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“Beechalee” is the glee-drenched scream from my grandson. The word must be broken into two words and explained. They are ‘beach’ and ‘alai’ (wave). He just has to see the sand and the waves, not necessarily really, even a picture or a photograph will do, and he gets animated and goes “beechalee”.
We are so fortunate, the people of Chennai, to have the Marina. It is supposed to be the second longest or whatever. I’d like to think I’m not very interested in such statistics but, really, it is because I do not have the brains to remember them. But it is Nature’s gift to Chennai. Of course, I mean the Marina, not my brains! The Marina is our city’s oxygen cylinder. It is there for everyone, without having to pay through the nose for the oxygen.
Many, many years ago when we were under the colonial yoke, there was a proposal by the South Indian Railway Company to build a railway track along the Marina to connect the Saidapet and Beach Railway Stations. There was, however, a public meeting to register public protest. I think the meeting was held in the same place where the Community Centre now stands opposite St. Thomas Church. My great grandfather was one of the speakers. He said in his plea that the future generations would not forgive us if the track was laid, because the beach was like the lungs of the city. The Government, to its credit, dropped the idea. Can you imagine now!
In those days, I am talking of the early decades of the last century, men in public life, who lived in the nearby areas like Mylapore and Triplicane, met every evening at the Marina. They discussed all matters under the sun. I imagine it was something like the Salons of France, where like-minded persons interested in literary and philosophical pursuits gathered. Only here, the men sat on the sands. In Sanskrit, there is a beautiful word to describe members of such a gathering: ‘Sahrdaya’, which means ‘together in heart.’ It is so rare now to find persons who are “together in heart”, and also to find a place where you can be so together. The silvery sands of the Marina provided such a place then. To go back to my ancestor, I am so proud that long before environment and ecology became the cool words, he understood their importance.
In Paulo Coelho’s The Zahir, Mikhail says, “We even made a sea disappear,” and describes how it happened. “I’m twenty-five years old, and that is all the time it took, just one generation, for the water that had been there for millennia to be transformed into dust.” Mikhail goes on in a voice which Coelho describes as being no longer ecological, but tragic, “My grandfather says that the Aral Sea was once known as the Blue Sea, because of the colour of its waters. It no longer exists, and yet the people there refuse to leave their houses and move somewhere else; they still dream of waves and fishes, they still have their fishing rods and talk about boats and bait.”
The sea and its waves not only have this umbilical hold on us, they also have a soothing effect. They calm you. Some 30 years ago, I think, I remember an evening when I was at the beach. A friend of ours was walking by. I tried to catch his eye and waved out. But he didn’t see me. Then he went and stood in front of the waves. The body language indicated that he was distressed, upset or angry, that he was definitely not at peace. I saw him, but I felt that I was in some way intruding on his privacy. This was a private dialogue with Nature, and he was asking, “Why?” Even to look at his back was a kind of eavesdropping. So I turned to my boys making sand pies. Have you ever noticed how, when you think you should not look at something, your eyes keep veering towards it? It was so with me too. But after something like an hour, the man suddenly shrugged, and it looked as if the burden was lifted from him. He turned around and walked back to his car. His head was lifted up. He had got his answer from the waves. They had listened to him and given him comfort. I am sure he was neither the first nor the last to have got this blessing from the sea.
The beach has its hawkers. They sell balloons, kites, peanuts, sundal, corncobs and a variety of other things. Oh! I cannot forget the visiri manga (mango fan). I do not know what they are called now, the delight fit for the gods, mangos cut just so that they spread like a fan. It should be eaten with salt and raw chilli powder. There are also the fortune-tellers with the black rod in their hands. One look at me, they know that good fortune is just waiting to pour on me. Then there are the sand-pies. This is another universal addiction for children. Children anywhere and everywhere, then and now, love packing a small tin or bucket with wet sand and turning it down to make lovely cylindrical sand-pies. And in any group of children, there was also the ghoulish tormentor who would knock the sand castles down. “Amma, ivan ellaatthaiyum udaikkaraan!” (Amma, this fellow knocks down everything). But soon another attempt will be made.
Another memory that flits in when I think of the beach is of moonlight dinners. When we were children, why, even after I was married, we had lovely moonlight dinners on Pournami nights. The menu was almost fixed, because you had to factor in the convenience of serving the food, with the wind blowing over heads. Potato chips were a must, with nary a thought of the bad fat-good fat thing. It was such a together-space, the moonlight dinners on the beach.
Then, what about standing in the waves? How long could it be since you stood there and allowed the waves to kiss you and go away? I remember, when my sons were young, we would go very regularly to the beach. My mother-in-law came along too. When we went to the waves, she would sit ‘guarding’ our footwear and things, looking at us with quiet warmth. The three of us would try to predict which would be the “biggie” wave. Some waves would look big when approaching us, but lose force before they reached us. It was fun! But you never get tired of seeing the waves dashing, touching and leaving, again and again. Alaigal oyadho? (Will the waves not be still)?
This touching and leaving is a metaphor of life too, isn’t it? We meet people in our lives, they touch us and then they leave us. Things happen to us, they touch us with joy or sorrow, but they pass. We must learn to feel to the full the moment of impact and then to let go. The moment when the wave touches us is the moment of ‘now’.
Waves are also used as a metaphor to explain the philosophy of non-dualism. Each one of us is just a wave raising its head and receding away, but we are part of the whole body of water. Our life is just as important as the one fleeting fraction of a second when the wave rises and subsides. A humbling thought!
Waves can be used as a metaphor for people in a society too. We would do well to remember that there is no difference between Wave One and Wave Two. All the waves are part of the whole, they are different and yet equal, they are different and yet the same, all the waves are in the sea. So there you have it, we live in a society, which includes everyone and everyone is equal. The waves speak to you of the limitlessness and vastness of Creation. Perhaps that is why we are calmed and comforted and uplifted when we look at the waves. We see that our problems, our pettinesses, our traumas and our tragedies are micro-miniscule compared to the Universe. It really does not matter. We realise that this too shall pass.
When I was a girl of 5, my father was posted in Goa. Our house was near the sea. So, naturally, I was taken to the beach every evening. Big Japanese ships would call. I am told I used to remember the names of the ships, the various marus. Maybe I have seen Komagata maru and Daikai maru too. But the best part of this Goa memory is that I would wait every evening watching the sun go down. You know why? I thought I would hear the hissing noise when the red-hot sun touched the cool waters. What a great ssss would that be? Just imagine the audio-visual, the sun shaking off the droplets of water while rising and creating a shooosh sound while setting. Cool!
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