JUST LIKE WATER

February 2023

Every other poet and philosopher has immersed: in the memory and desire it evokes; the life it offers to subsistence and indulgence; the various voices it speaks in, hysterical to hypnotic; the way it embraces you and then leaves you tingling with transience.

Along and against other elements - wind, sand and sun - water sculpts the tangible and the abstract, things and thoughts that feel timeless yet illusory.

I spend many sunups and sundowns standing at the edge of the vastness, looking at all that shows on its surface: sand, wave, seashell, nacre, boat, fish, fisherman, crab, crow, seagull, stone, feral dog, and other idle gazers.

I too immerse.

Rough & Romantic

The smaller boats are whirring in with their catch. They leave at 4 am and are back by 7 am. This morning has been much better for the fishermen.

Yesterday was no commerce, only collateral damage: mantis shrimp, which are neither mantis nor shrimp, were plucked from the net and chucked into the sand. A feast for the crows.

Seagulls are parked where a rivulet flows into the sea. They are sipping the fresh water. The ones that catch a fish scurry away from the flock to swallow in solitude. Upstream is crow territory, that's where they shower every evening.

Fishermen are now busy untangling their nets. Some men are playing football. The only woman there is a goalpkeeper who frequently shouts instructions. She has presence.

The footballers disperse for a few seconds to make way for a big bull that is being taken by two young men for a beach walk.

A few people are swimming, some sailing off in colourful kayaks and catamarans, most are tirelessly posing on the beach for photographs.

One young couple is wrapped in what looks like a pre-bedding photoshoot. Their very public intimacy arouses some onlookers, bothers the others. I wonder what might be going on in the heads of the two paid photographers, both young men, who have to keep rearranging the raunch.

I go about collecting mother of pearl, or nacre, iridescent layer of inner shell cast onto the quiet shores. A sand bubbler crab scuttling about sees me and freezes for a few seconds, casting a massive shadow on the sands.

This beach has the lullaby rhythm of undulating waves, the smell of sweet dampness.

A few kilometers away, at a jetty, life is not as peaceable. The boats are larger and they come and go at all times. They are at sea for a week or more, returning with craters bulging with larger fish, crab, squid.

I ask if they’ll take me along.

With enthusiasm, the sailors show me around the boat. Some request for photographs.

Each boat has 20-30 young men. That’s their home and office - kitchen, toilet, ration, drinking water, soap, wardrobe, clothes, laundry, nets, crates, ice.

I see only common spaces that are sodden, rusted, grimy. Survival here precludes privacy and hygiene.

Sea fishing is rough, only the watching is romantic.

A sailor, out of the blue, decides to stand on the deck and pee with glee into the sea.

As I turn to walk away with all my gentrified modesty, a weatherworn watchman arrives to tell me that photography is prohibited at this jetty. I’m to first seek permission from the chairman of the fishing cooperative.

The watchman is apologetic. He asks us to come in the morning, he would get us the permission. I thank him and leave.

Pee in peace, sailor.

Divergence & Convergence

My accomplice and I are driving along the beach looking for some other spot and - lo and behold! - we come upon a carpet of seagulls. More than a thousand.

We sneak into a random space in someone’s backyard, which is the seashore. The residents are welcoming, all of them contract labour from West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa. Around 50 of them occupy the five shacks. They are getting ready for work or returning, some are cooking or washing.

All men, again.

They point to a sweet spot down the slippery rocks. I settle there.

The sun is sliding, cruises have begun hurling neon light and popular music into the dusk, crows are making regular salvoes at the gulls.

Ignoring all the squawking and partying, local boys continue to play cricket on the sunbaked sand.

Sitting on the rocks, watching the horizon, I gush to myself: this liquid gold over the water, those gilded silhouettes of fluttering wings, the fragrance of faraway lands ... I can feel that beatific smile beginning to illuminate my face.

I think I am at the edge of an epiphany.

Just as I am about to drift, my reverie is punctuated by human chatter. I turn to look.

Behind me, my accomplice is assuring someone over the phone that he would not forget to get the vegetables on the way back and yes he would be home soon.

Behind him, two men in towels are looking at me, brushing their teeth, and discussing what they should cook.

My transcendence is paused at the threshold, the mystical is replaced by the mundane. I start packing the camera and tripod. It's time to go home.

And thus we all - seagull and crow, fisherman and photographer, sun and sand, resident and trespasser - find our own paths, gather our own preoccupations, as we journey on, reflecting and refracting.

All of us are migrants.

Just like water.

What They Said

कहते हैं ज्ञानी, दुनिया है फ़ानी

पानी पे लिखी लिखायी

है सबकी देखी, है सबकी जानी

हाथ किसीके न आयी

~ शैलेंद्र, गाइड

Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?

~ Siddhartha in Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

... the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future. ~ Vasudeva in Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), It's always our self we find in the sea. ~ maggie and milly and molly and may, e.e. cummings

It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen. ~ The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness. ~ The Rescue, A Romance of the Shallows, Joseph Conrad

You can't trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it. ~ W.C. Fields

You are water I’m water we’re all water in different containers that’s why it’s so easy to meet someday we’ll evaporate together. ~ We're All Water, Yoko Ono

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places. ~ Where Water Comes Together with Other Water, Raymond Carver

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

~ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

My big fish must be somewhere.

~ Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

~*~