As children, we ran toward the water the moment we heard the ocean roar – obeying an instinct we could not name. The Marina Beach of my Madras childhood was bright and noisy: cotton candy, merry-go-rounds, families taking in the fresh, salty air – the Sunday evening Marina.
One of the longest urban beaches in the world, the place tries on various guises as the day lengthens into night. It becomes a different place, and it is this afterhours shoreline that Sujatha Rangarajan captures in his novella Marina, set in the 1990s, the early years of India’s economic liberalization. Marina is a living system with its own rhythms, hierarchies, and unseen shadows.
Awash in the yellow of sodium lamps, Sujatha’s Marina comes into focus. The rich North Indian Seths arrive; their wives lounge on aluminum chairs. Their pet dogs leap at the waves and chase ghost crabs, scuttling creatures that make perfect holes in the wet sand. Young couples – the bold and the not-so-bold – linger in the gathering dark for a few private moments, but they do have a bus to catch. Those who depend on public transport live by the timetable.
By 8.30 pm, Marina enters the phase Sujatha calls meditative. Against the backdrop of drying fishing nets, shorebirds – perhaps blackcapped night herons – dart into the darkening waters of the Bay of Bengal to catch fish. Farther out, boats switch on their lights and look towards the shoreline for entertainment. And then, almost as an aside, the writer mentions that the keeneyed might spot dolphins.
Dolphins, here? Did they really swim off these waters? We are a city by the sea, yet the idea of dolphins just offshore surprised me.
But yes, humpback dolphins still move in small pods along this coast, keeping just beyond the breakers from Ennore down to Kovalam – a stretch of port, fishing villages, and new suburbs. Fishermen notice them often; beachgoers almost never do. The animals prefer quieter waters just beyond our sight.
In Sujatha’s telling, nature is only prelude. The real drama begins when the human predators arrive. As the last of the petromax-lit food carts shut down, another set of night creatures rolls in on motorbikes. Running red lights, engines revving, they grab the last packets of fish chips from roadside stalls. Young men, bodies buffed by hours in the gym, announce themselves with the casual arrogance of those who have never been denied anything. Whether they speak Tamil or English hardly matters – their true language is violence. They flick open beer cans – the hiss cuts through the dark – then smoke pot, snort cocaine, and speak casually of buying sex.
This is the Marina Sujatha walks his readers into – a perfect setting for a crime that the iconic detective duo, Ganesh and Vasanth – the cool, cerebral lawyer and his irrepressible, wisecracking assistant step in to solve. A young man’s body is found on the shore. The suspect is the leader of the drugaddled teen gang. The boy’s industrialist father calls Ganesh in – not for his legal expertise but to simply determine whether the bribe will move through the “right” channels. No report has been filed yet; the case can be quietly erased.
When the assistant Vasanth drops in to gather the facts of the case, the spoilt young man at the centre of the mess stays slouched in his chair reading a Peanuts comic as if the whole affair were a minor inconvenience. “You are up shit creek without a paddle young man,” Vasanth tells him, a line straight out of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Impressed by a man who knows his drugs, his American slang, and the night economy on Marina Beach, the boy starts calling Vasanth “guru”.
The case resolves with the usual Madras irony: the guilty punished, the corrupt rewarded and the city – indifferent. The characters, especially Vasanth, speak Madras bashai, the city’s irreverent slang, which is delightful. To me, however, the highest point of the novella is the introduction of urban ecology, specifically dolphins – a detail Sujatha drops casually, as if the natural world were simply another presence in the dark. It is a reminder of how easily the city forgets the wildness at its edge.
And no city can afford to forget the wildness at its edge.