There is a deep need within the narrator to be free for her own safety, sanity. A begging to get out, begging to be set free. She succumbs to the supplications of her inner beast. Yet no retreat from the world can mask the feeling of remorse inside. One that reels into layers of complications within. Visceral and primeval. Can anything be done about it: if too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made? My piece grapples with this.

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There is a shipwreck somewhere inside of me…

The sea never claims anything, it returns everything.

I remember being told this tidal truth, of this cosmic balance, as a child.

I was told of one more commonplace truism. Again, one I just as repeatedly refused to remember. That true places are never on maps.

I realize belatedly now that the choice to be a fool in spine and soul was mine alone. The wise know that the living have no right to forget that nothing is ever lost and that one’s truths live within, never outside.

Thirty years after my regrets, my darkest misgivings, were set adrift on waters of the Arabian Sea, or more accurately plunged into its infinite expanse, they salvaged their lost fates and found their way back to me, ingeniously, ignobly, this year, in 2019, as I turned sixty.

They returned to me by riding on the curls of sea waves, by flinging themselves sleekly above fishes, sharks, dolphins, turtles, eels and a multitude of other ever-moving sea creatures, over their goggle-eyes and gaping mouths, and by blowing off the surface of the sea, tail-ended by virile and turbulent winds.

They uncoiled themselves slowly within me over six months, reawakening in my emotional geography, a geography of loss, after being fugitive for three decades. It is almost as if my regrets were back to slyly mock my belief that all they, these chafed, flimsy sensitivities, had been dissolved past oblivion within the sea’s glassy bottomless floor. And laugh at my ignorant efforts to carry on with my life with this sure-footed but silly confidence.

I cast my encumbrances into the sea…

I know that many of you will see my story that is to unfold as distastefully expositional, telling more than showing, and selfish, one that bears only my version. Yet I feel compelled to write it, pick it apart and put it back together in the manner that I think holds my truth.

I had packed into a container of an Indian coastal cargo shipping vessel all the moments in my existence till 1989. The chances I took in life, the relationships I forged, the lives I birthed and the decisions I made. The ship was headed from the Chennai port in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu (then known as Madras port) to one in the western state of Maharashtra, called the Jawaharlal Nehru Port, or oftentimes the Nava Sheva Port.

I wanted away from my past life. Its appendages. Its miscalculations. Its physical and psychological exhaustions. Its demands to deflect my own feelings. So I decided to move from one state to another, and from one state of mind to another.

In a rather quirky and daring experiment at imaginative possibility, kismet, or fate if you want to call it that, decided to play along with my plans at that very time. It decided to take my undeclared wishes, my desire to cleave to aloneness, a lot further. The shipping vessel that carried my-at-a-one-time-life was shipwrecked twenty nautical miles away from Goa and sank beyond a trace.

Maybe the sailors tried to control the sea instead of steering the movements of the ship in a tidal windstorm. Maybe this in a futile attempt to defy the silver-disked moon that ruled the waves, the winds, the ship and the sea that night. Or maybe the ship simply ran aground on rocks, coral reefs, or sandbars. Or maybe the cargo was improperly stored or it was too heavy. Whatever be the reason for the disaster, it happened.

All the better, I had reasoned, when I heard the news. My past wiped clean. And now a fate I can control and remake. Theodor Seuss Geisel’s words, drilled into me since childhood, sang in my head, “You have brains in your head, You have feet in your shoes, You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.”

In what many of you may impute to be a perversity of sorts, after the news of the wreckage, after the irreparable damage, I felt lighter with each step I took. I did not fall through to the center of the world like I earlier feared I might. I felt the opposite. Like I was floating up to whatever you call the place up in the sky that feels good, where I could taste the last bit of the sun and smell the air, sweet vapors, that were more fragrant than perfume. The feeling lasted for some time. A brief some time.

I never did at this point care to look into my rear mirror. Had I done that, the incident of sinking would have reflected the absurdity of trying to control life and its circumstances, as my mindless belief that such an idea is even possible.

I would have known then that the notion is nothing more than a cunning illusion, thin as paper, fragile as a fallen leaf, and a perennial folly as an aim. That it is merely an impulse that is biologically motivated, adaptively selected for evolutionary survival.

The fickle things we believe in just to live!

I really should have seen beyond the world I knew but I lived another thirty years in misguided optimism of having control over my life. Over its circumstances.

Pure saltwater legacy or a nightmare knotted in nylon mesh…

A squad of marine guardians, a team of keen amateur divers, the ecological equivalent of a SWAT team, who lifted sunken vessels as they did tons of snared fishing nets from the Arabian Sea, to repair environmental damage, got in touch with me through a letter dated April 15, 2019. They said they had located the sunken ship that was carrying my cargo, as that of hundreds of others, and were going to attempt to retrieve the ship and the containers within.

They, of course, assumed I would be delighted to be part of their efforts to “re-claim cultural memory” and “renew bonds with our pure saltwater legacy”, unaware that to me the reclamation was a nightmare knotted in nylon mesh. And that I did not want the past to be dredged up and entirely happy to let it rest at its gravesite in the sea.

