The Sea His Father Knew

Selvam woke before the alarm did. He always woke before the alarm did. His body had its own clock, set thirty years ago by his father, who had set it thirty years before that by his. He lay still for a moment, listening. His wife Meenakshi breathed beside him with the deep indifference of a woman who had long since stopped asking what time he would be back.

Three in the morning smelt like low tide and kerosene and the particular dampness of a concrete floor that never quite dried. He found his lungi in the dark, his shirt, his sandals. The sandals he left at the door. The floor of the boat was easier on bare feet, and besides, sandals had a way of going overboard.

Meenakshi stirred.

“Eat something.”

“Later.”

“You say later and then you don’t.”

He said nothing. This too was part of the clock.

The lane outside was empty except for the dog, who was sitting where he always sat, at the edge of the drain, watching. He had been watching Selvam leave at this hour for as long as either of them could remember. Once he had been a substantial animal, the kind of dog that made other dogs reconsider their plans. Now he was thin in the way that old things go thin, his left hind leg held at an angle that suggested a story nobody had bothered to document, his muzzle grey where it had once been black. He watched Selvam pass with the calm of a creature that has given up surprise. The fishing colony was a tangle of houses that had been added to and subtracted from over three generations, walls in four different colours where someone had run out of paint and used what was available, roofs weighted down with old tyres against the wind. In the dark it looked almost dignified.

The boat was where he had left it, hauled up on the sand alongside the others. To call it a boat required a certain generosity of spirit. It was more accurately a collection of planks that had agreed, for the time being, to float together. His father had patched it. He had patched his father’s patches. His son, who now worked at a hotel in Mahabalipuram carrying other people’s luggage, would not be patching anything.

He pushed it to the waterline, feeling the familiar protest in his lower back. The sea this morning was flat and dark, which should have pleased him. Flat was good. Flat meant he could go further out without fighting the whole way. 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.

He got in and rowed.

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 sea, which had been flat, was no longer entirely flat. Small swells were building from the south, which made no sense for this time of year. The sky at the horizon had deepened. He pulled the net without counting what was in it — he would count later — and turned the boat around.

He rowed hard. His arms knew how to do this without being asked. The swells were steepening now, which also made no sense, and the wind was carrying something in it that was not rain but was the smell that came before rain, hot and mineral and wrong for three in the morning in this month on this coast. He had smelt it before. He had smelt it more often lately.

The boat took water over the bow and he kept rowing.

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.

By the time he hauled the boat up, his shirt was soaked and the sky was doing something he could not remember it doing before — not a storm exactly, but a heaviness, a pressure, the sea and the sky pressing toward each other like two people in a disagreement that had not yet turned loud. He stood for a moment and looked at it.

Then he pulled the net further up the sand and went to count the fish.

There were not many. There were fewer, lately, and they were smaller, lately, and they came from further out, lately, and the sea on the way to them and back was less and less the sea his father had described to him, sitting in this same boat, in this same dark, pointing at stars that had not yet begun to shift. He sorted through them and set one aside, a small thing, not worth much at market. He always set one aside.  The dog was at the waterline. He had not heard him come, which was usual — the dog moved quietly for an animal with a damaged leg, or perhaps Selvam simply always knew he would be there and stopped listening for his arrival. He held the fish out without looking down. The dog took it without ceremony. They were both too old for ceremony.

He gathered what there was and walked back up the lane, the dog a few paces behind, the way he always walked — not at heel, not leading, just present, at the distance of an old arrangement that had never needed to be discussed. The colony was beginning to wake — a light here, a cough there, the sound of a pump.

The market opened at six, which meant the serious business was done by five-thirty. Selvam knew this. Chandra knew this. Everyone knew this except the people who made the rules about when the market opened, who had presumably never tried to sell a fish.

Chandra had her spot at the end of the second row, which she had occupied for so long that the concrete beneath her basket had taken on the particular grey-black shine of a place that has been sat beside for many years. She was a small woman who gave the impression of being larger than she was, the way certain birds do. She had four children, a husband whose back had given out eight years ago and had not recovered, opinions about everything, and a tongue that moved faster than most people’s thoughts.

