I had come to Kanyakumari in the way one comes to such places without particular purpose, following a vague recommendation from a man I had met at a dinner in Madras whose name I had already forgotten. He had said something about the light in the early mornings being unlike anything else on the subcontinent. I am a tolerably experienced traveller and I have learned to be suspicious of such claims, which are usually made by people who have spent three days somewhere and wish to seem more interesting than they are. In this instance, however, the man had been right. The light at that particular confluence of three seas is extraordinary, and I found myself, on the third morning of what I had intended to be a stay of two nights, rising well before dawn and making my way down to the shore.
It was there that I first saw Selvam.
He was pushing a boat into the water, if boat is the word for the thing, which is perhaps generous. It was more accurately a collection of planks that had agreed, for the time being, to float together. He was perhaps sixty, a small, lean man of the kind that seems to have had all unnecessary material gradually removed by years of physical work and weather, leaving only what was essential. His movements had the quality I have occasionally observed in very old craftsmen: a total absence of wasted motion, each action so thoroughly practised as to have become indistinguishable from instinct.
There was a dog. I noticed it only after I had been watching for some minutes — it had a stillness that made it difficult to distinguish from the shadow it sat in. A large animal, or had been; age and whatever misfortune had befallen the left hind leg had reduced it considerably. It sat at the waterline watching Selvam with an attention I can only describe as professional. When the boat was far enough into the shallows, Selvam reached into a cloth in the bottom of the boat and held something out without looking down. The dog took it without moving. Three seconds. Neither acknowledged it. Selvam got in and rowed out into the dark.
I stood on the shore feeling, as one often does in the presence of lives organised around genuine necessity, faintly decorative.
—
I asked about him that evening at the guesthouse, where a man named Rajan presided over indifferent food with such evident pride that I had not the heart to remark upon it.
“Selvam?” Rajan said. “Yes, yes. He is here long time. His father also, his father’s father also. Always fishing.” He paused. “Not so much fish now.”
I asked him to elaborate.
“Before, the boats come back full. My father told me this. Now —” He made a gesture eloquent of diminishment. “The sea is changing. The weather also. Last year, cyclone in November. My father lived here sixty years, no cyclone in November.” He shrugged with the philosophical resignation of a man who has concluded that the universe is not organised for his convenience. “Selvam goes every day. What else he will do?”
—
On my fifth morning I rose earlier than before, at three, driven by an insomnia I have come to regard as the occupational condition of a man who spends too much time thinking about other people’s lives. I went down to the shore.
Selvam was already there. He moved through the dark with the particular confidence of a man who has made the same preparations so many times that the dark is no impediment. The dog sat at its post. The fish changed hands. The boat went out.
I watched until I could no longer distinguish it from the water.
And then — I find this difficult to account for, and I offer it only because honesty compels me — something shifted in the way I was seeing. Perhaps it was the hour, or the quality of the dark, or simply that I had been watching this man for five mornings and had begun, without intending to, to know him. Whatever the reason, I found that I was no longer standing on the shore watching a fisherman row out to sea.
—
The water this morning was flat and dark, which should have pleased him. Flat was good. Flat meant he could go further without fighting. But there was something in the flatness that did not sit right. He had been reading this water since he was nine years old and it had never lied to him, not exactly, though sometimes it told the truth in ways he only understood afterward.
The stars were where they usually were but the sky had a colour at the horizon that did not belong to this month. He had first noticed it two years ago, that colour — a bruised orange that came too early and faded too slowly. He did not have a name for it. He did not need one. It was simply the colour that had started appearing, the way grey had appeared in Meenakshi’s hair, gradually and then all at once.
An hour out, he set the net.
When he was young the net came up heavy enough to make the boat sit lower in the water. His father used to complain about it. Too many fish, he would say, which was the kind of complaint only a man with too many fish could make. The net came up lighter these days. He had adjusted. A man adjusted.
He waited.
The wind, when it came, came from the wrong direction. He felt it on the wrong side of his face and sat up straighter. The swells were building from the south, which made no sense for this time of year. He pulled the net without counting and turned the boat around.
He rowed hard. His arms knew how to do this without being asked. The wind was carrying something that was not rain but was the smell that came before rain, hot and mineral and wrong for this hour in this month on this coast. He had smelt it before. He had smelt it more often lately.
