That time I looked at the sea

That time I looked at the sea, I did not think much of it. It was the warm feeling the usual place gives. It felt like strolling leisurely, but I quite dislike becoming comfortable with this feeling because it makes me invisible to things – they don’t present themselves like they used to. When that happens, moving away from the place, as I often do for long intervals, helps me reflect upon it, makes me think of things I didn’t realise earlier, makes me long even.

It is winter, and I miss the sea, even as I long for the distant snow-capped Kangto I see once in a while through a sheet of fog. But time makes it difficult to reminisce. It becomes difficult to write, not because I cannot recollect, but as memories become more distant, emotions explode. Collecting them and weaving them in a string of thoughts is exhilarating if not overwhelming.

But here I am, thinking about that moment I knew I would write about. Years later, I thought to myself then, I would look back at this cherished, sad, moment, and write about what it meant. That moment never came until now. To encapsulate how it feels, it’s like a barnacle cut – it hurts worse because barnacles are jagged and rough and the sea salty. A barnacle cut is now a distant memory, but a memory I can now romance about.

That time I looked at the sea, I did not think of the sun and the sand. It donned the same old shade of colour, a summertime dullness bathing the entire landscape, a late-morning early-evening glow etched in my memory. It has a certain bleakness to it, one that I don’t really dislike but it’s a colour of nostalgia, a longing for a non-existing memory. It’s like that colour of the pages of an old book from your father’s library you’ve never read but has been here since before your birth.

After many years, and many years ago from now, I accompanied my father and sister on a walk along the sea. Led by a marine biologist, it was a saunter through a long stretch of sandy shore of Arabian Sea with the mouth of Banganga River to the north and basalt outcrops to the south. Beach-goers frolicked, someone kept an eye on the sky for the White-bellied Sea Eagle, a bird of the seaside, and someone looked to the ground, at the life that hides in the coming and going of the waves.

Receding waves left behind small depressions where sea carrots – the anemones – buried partially, unfurling during high tide to filter-feed on the stuff the waves bring in. We walked past the deep-red anemones and shells of many hues and colours. The biologist has been walking the same beach, seeing the same anemones and shells regularly. Without a sign in the sand save the tall line of suru trees – he didn’t look at them – he knew how to find the intertidal dwellers, knew where they live.

That time I looked at the sea, it wasn’t to see inward. I thought little about life between chasing ghost crabs and looking for beached fishes – looking inward from the outward, interacting with the sea and absorbing whatever I wanted to feel. The real boost, of course, was in finding the denizens of the intertidal zone. The more I looked outward the more I felt.

After many steps of which there is no count, we reached the rocky shore on a low tide, full of intertidal rock pools teeming with life. Algae of various shapes and sizes, fishes, snails, crabs, and more varieties of anemone and zoanthids. Life, I thought, fully looking outward many years after that moment, is lived on the precipice – the edge of dry land farther ashore and deep sea farther offshore.

With a habitual compulsion, I looked for target perch and gobi and shrimps in the rock pools – as did my father who was still at it as I was as a child with a fishing net in hand. They were all there, in the bucketful of trapped seawater, as I found them in my childhood on some other part of the Konkan coast trailing my father, breaking the reflection of the blue sky by peering close to the surface of the pool. Not that we could catch any, they have, after all, outmanoeuvred predators after them – real predators like birds and such – for millions of years – in a rocky bucket. The glass shrimps, the pistol shrimps (that’s a real shrimp with an actual air pistol), live a delicately balanced life between the threat of being drained off and being washed off into the open sea with the coming high tide.

That time I looked at the sea, I did not think much of myself. Many years later as I write, having seen the first rays of the golden sun hitting the massif of Kangto in the morning, I realise that to look inward we need to, we have to, we must, look outward. A rocky pool is really our planet.

And then, as we peered over one of the many rock pools looking for sea slugs, we espied a set of four arms clinging to the edge of a loose rock. It stayed still, sensing a set of four heads silhouetted against a clear sky from the circular corners of its world. A hand entered, tugging at the rock it clung to, setting it lose, and pulled it out of its environment.

This was a moment that I did not expect to partake in, but the urge to understand a different lifeform, one of the few non-chordate sentient non-humans, a cephalopod, drove me to look at the octopus in its natural environment like the urge of a mountaineer to climb Mount Everest. Several sets of legs and arms crowded around it as it let go of the rock and crawled along the wet basalt looking for a way back into the pool.

That time I looked at the sea, it looked back at me. The octopus’ freckles on translucent skin pulsated to the beat of human heart. It appeared to blend-in with this terrestrial world, either to become invisible or to merge with the biped observers, I believe. It wasn’t out for a minute before it slipped back into its home pool, and instead of squirting its way into a cranny of rocks, it stayed still.

It stayed in the murky waters, lidless eyes gazing into my inner self. It was not a strange piercing gaze; it had almost shut its pupils from the glare of the sun. It had nothing to teach me, I think. That these are my reflections, which many years later I would assign to this octopus of the rock pool, never occurred to me, but sitting far from the sea and thinking about that moment now, this is all I can find.

I had many plans to write about the octopus as a symbol of English imperialism, of its intellect and the fascination humans have for it. Seeing an octopus, as wild as the tiger of the jungle and the eagle of the skies, brought back memories of discovering my first seashell, first crab, first cuttlefish bone those many years ago. That time I looked at the sea, it was not about searching for something. It was about being reminded of childhood walks with my parents, and that’s it. In the scheme of nature, this memory would have slipped into the back of my mind had I not taken years to write about it.

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The hiatus is over. I’m hoping to write at least once a month or in two months in 2025.