It was an unjust and humid afternoon-like most of the afternoons here. The sun was beating down hard upon the city and upon the taxi in which I sat sweating profusely, peeping out of the half rolled glass window. A high rise went in a swift curve past my upright gaze. An old man stood shaking at the next traffic signal; glanced at the sun, the radiance of its orange rays squinting his eyes. May be he cursed the great sun with that glance, adjusting his posture time and again that seemed bowed down by the weight of a rusted past.
***
A sudden jerk of the cab brought me back to a desolate as well as a crowded street that wearily felt, what people call, an outskirt.
“This cab can’t go any further, bhai. You have to walk; a couple of mile through those narrow lanes”, the cabbie said. “Are you sure it’s the Worli fishing village?” I asked gravely, seeing the trail of sun tanned people moving through the crowded lanes that resembled a marketplace.
***
“Yes, yes, saab”, he said, and honked a couple of times. “The smell of dry fish skins may nudge you to come back”, he grinned, and swept away the taxi swiftly through the chaos. I kept moving-part walking, part hiking the steep concrete lanes that grew narrower as I descended. I felt terribly tired; the backpack adding a considerable amount of weight to my woes. I asked for the fishing dock and their main settlement at every curve of the path, which seemed to be crunched between elbow kissing sidewalls. Suddenly a burst of sun light, packed in bundles of rays, struck me-part blinding my vision. A strong moisture laden breeze swallowed the last of the sweat drops that clung to some strands of my hair.
***
I found myself standing over the edge of a slightly elevated land. I turned, and looked at the chaotic array of dense lanes, and more lanes that led to the point where I stood, and then twisted witlessly to what lay beyond those forgettable miles: the first thing that turned me off was the dead smell of dry fish skins, which was spread like a sheet over the length of their settlement; there were numerous, recklessly spaced shacks, even some well built houses, painted in successive stripes of brown and green; small boats lay idle- fastened to poles erected across the shore- and some of them scattered over the stretch of land.
***
The next moment my gaze shifted to the ever restless and infinite, chaotic sea, stretching from the brackish rocky shore, to some far sighted horizon, the sight of which was blurred against the dazzle of the orange sun, reflected over the crest of a pounding wave. Eagles flew low, hovering over the remains of fishes. A cluster of seagulls could be seen flying past the mast of a small ship in the sea, not far away. A large set of boats bobbed on the shore waters erratically.
To be continued…
Rohit Inani lives in Nagpur and is currently studying Civil Engineering. He has been a writer for as long as he can remember. For he believes writing to be an art that is not about mastering a language but about nurturing a different perspective-even distorting reality sometimes. Hiking and running are his companions. Currently, he is penning down philosophical fiction and is also a big fan of everything satirical.
***