The Sea and I

Agatti, Lakshadweep

N Ikka points at the stars ahead. There are three big ones vertically aligned. He says we need to head in the stars’ direction. The sky is inky black, thousands of stars strewn across its vastness. The boat jumps along with the waves as we hold on to the plank we are sitting on. The excitement of being on a fishing boat at night dies down eventually and wonder replaces it. Our whispered conversation ebbs, and F and I just sit there in silence.

The faintest of light appears in the eastern sky, and slowly one by one the stars acknowledge the presence of the approaching sun and begin to recede. In the semi-darkness, much before dawn, F nudges me and points to the back of the boat. Under a still bright crescent moon with a shining star above it sat a fisherman on his mat facing west, deep in prayer. Around us is the silence of the vast ocean.  

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The sun is high in the sky and beating down unrelenting. The sea is indigo blue. I wonder how the fishermen can see through the dazzle of the noon sun. I am wearing my sunglasses, yet squinting through it. But their gaze is fixed scanning the surface of the sea for signs of tuna shoals around. There seems to be none, as we keep going further out into the sea. The live bait fishing early morning was full of excitement for me. It was routine work for the 11 fishermen on the boat. Though they are not, I feel tired and doze off under the shade near the bait fish tank. MK wakes me up with one word – Dolphins.

In one-tenth of a second, I am at the bow of the boat peering down at the blue water. There, just next to our boat, on both sides, are about twenty or thirty dolphins swimming along. So close, I could have touched them if my arms were a little longer. Sharp and sleek bodies moving as fast as the boat. Suddenly, they all move away together. Just as I am thinking that the show is over, they return jumping and frolicking. I want to jump in, touch them, feel them, swim with them, say a big thank you for being with us humans for so long. A few minutes later, they disappear leaving me wondering if it was all real or just magic.

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It’s my last day on the island. I am standing at the edge of the eastern jetty, the deepest blue sea spread ahead of me. There’s something different about the current today. Or so I feel. Small eddies form below the jetty and I can see a shoal of a deepest blue fish. There’s a stillness in the air, a rise in humidity. A sign that a thunderstorm and rains are approaching. I stand there under the afternoon sun in awareness of the ocean that is breathing, ebbing and flowing, in a beautiful dance with the moon. This is where life started, billions of years ago - in the womb of the Earth. I had lived for 12 years in a coastal city, but it is here that I experience her magnanimity and strength. I turn back, forever changed.  

The Speaking Land

This was an attempt at writing prose-poetry for Alpine Fellowship Award. The idea was to try out a different style of writing using the Award as motivation.The topic was civilization and the wild and the post is about my experience with the last standing virgin forests in Chhattisgarh

The land spoke, the children of the land spoke. Only we could not hear, land’s children bred of civilization. 

 

She throbbed with an energy that no human commune, today, can bring to birth. Deep and ancient, it ran through the veins of the forest, held in the trees’ girth. The trees spoke of times when they grew with a wild freedom, carrying with them centuries of wisdom gathered with patience and groundedness. Were they there when our land was drifting in the great wide oceans, I could only guess. These ancient teachers: so old that my life, here on this land, felt just an exhalation long. So huge, their panoramic canopy I could fathom only lying on the forest floor. So tall, I felt like a grain of sand at the base of a Himalayan mountain. The soft winter sun filtering down threw shadows that reminded of a time when my ancestors roamed the land on all fours, their memories perhaps carried in our cells. It made me long, just long, for what, my heart then couldn’t tell. 

 

Oh, you speak of a land, imaginary and magical – you would say. Which ancient forest is left now that speak of age-old tales? It’s no fiction, I say, for its there, still there! Right in the heart of my country, a land of forests filled with tigers, elephants, and bears. Where jungle streams gurgle with happiness and flow with ease. Where tribes live among them deeply caring for others, away from things plastic or life filled with disease. 

 

But young towns nearest to the forests, slowly being fed on adrenaline that is money, were abuzz with the idea of wealth under their feet, forgetting that abundance not wealth lay in the nurturing land and wisdom of grandmother trees. They dreamt of a glitzy life and said rightly – how can you have a forest if you desire a city like Mumbai and a life of ease? 

 

I was following the trail of coal, Earth’s gift but civilization’s greed. And it led me here, India’s last wilderness untamed. Deep in the forest, peopled with innocence, were villages unaware of what civilization had in store. For hundreds of acres of this primeval land were marked for mining, and the rivers for dams to clean the gouged coal. They did not know that their home and a life of peace were being readied to be handed away to companies who termed mining – “clean and green”. 

