Quicksand

"Beach chale?" I asked. Grinning inwards at the kiddish-restless look on his face. And at the childlike sparkle in his eyes at that sentence. Sometimes looks can be so deceiving - Aint I supposed to be the childish one? And he the mature one?

“Haan haan chalte hai chal.” So there we went, running off to what is the nearest, one of the quietest beaches in Mumbai. Ofcourse Salman made a mockery of the wonderful place with a pathetic song… but sigh. Nevermind. It remains exactly how it was. I remember coming here once with Ro a long long time ago. A lifetime ago - but this visit wasn’t about him. Or me. Or anything concrete infact. It was just… a walk on quicksand. That’s all.

“Beaches here… are like lips of a many faced woman. A beautiful woman called Mumbai. Juhu was that once upon a time, the crowning glory in a way…. And now it has cheap red lipstick all over it, all that glitter and noise, and more balloons in the air than clouds, more people than required, more show than real emotion…. This place, is pure unadulterated beauty.” said I, as we sank our feet into the clear waters. The water was warm, and cool, in alternate waves. And the strangest part was, the waves never went back.

He had that funny look on his face again and then he said, “Now I’ve seen Mumbai.”

I laughed and said, “You haven’t seen any of it. Look at it from the eyes of a lover, and you shall see more than you can imagine.”

But of course I know that he couldn’t do. The man always remains faithful, in a weird twisted way, to his first love. The love may leave him, or he may leave her, to find new destinies, but it always remains the remembered love. It’s like cigarettes we discussed in one of random conversations, “I can’t be promiscuous when it comes to Navycut.” Touché, I agree. And this man’s first love was Delhi. No matter where he is, I know he will never allow any other place to take Delhi’s place. It’s a love affair that lasts a lifetime. I know, cause Mumbai will be that for me.

Growing up in Mumbai, the beach has always been an integral part of me. Summer vacations for me didn’t mean going off to the native place, as everyone did. For me it meant the beach, Juhu. For him, he said it was India Gate. I have been there only once, but at once I imagined coming back to one place years after year, growing older each time. And the magic still lingering around always. The waves always made my feet tingle. They do even now. I knew what he meant.

“Can we understand, we humans, that no matter how much we try, we will never be able to control the sea, like the way the moon controls it? The sea will never yield to us the way it does to the moon.. This is the same water body that’s spread across the expanse of the globe… And we are so small.” says he. It’s a wonder how we think the exact same things sometimes. Maybe it’s the sea. It makes everyone feel so insignificant.

We grinned at the fact that we were both photographers, and yet we didn’t have a camera to capture the red globe as it played hide and seek with the clouds, making beautiful patterns out of them. We walked along the edge, listening to the sounds of the tide that was pulling in. He asked questions that I didn’t have any answers to. We talk about life, random things that interests us, which most people dismiss as the mundane. Like a psychology class discussion we talk about life.

We are two very different people, who are freakishly similar sometimes… who think on the same lines more often than not. We both agreed that life… was like quicksand (and we rarely ever agree on anything). Everyone has two versions of life – one that we are living, comfortable and mundane. What we are right now. And another that we always imagined we would be. What we set out to be – the “could-have-been” version. We get so used to the comfortable quicksand around our feet, sinking so deep into it, that we somehow forget that our feet never wanted this – they wanted to roam, see the world and not put down roots. Like a lie that’s repeated over and over again, that’s now the accepted truth, we create a make-believe perfectness around us. Quicksand. Ha!

We laugh about things that are funny to only us. They strike a deeper meaning to us that only we understand. Like when we finally started to walk back away, there was this dog that casually walked across the water that had formed a little stream-lake there, to the other side. We didnt try to walk across because we, like everyone there, didnt know how deep the water went. “Lucky bitch”, he mutters, and then we laugh. “Lets call out to her and ask her if the grass is indeed greener on the other side.” I reply that she is already too far along, too busy absorbing the other side to hear the voice from this side. We laugh again. I’m sure that no one will know why we laughed. Lucky bitch.

“What if this universe – it’s all a big, giant lie?” I said as we walked away from the steadily darkening beach. “What if it was all this intricate lie that was fed to the entire human race, that no one ever questioned. And somewhere there’s a giggling someone at the entire foolishness?” With the beginnings of a grin he said, “It’s possible you know, the world might not be round at all… We make the universe too important – After all what’s the universe anyway? It’s a humongous big ball of dust right?” I grinned back and said “Maybe. You never know...”

Laughing to ourselves, we went and got ourselves two plates of double bhurji-pav.

~Annie..

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