The visual recording of the retrieval that the team screened for me, and for the other recipients of lost cargo, in a South Mumbai auditorium with great pride, in October 2019, five months after their first communication, seemed hallucinatory at first.

In their initial clips, all we could see were murky images, small, shy, swaying, gray-green shadows. This, we were told, were mossy, planktonic organisms, growing on the containers, and so very overgrown that all they do was to drift and float passively. We were also told that these are the only living beings that are able to flourish in this low oxygen pocket of the sea, other than lantern fish.

As the visuals progressed, I could actually smell the tell-tale, pungent, flavors of the sea and I began to feel part of the waterscape, as if I was born for the sea with fins for limbs. Then as a multitude of cargo surfaced from above the ship waters on the screen, the shadows slipped out from the bodies of these large metallic containers to reveal their enormous sizes. Yet to us, these canisters still did not appear leaden but rather like enormous crimpled walnut shells, odd beings that had squinted with a lifetime of gazing into the secrets of the underworld.

Of fog, storm, and sinking into the abyss…

It was then that I found the broken parts of my soul bob towards me on the screen, deep from the sea waters’ luminescence, wobbling, then limbering, swirling, shimmering, and finally crumbling.

And my feelings that started out as soft, gauzy, floating clouds of emptiness within, pooled up into a recurrent unease, where unknown nerves seemed to convulse, and concluded with an implosion, one with wild ferocity. The kind where remorse, that foamed, steamed and twanged audibly from beneath layers of other imprecise emotions, mushroomed into a cloudburst of self-reproach, self-loathing. Just breathing made my nostrils burst into flame.

My body, I know, since the news of the recovery, the comeback, did its best to be economical with the truth. At least over six months, it did. So as to break off this very frightening clamor within its cells that occurred. To stop this current tangle within the gut. To draw up the insistent crow’s caw within the head, raspy with sore-throatiness. And to muffle the skritch that eventually reached my ears.

My body waited for a while with sturdy deliberation. It submitted itself to languishing, to the affliction of the unoccupied, dulling its motivation, its focus, by falling into the void between flourishing and depression, by being indifferent to its indifference and by staying away from the pressure of being upbeat.

But deep-within, in this period of standby, was the certainty, the instinctual wisdom, that this restiveness, this quiet despair, was just a morphine-induced wait. My body knew it could not hold out. It knew that the disquiet would open out not into desolation but into a throbbing heartache, bursting at the arteries and wind-milling its entire being, spinning its self-image.

And that is what happened. The sea, and the contents it came back with, had my body turn itself inside out. It found my body’s weakest spots to build and break many nightmares, ordeals of shame and guilt, and unleash a wilderness of unnameable emotions. I came to a point of frantic desperation as the spaces for suffering were dilating, filling out.

Questions poured out.

Is there any point in searching out my loss, that had come back to me from the salty formlessness of the sea, not through flickers of information but in its full form, one dripping with pain? Grieving for what was not? Should I undo my current self, its preservation, by bringing back the exclusions? Should I make my past real once more?

Or should I leave the truths veiled, push them back to their watery grave? After all, if I had no answers then, how I can know that I will have them now?

Memories of as far back as I can reach…

Experiencing and expressing emotions always seemed mysterious and confusing to me from childhood. Being in touch with my instincts and intuitions, even a measure of it, and turning the understandings from them into action, into emotional awareness, is something I inherently lacked. My social experiences were skewed from being raised in foster care but my learnings on tamping down emotions to handle and adapt to situations were sharp.

As I stepped into my twenties, in the 1980s, I fell in love Vikram, and, contrary to character, I let my feelings learn new metrics, push up for expression, take me to embarrassingly foolish places, wheel me around, giddy-headedly, spontaneously, and I even impetuously went so far as to let them run their course in my gut, in my heart, in my head.

With the usual recklessness of lovers, Vikram and I avoided talk of tomorrow in our early days of courtship. It did not seem to matter.

Two children later at twenty-nine years of age, it did, to me. Choosing each other as family did not seem to be such a powerful statement anymore. To me, we four began to get compressed and crushed down in our two-room apartment, in a house that seemed sizeable earlier. My husband suggested we move into a smaller town, a distance away from Chennai for airy, spacious living, uncaring about the fact that I had a mistrust of nature and a disdain of quiet living.

At this point, I hated knowing what I wanted, wanted with maddening hunger, …the need to be alone…and hated knowing even more that this was not the same as Vikram wanted. The children, of course, were too young to know what they did want and what they did not.

As my ability to perceive, control and evaluate my core emotions started to stagger, to turn too overwhelming and conflicting for me, I knew it was time to thwart their overflow for self-preservation. It also dawned on me that my inability to recognise and share my family’s inner states, their complex inner workings, in the lack of self-awareness, would harm everyone and that it would be best for me to leave. As a mother, I guess I was coded to protect my young, even from me.

I resolved within that my journey from now on was not about becoming someone else but un-becoming who I was for them. Or when I was with them. I left them, my stuff packed into a container and my goodbyes hurried. Abandoning a husband and two tiny children, aged five and two, who both did not understand that I was leaving for good, was not easy by any measure.

