The Sea Inside

playmates’ micro-tides. Flukes and fins, flanks and bellies are intertwined, yielding and caressing. There is clearly sensuality, pleasure in intimate contact. I watch as two whales come head
-
to
-
head, touching brows, or more precisely, noses. How intense it must be to come so close to one’s fellow whale in an almost physical transference of emotions, perhaps even ideas.
    After this transcendent display, which leaves us feeling as rapt as the whales, a pair appears just off our bow. At first I think they’re still playing with one another; only when they begin to swim straight at us do I realise it is a mother and calf. They continue to head for our prow, where I’m perched. I’m sure that at any moment they will shear off and dive.
    But they don’t. They keep coming, right up to the rib, so close that I could reach down and touch them. I can see the calf’s head bobbing along, and through the water, barely beneath the surface, the mother on her side, presenting her entire length, easily dwarfing our craft. She is looking up at us, we are looking down at her. The whiteness of her jaw glows green like an iceberg through the inches of ocean that separate us. The hypnotic state of the past three hours is sundered. And so the pair pass by, and swim on.

The sea of serendipity

The birds may come and circle for a while …
But they soon go elsewhere. When they are
gone, the ‘nothing’, the ‘no-body’ that was
there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was
there all the time but the scavengers missed
it, because it was not their kind of prey.

T HOMAS M ERTON ,
Zen and the Birds of Appetite,
1968



T he night that fell so abruptly has yet to shift. It lies over the island like a hot, thick blanket. I awake, the ceiling fan spinning. Outside, palms are scissored out of the sky. The white noise of the sea breaks through my dreams and onto the shore.
    Drew and I squeeze into the tuk-tuk, knees drawn up on the plastic-covered seat; a gilt Buddha swings from the rear-view mirror. The muezzin’s call from across the street has already begun. At four in the morning people are walking to work in the middle of the road, leaving the pavement to the animals. There’s a sense of a place falling apart and putting itself together. A community speeding slowly towards some determined point, in five hundred years’ or five minutes’ time. Bikes loom out of the dark with huge boxes of fish balanced over their back wheels; our headlight reflects the retinas of dogs stretching themselves after a night curled up in the dust.
    We turn down a lane lined with low cottages in varying states of construction and collapse. The tuk-tuk jerks to a halt at a gap in the trees, out of which a man appears, gathering up his green-and-orange sarong against the rubbish that lines the footpath. Handsome, with high cheekbones, Rasika wears a peaked camouflage cap that lends him the air of a freedom fighter. We follow him past squashed plastic bottles, single flip-flops, and coconut husks. At the end of the path is a starlit sea.
    Rasika steadies the
Kushan Putha
for us to board it. This does not take long, since the boat barely measures twenty feet, little more than a canoe, its fibreglass patched here and there, with uncertain stains on its once-white surface. We balance on the makeshift blue-painted planks that straddle the boat, padded with nylon-covered pillows held together by safety pins. Rasika pushes off from the beach. I feel a slight lift as the sand scrapes beneath us and the boat surrenders to the lapping waves.
    As we leave Mirissa behind and move out into the bay, my eyes get used to the darkness. I see fishing boats all around, returning from their night’s work, nets bulging with silvery fish. Others are racing ahead, black shapes against the even blacker water. They somehow make the dark companionable. We pass a flashing green light on the breakwater; the headland beyond is barely distinguishable. So close to the equator, day and night begin and end sharply, although the mountains delay the dawn, holding back the sun from the eastern shore. Venus flares before dipping into the blue. Up in those hills, Julia Margaret Cameron took her last look at the sky. Somewhere, too, my ancestor may have ruled over his plantation; perhaps he even sailed over these waters on his own final trip.
    But all this beauty is a bit too much for me. It’s still only five-thirty, so I push my roll bag into the space under the prow, climb into the