panaecea

My fondness for the sea is some four decades old since I first visited Digha , then a small seaside resort, near Bengal-Orissa border.  I believe now it’s as flourished as any other bustling town which gains momentum gradually with more and more human footfalls season after season.

When we visited it was far less occupied. There were flocks of  bathers nonetheless their existence did not render the atmosphere claustrophobic.  Clean stretches and stretches of empty beach lay deserted, unexplored and even cautioned to be avoided in fear of ungainly mishaps happening now and then.

Getting accommodation in hotels was not that difficult even “in season”. Though crowded you still found your own spaces inbetween wherein you could enjoy breathing deeply, evenly and easily.

My first consciousness (read sight) of the sea was mesmeric.  How enchanting the waves were! Crashing near the shore. Receding hurriedly to  lap up again. The frothy water fairies pirouetting along the embankment, caressing the sands momentarily then suddenly turning away in disdainful charm like a pouting beauty asking to be enticed back.

An old photograph from my album

Digha sea was like a mischievous, almost audacious, young girl. It liked to seduce the farers playfully. I was with my kaku (father’s younger brother) –  my guardian after father’s untimely demise. We had a lovely time. I remember laughing and giggling  a lot.

I don’t recall how Kaku ended up hiring a deaf and dumb rickshaw puller who religiously reported each day very punctually to take us on a tour around the town and even beyond the state border. Kaku somehow managed to communicate with him. At first raising his voice which literally fell on deaf ears and subsequently with frantic gesticulations whenever his back was turned towards him. How it made me laugh!

Kaku, like my father, was a quiet man. He was a confirmed bachelor but very dutiful towards his sisters, that is, my aunts, and needless to say, towards me. Nobody compelled him to do what he did for me – he did it on his own. He would laugh silently when I shared something funny. He taught me to be frugal in spending which my father never did. He had plans to ensure a so called secure future for me but I dashed all his hopes to ground when I decided to return to a chaotic life in the city I was brought up.

We are a family of unconscious comedians. Kaku was no better. But most times we enjoyed each other’s company in silence. Now that I look back I realise he filled up the vacuum created by my father’s sudden departure to heavenly abode. Unfortunately, Kaku left this world quietly – a  broken man disillusioned with life. He never called out to me. I was not there when perhaps he needed me the most.

I bonded with the sea deeper with him around. It was made easier by his laconic company. We would sit for hours on the shore watching the waves come and go unfailingly in  rhythmic succession. The waves rushing towards the shore would not stay put. They had to hurry back again to the sea. They never broke that unwritten promise made to infinity. They were not humans who callously went back on their words disrespecting their own selves.

The bathers often dumped their baggages on me. I felt happy taking care of them. Mid sea they would call out, “Come! Join us!” I declined. I was afraid. I did not know how to swim. My lack of skill became a deterrent.

Time was fiction when sea became a reality. It never intruded and we never invited the needles of the clock to meddle in. Digha’s sea was a clear light blue. The waves laced with white frills. The setting sun imbued it with the colour of gold. Wistfully it would darken into a shade of  electric blue as night fell.  Going to sleep listening to the sea was like a timeless lullaby. The roar of the sea was like the eternal sound of creation and devastation which was carried on endlessly in the cosmos. It’s we who never paid attention to it. But it continued without a break immersed deep into its own mood and cadence.

I had taken a fancy to photography during this time and kept on clicking randomly with the beginner’s Hot Shot. Its still there tucked in somewhere. An instrument of making memories. Those moments which I am really fond of. A simpler life. One with Nature. With the waves. With the sea. The sea was never without the waves. The waves were never without the sea. It’s we who moved away. Farther and farther till the body of endless movements became a mere speck in the vignettes of mind. And the waves just a distant sound.

We met a couple during our stay. In fact, it was Kaku who met them first. The man, a creepy fellow, was hell bent on introducing me to a TV producer who was into making serials. The woman, an emaciated being, serious faced and completely sucked out of happiness,  endured her husband in silence. They had a child, a girl, if I remember correctly. The child seemed to have no role in the man’s life. The woman was attached to her. She tried to be friendly with me too. But I detested  them. “How could you be with them?” I cried. Kaku had a knowing, impish grin. “Why? What’s Wrong ?” He asked. It didn’t take much to extricate Kaku from their clutches. He always made wrong choices when it came to relationships with humans. It would have been way different had it been otherwise.

Chandeswar or Chandaneshwar is the only temple in India where Lord Shiva is worshipped in niraakaar swaroop or in formless form. The temple is just across Bengal border falling in the state of Orissa. There were buses which took those who were interested to the temple. We went by our favourite rickshaw.

It was scary, extremely slippery and pitch dark. A few weakly lit earthen diyas strategically placed in the alcoves could not overpower the strong sense of foreboding that swelled up with the satanic shadows that ruled the interiors of the sacro sanctum. The air heavily coagulated with the echoes of incessant, unintelligible chants. The chanters were just bodiless hands shoving heads of the devotees into the kund – a bottomless pit. The pit was most probably in the shape of a phallus symbolic of the Lord. A slim stream of water flowed somewhere down below. The devouts became aware of it’s existence only as the copper or brass ewer tied to a  long rope hit the base and a splash could be heard from deep within. The usual sense of  submission was largely overtaken by an all devouring apprehension of possible manhandling. I could feel the rope being pulled up and water spilled all around me accompanied again with a string of incomprehensible drone. I was surged with relief as I  made towards the exit after the rituals were over – an uncommon feeling to be experienced in a place of worship.

One evening we saw a middle-aged man in spotless white kurta pajama playing football on the beach with a green coconut shell. He had a bushy moustache. His hair was tousled and fell across his narrow forehead which was demarcated by an elongated stretch of vermillion tika. “He is drunk.” Muttered Kaku under his breath. Completely unaware of the passersby the man kept on intently kicking his play ball which went zig zag alternately hitting the embankment and the opposite wall which ran facing the beach.  His single-minded focus on his toy was so strikingly childlike! I stared at him awestruck. On some other occasion his antics might have made me laugh. But not then.  Anything and everything on the seashore seemed remarkably natural.

The sea could make you go back in time and become a child. The sea could make you philosophize on the futility of all things worldly. The sea could make you a carelessly jubilant youth dangerously surfing on the rough waves or running wildly down the beach. The sea could evolve you into a sage aspiring for divinity. The sea had such transformative power over human minds  that even the most unthinkable, unimaginable, improbable became palpable, attainable , accessible. Thus an empty coconut shell became a football, a man past his prime in a state of inebriation became a gleeful boy and a woman in her mid twenties witnessing the drama of life unfolding before her eyes became so absorbed that she overlooked the comical side presented by the spectacle.

We never returned to Digha again. But Digha kept on beckoning like a long lost friend. “Come! Come to me.” It said. But I did not keep the promise the waves made with the sea. I moved away never to lap up again to be fascinated by the hypnotic magic, to be one with its waves ducking, dancing , undeviating, to warmly cuddle the careworn grains of sands spread over it’s beaches with my curled up toes in remembrance of a relationship fudged with time.

I said goodbye to Digha forever….