She looked at Selvam’s basket and then looked at Selvam.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

She looked at the basket again, as though a second inspection might cause more fish to appear. It did not.

“The Krishnamurthy boy brought twice this,” she said.

“Good for the Krishnamurthy boy.”

“He went further out.”

“I also went further out.”

She made a sound that was not quite a word but communicated an entire paragraph. She had a gift for this. Her husband, in his better years, had once told Selvam that living with Chandra was like living with a woman who had learned every language simultaneously and chose between them based on her mood. He had not said this unkindly.

She began sorting through the basket with the brisk efficiency of a woman who has handled fish since before she could read and has no remaining sentimentality about the process.

“Small,” she said, holding one up.

“I know.”

“Smaller than last month.”

“I know.”

“Smaller than last year.”

“Chandra.”

“I’m making an observation,” she said, setting it down. “A woman is allowed to make an observation. My mother made observations. Her mother made observations. It’s a tradition.”

“What are you going to give me for them.”

She named a price. He looked at her. She looked at him. Around them the market was conducting its own overlapping conversations at a volume that suggested everyone was either arguing or hard of hearing, possibly both.

“That’s less than last month,” he said.

“The fish are also less than last month.”

“They’re the same fish.”

“Smaller fish are less fish. This is mathematics. My son learned it in school.”

He said nothing. She had been buying his catch for eleven years and they had been having variants of this conversation for most of them. In the early years the argument had been about price. Lately it had also become about quantity, and lately, beneath the quantity argument, there was a third argument that neither of them named because naming it would not change it and would ruin the morning on top of everything else.

She weighed what was there. He watched.

“You remember,” she said, not looking up from the scales, “when your father used to come. I was young then, just starting. He would come with that same boat — is it the same boat?”

“Mostly.”

“Mostly,” she repeated, as though this was either very funny or very sad, and appeared to have decided it was both. “He would come with that boat, full. Full like a man who has just argued with his wife and won, you know that kind of full, puffed up. The basket couldn’t hold it. I used to have to call my sister to help.”

Selvam said nothing.

“Now.” She gestured at his basket with the hand that was not holding the scales. The gesture required no elaboration.

“Are you going to buy them or give a speech.”

“I’m doing both,” she said. “I’m talented.”

She counted out the money and held it toward him. He took it without counting. They both knew it was correct. Eleven years.

He picked up the empty basket. She was already calling to the next seller, her voice rising easily above the noise of the market with the confidence of a woman who has never in her life needed to raise it twice.

He walked back through the market, past the vegetable sellers and the flower sellers and the man who sold plastic things of no obvious purpose that people bought anyway, out onto the road that led back to the colony. The dog followed at the same distance he always kept, neither hurrying nor falling behind, his bad leg finding its rhythm on the hot road with the patience of something that has stopped expecting the ground to be otherwise. The sun was up properly now, which meant the day had opinions about temperature that it had not had an hour ago. His shirt, still damp from the morning, made its feelings known.

He thought about what Chandra had said, which was nothing he did not already know, which was why he thought about it for no more than a minute before his mind went back to the colour at the horizon, the wind on the wrong cheek, the way the swells had built from the south at an hour and in a month when swells did not build from the south.

He thought about his father, who had never had to think about these things.

He did not think about his son, who worked at a hotel in Mahabalipuram carrying other people’s luggage, who sent money home on the first of every month, who smelt of air conditioning when he visited.

He walked home.

Meenakshi was in the doorway when he got there, her arms crossed in the way that meant she had already calculated what he had made and found it wanting. She looked at him and then at the dog, who had stopped at the threshold and sat, as he always sat, just outside. She said nothing about the fish she had not found in the basket. She never did.

“Chandra?” she said.

“Chandra.”

She moved aside to let him in. The coffee on the stove was still warm. He drank it standing up, looking at the wall, while outside the sea went on doing what it was doing, which was no longer entirely what it had always done, though it had not yet found a way to say so that anyone with the authority to listen would understand.