seaside stories

We spent a June week near Puri this year. More the need to leave than the need to go somewhere, which gratefully, everyone in the family gets. Slightly itchy around the waistbands if there pass six months without a trip. That's when this first happened, among many others, the one I mean now is how we got on a boat, like every time, to bob up and down an afternoon away on a river. Except this time, slapped out of our siestas by salt that came at our faces like an epidemic of needles. The man grinned, we're here, take off shoes, please. Um, we're going to march into that pile of salt? - no, no, madam, take off shoes please.

We totter off boat, me grumbling mostly - what is this, the Satyagraha? was having such a nice dream too - the sand and salt are sharper than whale teeth, biting into calves, arms, back - should've come as an eskimo, grumble, skin is peeling off - the wind howls, tangible and sour and sticking to ear lobes like lice. We persevere; the man indefatigable. Dunes, look, dunes - stop being so cheerful, grumble. About six feet away, there's a fisherman tossing his nets in, his body pulling back in an impossible arc every few minutes and relaxing again as the net stayed suspended over his head for just a second, before falling into each gentle, identical splash - what is he catching I wonder, rock salt?

This time Ma glares, so I stop, we're almost at the peak of the hill of salt, when with an immense hush, the blinding wind dies down. We were on the other side. And there they were. Two seas and an ocean, the man grins. Without warning each of us runs out in separate directions; Didi is the one yawping, I think.

I try and find the middle of the circle and wedge heels in. Water gushing in, sand scudding away from between toes. Oldest, fondest memory. And that collective roar of oceanic exultation that no shell can quite contain. In minutes, it was probably about fifteen that I stood there, thinking it would be the most natural thing to wait patiently to be swept in. Just listen, Ma whispers from somewhere, just listen and watch and breathe in deeply. Remember it to that last, tiny crystal leaching your legs.

-- This afternoon - last afternoon, it's 4 in the morning holy cow - I finally earned myself a Wacom Intuos 4. Have drawn over twenty things since, but this is today's last. Reproduced inasmuch as can be with the reference image being only a memory and the skill being deplorably slow in progress.

i was probably more sun-burnt.

Life as an anachronism is more ebb than flow - dryer when the face that convinced you you were right changes its mind - but I know this: that for those few minutes that the world stood still, I possessed all.