He thought about nothing in particular. This was a skill he had developed over thirty years of being alone on the water at hours when most of the world was asleep. His mind went quiet and his body worked and the two things had nothing to do with each other. Meenakshi called it stubbornness. His father had called it the only way to survive.
The lights of the colony appeared. He rowed toward them.
—
I became myself again somewhere around the point at which the lights appeared on the shore. I am not a mystical man and I do not offer any explanation for what occurred. I record it only as a fact: for some minutes I was not a writer standing on a beach in Kanyakumari watching a stranger row his boat through unseasonal weather. I was inside it. Whether this was imagination, or empathy, or merely the particular derangement that comes from standing alone at four in the morning at the edge of three seas, I cannot say.
What I can say is that when the boat came back and Selvam hauled it up the sand, his shirt soaked, the sky pressing down in that way it had been pressing, I felt something I had not felt watching from the outside — a tiredness that was not physical, a knowledge in the body of having made this crossing before and before and before, and of understanding, somewhere beneath the level at which one forms sentences, that the crossing was becoming different from what it had been, in ways that no single morning could prove but that thirty years of mornings made undeniable.
The dog was there. The fish went to the dog. Both of these things happened without acknowledgment, as they always did, as they had presumably been happening since the dog was young and vigorous and Selvam’s back was less particular about its opinions.
—
The fish market I visited the following morning needs less from me, because Chandra is more than capable of narrating her own situation.
She was a small woman who gave the impression of being considerably larger, the way certain birds do. She had four children, a husband whose back had given out eight years ago and chosen not to recover, opinions about everything, and a tongue that moved faster than most people’s thoughts.
She looked at Selvam’s basket.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
A second inspection. No additional fish.
“The Krishnamurthy boy brought twice this.”
“Good for the Krishnamurthy boy.”
She sorted through the catch with the brisk efficiency of a woman who has handled fish since before she could read.
“Small,” she said.
“I know.”
“Smaller than last month.”
“I know.”
“Smaller than last year.”
“Chandra.”
“I’m making an observation. A woman is allowed to make an observation. My mother made observations. Her mother made observations. It’s a tradition.”
She weighed what was there without hurrying. Between buyers and sellers who have dealt with each other for eleven years, the weighing is partly commerce and partly something else — a form of witness — and Chandra was not a woman to rush either.
“You remember your father,” she said, not looking up. “He would come — full. I was young, just starting. He would come with that same boat, is it the same boat?”
“Mostly.”
“Mostly.” She repeated the word as though it were either very funny or very sad, and appeared to have decided it was both. “Full like a man who has won an argument. The basket couldn’t hold it. I used to call my sister.”
Selvam said nothing.
“Now.” The gesture at the basket required no elaboration.
“Are you going to buy them or give a speech.”
“I’m doing both,” she said. “I’m talented.”
The money changed hands. He took it without counting. She was already calling to the next seller before he had picked up the empty basket.
—
I watched him walk out of the market and onto the road that led back to the colony, the dog falling into step behind him at the distance of an old arrangement — not at heel, not leading, simply present, its damaged leg finding the hot road with a patience that suggested it had stopped expecting the ground to be otherwise.
I thought about following. I did not. Some scenes have about them a completeness that the arrival of a stranger can only diminish, and I have learned, slowly and with some difficulty, to recognise them. What I had already been given — the five mornings on the shore, the minutes in which I had been, inexplicably, inside a life that was not mine — was more than enough. More, perhaps, than I had earned.
I left Kanyakumari the following afternoon. Before I went I asked Rajan whether anything was being done about the fishing, whether the government had a position.
He looked at me with the gentle patience one extends to a child asking where the rain comes from.
“Government,” he said. “Yes, they come. They have meetings. They make reports.” He poured my tea with the careful attention he gave to everything. “The sea does not attend the meetings.”
I paid my bill, thanked him for a hospitality that had been genuine if modest, and went out into an afternoon that was very bright and very hot. The sea was visible at the end of the lane, flat and glittering, beautiful in the way that indifferent things can be when the light is right and one does not know them well enough to understand what they are no longer doing.