 

Did anyone ask the land, these ancient trees, the people and other children of the forests, if they wanted their home plundered to fuel the lives of the rich? The forests, trees, rivers, and land are all a waste if not for the use of humans. And animals - are they really there or figment of tribal imaginations? The tribes who ‘are so backward’ as to not even know plastic, will be ‘compensated’ with money and given offers of manual labour to ‘improve their livelihood’, they would preach. 

 

As I stood carrying the weight of consequences, a deep ancient grief as old and huge as the trees, welled up in me. Desperate, I walked inside the forest and looked at the trees. And I whispered, “Sorry for all of humanity’s misdeeds”. In that moment, the forest fell deathly silent, no birds chirped and not a leaf stirred. In that eloquent silence, I understood, without a doubt, that the forest knew what her future held.

 

I turned away helpless, stricken by the collective loss. But even in that loss, I returned with a gift. For now I know that the land speaks and all children of the land speaks - of magic and wisdom, of non-judgment and compassion, of balance and a future shift. 

 

 

In the Land of the Blue-Green Sea

 The east coast was three shades of never-seen-before blue; the west coast a deep green that kept changing with the sun. And I was there, somewhere in the middle, lost in nature’s grandness.

The island of Agatti, like most islands of Lakshadweep, is small and can be covered end-to-end within half an hour, if you are on a motorbike. Which means the sea is always with you wherever you go. The sea’s constant presence, however, did not prevent me from being shocked to momentary stillness every time I caught a glimpse of her colours in the month that I was there. During one thunderstorm that I witnessed, the colours shifted with the mood of the weather – light green, dark green, grey, light blue and dark blue – as if the sea was playing her own grand symphony.            

Placed within a unique geography, Lakshadweep is as beautiful as the tourist brochures want you to believe. Perhaps even more if you get to know the sea. But as life in the island started to reveal itself, it became clear as the water that there is no other place in the country like these islands.    

Agatti: Photo - Bipasha M

Almost the entire population follows Islam as its religion with a floating population of ‘outsiders’ largely in Kavaratti, its capital. Though some anthropologists have mentioned Wahabi and Sunni as the main sects here, one can find many traces of Sufism in their rituals and ancient healing traditions. Socio-culturally, they carry the lineage of their Kerala ancestry. They are a matrilineal society, the only other being Meghalaya, where the property passes from mothers to daughters. Unlike Meghalaya, here the husbands do not stay with the wives but visit them from time to time and have to pay money (similar to dowry) to the wives’ family during marriage negotiations. Apart from the island of Minicoy where social mobility of women is known to be higher, the rest of the islands have patriarchal value system where the men take most of the family and financial decisions. As such, participation of women in community level decision making seemed less, with them functioning mostly in the background. Gender segregation at the society level is high, with free interaction between girls and boys being almost non-existent. All across the island I saw young boys and fishermen largely occupying public spaces including tea-stalls, beaches, markets, and jetties, while groups of women and young girls would mostly chill out at the beach during sunset. This segregation also finds its manifestation in one of the simplest yet most obvious aspect of island life, where girls and women don’t know how to swim and are prone to major sea-sickness while travelling on sea.   

These aspects might make the place seem similar to that of north India’s many highly patriarchal and aggressively ‘male’ cities and villages. But this is where things get fascinating. These islanders are one of the warmest, friendliest, and most hospitable communities I have ever come across in the country. People are ready for some conversation and chai at any point in time. Despite gender segregation, there is high level of dignity and respect for each other, something which I find sorely missing in the plains. After I dropped my ‘mainland’ guard, I walked, sat, cycled freely without any fear or looks over the shoulder, even during times when electricity went off pitching the whole island in absolute darkness. The community operates under an invisible cloak of cooperation and collaboration even when ideologies and ideas did not match, for they know that all are dependent on each other in the small space that is their home. One can easily understand why crime rate is almost nil and incidences of domestic violence limited; I did not hear any raised voice or arguments in the month that I was there. With education a priority for all, marriage and child bearing are much delayed with women getting married after the age of 22 or 23 years and men after 25 years, trends that are in stark contrast to those in the mainland.             

It was sublime, the first day of Ramzan as the island slowed down and time reversed and people hurried to the call to prayers. In the days that followed, I would wake up early every day while the island slept and spend a couple of hours walking from the blue sea to the green one, observing life in the tidal pools, lying down on coconut fronds and watching clouds glide across the blue sky, or sitting quietly listening to the sea and the wind.   

Agatti: Photo - Bipasha M

I had to make a hurried exit from the island due to the covid resurgence across the country and the tightening rules there. As the flight made a turn towards the mainland, the island came into full view from above. A tranquil piece of white and green against a vast backdrop of blue appearing as if in a dream, for I couldn’t make out where the ocean ended and the sky began.

Indigenous earth-based traditions regard water as transformative. Living with a beautiful community in the midst of a world of water, I came back a changed person.