and warm, like after a busy day, a remarkable play. All my drama of life and death has packed and left.

A space opens, uninhabited and tranquil.

I had learned that what heals us – people with excess vocabulary and emotions – is imagination. There are those shrapnel, those moments of feeling misperceived, rejected, abandoned, betrayed. We use words to shift those feelings, protect the self-story.

We try to escape the tyrannies of memory.

What also heals us, I realise today, is letting go of the compulsion to recast reality, to find closure – a rational conclusion which will absolve us. There is no definitive closure, only fading and displacing.

Perhaps, beginning now, I can stay centred in the unknowing and undesiring. I am no more 'asking of life some tremendous question'. All my shiny baubles of wisdom, the need to understand other people or even myself, I offer to the river.

Many emotions are an outcome of comparison: my now with your now, my now with my then. This moment on Periyar sands, I can compare nothing with nothing.

The river doesn’t pause, doesn’t smile, doesn’t sing to me. The river is just there, stealing away silkily.

After the Rain

I want to ask Baba where his boat went.

In the past few days, the firmament has been a stack of quilts – thick, grey, heavy bales that someone keeps rolling out there.

Wet monsoon is having one of its mood swings. The river has risen by a few feet. All the ferry steps, the entire bench, and half the trunk of the big tree are submerged.

We wait for five darkish days. We rejoice when we see some yellow light diffusing like a vapour lamp on a foggy winter morning. Soon it gets smothered by the big grey blankets.

Baba has been coming every day. Many others too, entire families in raincoats and umbrellas. They gesticulate and chatter, now and then there’s a reference to the flood of 2018.

Bored of the same old riverbed, the same old banks, the river had wanted to know what a city felt like. A curious, profligate, irresponsible tourist.

More families arrive. They take pictures standing and squatting, measure the level of water, call up people, sidle up to strangers to feel reassured.

Not Baba.

He looks the same. He stands by the river quietly as if to ask, Are you going to be like this much longer?

He lives a kilometre away in a small sparse house by the alley that I take to the paddy fields. The gate, wide enough for a scooter but not a car, is open. It leads to a porch which has in a corner a forlorn table with snacks and knick-knacks.

We see Baba in his grassy yard cleaning his golden yellow scooter. There’s no manicured or tiled lawn, no neat arrangement of pretty pretty flowers of many colours.

I slow down from instinct. As a journalist I was trained to pause, observe and ask questions so that I could find or invent a saleable story. I quit as I was about to graduate to inventing theories.

I keep looking at Baba but I don’t stop.

However much I ask and know, whatever I do to wrap him in a coherent story, that story will never be totally complete or correct, only a collection of words that you and I shall read to entertain yet another day.

I don’t want to know even his name. Names can change the way we see someone. We have crossed each other many times and he hasn’t asked me my name either. In fact, he hasn’t asked me anything, only nodded.

On the sixth day the sun comes out, coy and mellow at first. A few clouds are lurking.

The gaunt fisherman scurries to the far corner near the temple, sets down his plastic bag and wooden fishing rod, and begins to hook the bait. He works with unusual energy this morning. The resident kingfisher – I think there are two – glances in the fisherman’s direction often. A friendly stranger told me that one kingfisher is known to go off on fishing boats hoping to be fed along the way.

Baba glides in soon enough. His shirt and scooter shimmer in the sun. He parks, wades into the water, gets to the ferry landing, picks up a long wooden pole, and starts dislodging hyacinth. After about an hour, he sloshes out of the water and pauses for a smoke.

I find myself drifting towards him. I want to know where his boat went. Has it floated away or is it lying under water? What if it has come apart?

By the time I get close enough, Baba has finished his smoke, turned, and is back in the river.

~*~