Ram was rowing the boat now; he has a nice way of doing it, with long steady strokes as if caressing the water. There was barely any movement. The little boat was sliding smoothly over a surface which was thick and greenish. I dared not touch the water with my hands. It looked deadly. It was completely opaque as if it was made of some pliable plastic material. The thing lay thick and undulating beneath the boat.
I was looking abstractly into the water and watching the barren clouds reflected in it. They were moving at some speed. They looked like a group of nurses. What is the hurry about guys? Where are you off to? You don’t have any patients to attend to do you?
Ram rested the oars and dipped his hands into the water make it moist for a better grip. I thought of saying something about it but thought better of it and desisted. He would not mind getting his hand dirty like that. He is like that.
Now he again took up the oars, I could trace the greenish outline of the foul water on his palms. He should not have done it. It was dirty water. It did not even look like water.
It was like a long piece of green thickness.
One could chop it into little bits and they would hopefully remain separate like portioned off layers of green jelly. What horrors lay underneath the surface, I did not know.
Well maybe you would not die of drowning if you fell into it. It was a mini dead sea, with high concentration of salt in the water.
Yet you might die of infection. The water could be the highest concentration of domestic and industrious discharges in the world. The canal extends some 5 miles and every sewer in the neighborhood might open into it.
Well really I do not know if it is absolutely true. May be no sewer is connected to it. May be the water is pure as hell. May be this is a canal in heaven, with water made up entirely of green honey.
All the same the water looked wonderfully vile.
It is the sesha I thought, on which Lord Vishnu goes to sleep. The Adi Sesha, the primordial serpent. The green sesha.
How deep could it be? Ten, twenty feet? Could not be more than that. Well twenty feet could be tricky too if you fell over.
Well we were at Veli and come here often to row around for some hours, both as an exercise and a pastime.
It was the weekend and there were very few options for a weekend day in this bit of land. You could go to Kovalam and bathe in the sea, or you could come here and wander around. Both are always crowded but I preferred Veli to Kovalam. There was reason for it.
Kanai Kunjiraman has gone berserk here. He is the sculptor of our basic fantasies. That concrete Yakshi at Malampuzha was violent. He has done several pieces at Veli.
I did not care about the other pieces, but the massive relief of the girl looking up at the sky (he has fashioned it as a part of landscaping, out of the very ground) is unbelievable.
Kanai has some mysterious thing with which he link to something very basic in us.
We had done the round of the garden earlier in the afternoon. It was a bit early, just after two in the afternoon .There was only a group of Malee girls around. We were both wearing slippers as we had planned to row around for some time.
There were the normal giggles and the surprised looks.
“He is cute”
“But they are wearing slippers!”
“Still I like him.”
It was like a balm to our ego. We felt we can get a boat on this day.
Now we are rowing through the canal in the boat owned by the youth club there. The boat of course was on its last legs. The slots were the oars were to be fitted were missing on both sides and we had to tie them to the boat with a length of rope.
We of course had to face the black looks of the guy in charge of the boat. He was not ready to hand them over to us. Well he can’t be blamed. The boats were unfit to be on the water. We took the best one among them with the remains of iron rings so that we can tie our oars to the boat.
There was lull in the air now. The motor boat which takes the tourists around for a spin through the canal had just returned to its jetty. It kicks up hell when it passes by our side. Even Ram has a hard time controlling the boat then. The imbecile who drives it would have a huge grin on his face when he sees any of the youth club boats, his stupid passengers would follow suit and grin the more.
The guy would purposely make a big sweep around us creating a trench to drown us.
Well he is back at his jetty and might be packing his boat with other tourists. We would probably be away from the danger area by the time he starts up again. He does not normally go much farther than the over-bridge. Once past that I planned to take up the oars.
Ram would laugh whenever I demanded the oars.
“I often think you are like a child” He once said. “You have an excess of energy like them.”
Ram looks at me wonderingly when I am at the oars. I would be kicking up hell with the oars. Thrusting them deep into the waters and tearing at it so that the oars would emerge from the water with some noise.
You are wasting energy. Only half the effort is needed to make it really fly.
I do not heed at all.
The boat will start then to heave and tilt. Every great pull would thrust the boat forward at some pace and it would slightly languish when the oars are out of the water and is being again thrust into it. I hated that moment of inactivity. I wanted to fill it with power.
It delights me when I dip the oars deep down into water and it resists the pull of my arms and shoulders. I enjoy it me when the oars rip the water apart and emerge dripping and shining. They would burst out from water with a great load of water following it.
Now we are just past the over bridge and I have the oars. I can’t talk to you for sometime now. I will be too busy rocking the boat you see……….
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