I saw my leaving, my movement of un-becoming, as an act of courage. They as a betrayal. Cold, callous, malicious, with no remorse. One filled with witchcraft and vice that let a wilderness of hatred into their lives. I was told this when I re-visited them during our divorce proceedings. They could understand it only from their level of perception.

I guess you do not destroy others and decide how they should feel, and, thus, your perspective has to stay only with you. So to put it simply, our thoughts did not quite match up from then on and neither did our memories of life together thereafter. He remarried, I learned later, to a kind woman, who helped make less the detestations, and added another child to their family.

A life of organized indifference…

In my second chance at life, in my thirty years away from my family, nemesis, if you can call it that, spiraled out in a strange way.

While my career in the banking sector took off, money came my way, and I made a decent living, in my moments of introspection, I knew that about living my life, I could only say this, it was a partial affair. Living but partly living. A life layered by an un-astonished sameness.

Mostly, I was content in my unforced self-sufficiency, in my emotional distance from others, in my stuck-in-the-old-ways kind of life that I caught back by sheer reflex of habit. Cheer, if I can call it that, came in a far-off sort of way, fuzzy, wavering, suppressed, lukewarm. I can safely say my emotions were diffused, incapable of much happiness or unhappiness, pain or pleasure, hovering in a neural place that showed a disinterest to reach anything to a conclusion.

Reciprocation of feelings, the sharing of myself, and the accepting of joy as well as storms, was still hard for me. My banking career only fuelled my unreceptiveness. I still could not offer myself or even a bit of myself to another being.

Though I tried, I invariably associated with those whose scents resembled mine, people of dull heartless-ness, those within a submerged loveless-ness, an alone-ness, and in a vacuum, who like me were unable to form bonds and were sexually cold.

So I missed no one, yearned for no one, expected nothing of anyone. There were no nostalgic recollections of the past either.

I often watched diminishment cover my body and the faculties of my soul, disinterestedly, as if I was watching another person. I saw that it left no trace, cast no shadow, and had no consequences. This feeling of indifference mingled with my daily life so exquisitely until it was not a separate thing at all.

I would not say my thoughts were in a maze, or that my mind was in a mess yet I knew I was fraying from the inside, slowly and softly giving way, moving inward from the edge, in a way that only I knew. And I kept this secret, this atrophy of mine, locked within, under the guise of independence. A fierce one.

Was this my punishment? I wondered. For choosing this state of vacancy, invisibility, reduced-ness? For my inability and fear to deal with complexities and adjustments within relationships? For choosing to remain distant rather than devastated when separated from my family? Too see and feel too little?

If it was, I was willing to accept it.

Make the crooked straight, make the straight to flow…

What I was unprepared though was for was the inner squall that hit me when the commodities within my container, reasonably well-preserved, were laid out in front of me in a large shed on the Mumbai dock, transported as it was from Goa. This a month after the film show in October.

The torment on that day, and the days that followed, made me strained. My nerves and veins burned in a manner that they had never done. The heightened consciousness that filled me was hot, scalding hot, as if I was on fire from within. It thawed my impassiveness completely, and anguish, rage, fear, were stripped of their cloak of time.

Yet in a contradictory way, in a way that cannot be explained with words, I came extraordinarily alive. I held the blaze close to me as it grew stronger, possessed me. I nurtured its heat, its intimacy. A single ember in the form of a lost container brought a wildfire to life. It brought to me the truth of who I am. A creature with feelings, with unresolved past traumas.

This truth, like the glorious cadence of an unfettered birdsong, was liberating, and enlarging as my new emotions demanded living space.

Many around me, perhaps, interpreted my experience to be the repressed ghosts of my past emerging from their forced smaller memory spaces, my contrition, and even my redemption. Perhaps, they are all these and more.

For me, it was about coming face to face with all parts of myself, reaching my feelings to the extreme but not over its apex. As the tempest raged it was about learning that to nurture some things, you have to bring them close to but not over the edge so that you can retract them to an even, center point, to the wisdom and the equilibrium of the middle, a balance of the mind and heart. Quite like a chess player, who gains the middle board and gets to a superior position, or like a person who reaches the eye of the storm to be safe.

Right now my emotions are still in confusion and chaos, in the lack of an art to shape it, to trim its sharp edges and to harmonize it into some kind of sureness, into a middle-ness. That was my undoing earlier. I had led my feelings to the extreme.

At sixty my true challenge lies in experiencing the emotions that go with my story, learn to deal with them, allow them to find their level, and settle into some kind of tenderness. Tasks I failed in all my life. Yet tasks that can no longer hide behind invisible lines.

Do I crave for my family? Sadly, they have wandered off too far away in my mind to recall, miss or crave.

Do I wish for a new one? No. At least, not as yet.

A connection with others? Yes.

But I know better now. I know that I can reach out to others only after having learned self-cultivation and self-compassion, by developing an ability not to hurt others or myself. And by arriving at a point where I know not to suffer from regrets. THE END

By Chitra Gopalakrishnan

From: India

Website: http://www.chitragopalakrishnan.com