tides & cycles

*INTPc Writing Exercise: Write a soothing novel in 12 paragraphs.

*

Been visiting my grandfather at the hospital across Saturday and Sunday. Needed to breathe some air, so escaped to the beach for a few hours.

There is a quieter stretch just away from where the Big Splash swimming pool with its water-slides was. That has now been redeveloped into a dining complex, with a bar where the beautiful hang out.

The casuarinas are old on that strand, and the ground is littered with their fallen needles and spiky fruits. Old men sit by the side of their boats, and they look past me to the sea. There are first loves which time never steals.

I have loved the sea since I was a child, before the area was developed into the hip/sexy/cool hangout it is now. That was some 25 years ago. The sea was cleaner, the water much further back. The years brought development, pollution. But quietly, inexorably, the sea has taken some strands back. The waves there are clean again. Full circle.

Small things litter the memory. Weekends wandering by the shore, picking up shells, stones, bits of glass and wood, being burnt brown as berries. Digging for little clams and crabs, learning to throw a net to catch the tiny silver fishes which feed near the pier, or the shoals of shrimp. How my dad one day decided his daughters would learn to swim, and unceremoniously tossed us in. Even now, I do an awkward doggy paddle if caught unawares.

We learnt to read the sea. The preternatural, opaque green stillness which signalled a rainstorm approaching. The dark blue, almost black howling during the monsoon season. The pale-pink, morning sweetness after. Where the tides changed and where the currents were strong, where the sand-bed would do a sudden dip and the water would turn icy.

How the mornings would have pink bougainvillea and red ixora blossoms washed on the sand, blown there by the land breezes the night before. The afternoons would have sea coconuts, sea almonds and mangrove seedlings brought by the tides from the neighbouring islands.

Love also brought the first encounters with death: Dead fishes and the sun-bleached cartilage of squids would come to rest some days. I remember burying the fishes as a child, constructing little tombstones of stones and coral bits, hoping their families would not be too sad.

In the evenings, if you were lucky, you could glimpse horseshoe crabs mating near the shallows, and glistening fish-eggs deposited among patches of seaweed. Life follows the tides. We would range the shoreline, watching the fishermen pull in their boats and their floating nets, entranced by the garoupas, pomfrets, crabs and bass, paying particularly rapt attention if an unfortunate stingray was hauled in.

Growing up, the beach was where I would run to whenever I grew distant, disenchanted and frustrated. In her ever-changing moods, I found solace and constancy. It calmed the restlessness in me again today.

I know I will have to bury my grandfather soon, and the tides will change again and my turn will come some day, some time.

In my selfish way, I hope there would be someone to bury my bones then, who loves me deep enough to mourn me. Like a blossom carried on the waves, I would touch their minds with the sea's knowledge of the tides, the cycles and the years, and so quiet their grief with the gentle certainty that they are loved, more deeply than they ever believed possible.

Postscript: My grandfather passed away a week later.