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Published: March 1st 2010
A lot of friends, and friends of friends, come over and tell me how superb a decision I took, to leave the hectic journalist life to come back and become a farmer. That’s not it. That’s not what I did.
I liked being a journalist, I liked being a 24/7-waiting-for-disaster, busy-up-to-my-eye-balls person. I liked hectic. I still do. But I came back because nobody else would. And I believed in my father’s vision. I believed that if he saw a future in something, it’s only because there really was a future in it.
So I came back to understand what was it that kept my father here, tethered like a goat. Unable to leave; even though everything else had left him. And here I am, three years later - tethered like a goat; unable to leave, even if everything else leaves me.
Most people ask: “So, you own an Island?” It’s not the fact that it’s an island which I am shying away from, but the connotation and baggage of “An Island” that makes me queasy every time the questioned is asked.
“Well, actually, it’s just a farm, really, and because it’s in the Andamans it happens to be surrounded by water,” is usually my answer.
“Wow, rich girl!” always follows suit. Like a rule. I’ve heard this sequence of conversation so many times that I know exactly how to end it too - With a smile and a shrug.
The baggage of the farm being an island is so heavy that no courier service would deliver it anywhere. So I decided to carry it. There I was, walking through the pathways of an island / my farm, which I had left behind once - with the decision of never returning.
I started with day trips. Only visiting the farm and working there during the day. Leaving well before sun-down.
The trees seemed to mock me, I didn’t recognize them, but they recognized me. I couldn’t help wonder if the farm didn’t want me there at all. I thought, if trees could talk, what would they say about me, us, people?
Then came New Year’s Eve. I decided to bring in the New Year at the farm. If the land hated me, that would be the perfect time to show it. That’s the thing about the farm - it’s alive, it watches, it teases and taunts. It scolds and soothes, it silences and revives.
As the sun went down, taking the previous year with it, one of the farm boys was returning from the market with his monthly provisions. Every time he lifted his oar out of the water a fluorescent ring of ripples and water drops would light up around his oar. By the time he reached the farm, it was pitch dark and the only way to tell where he was, was by the phosphorescence of the sea lighting each stroke of his oar.
I’d only read of such things in fairy-tales.
So I walked down the jetty to the sea and splashed it, and Behold!!! Every drop of water was ablaze with phosphorescence. I looked at my hand and there were tiny glowing things stuck to it.
I sat, amazed. In the dark. For who-knows-how-long. Watching the sea. Waiting for a fish to disturb its surface so it would light up again. And again. Did he know? Is this new? Or did my father know, and that’s why he built the house on the jetty instead of on the farm itself?
I went inside to prepare dinner. In the kitchen I had on a little lantern, as we haven’t been allowed an electricity connection, yet. Cooked myself some boring noodles, soupy and slurpy and sat outside to eat.
All of a sudden I was acutely aware of how brightly lit my balcony was. ‘A spotlight…here…in the middle of the ocean,’ I wondered - till I looked up at the moon. I was making shadows on the front wall to amuse my dog through the rest of the night because it was that bright!!!
As the tide began to fall and crept further and further away from the tips of my fingers, I turned to lay on my back. And the next thought I had was: “Do stars have traffic signals?” I swear on anyone you’d like me to There was, and I insist it was, a traffic jam of stars in the patch of sky far above my roof. ‘This is it’, I knew then, ‘This is why he stayed.’
What a fool, what a city-slicker fool I was to not see it for all these years. What a sorry fool to almost have given it up forever…for what, why - why would anybody leave this?
The phosphorescence, the stars, the moon-shadows on the wall, the security of my farm dog, the simplicity of life and time here, is not something you can catch on a camera.
The camera cannot see these things.
And I’m certain, that if others saw what I saw, felt what I felt, and understood all of a sudden what I did, they’d never leave either.
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this is exactly what you should write about. well done.