The mean-eyed mean

A tam-brahm’s fishy experience can best be summed up as an oxymoron. But this is not the best nor is it a summing up.  Instead, it is a rant and rave of a tam-brahm,  moron enough to go on a class trip which has its main theme as`Fish’, at least as far as she is concerned.  The others might title the theme as `sustainability of marine life’ or whatever.  In circles knowing Tamil or Malayalam, it can also be called a `mean’ingful tryst.  Full of meaning, if you know what I mean.

The day began innocuously enough.  The students, teachers and the writer of this piece got on to two buses.  The students and the other teachers were all of a scientific bent of mind and they set out to perform experiments on the island of Madh.  The writer tagged along as a camera woman and a keeper of records.  The Group 4 project was well under way by 9 am and the group split up into Physics, Chemistry and Biology and the teachers logically followed their calling.  The Physics teacher went with his brood of physicists, armed with vernier callipers, long scales, mirrors and a piece of thermacol for some strange reason.   Or at least this uninitiated writer could not make much of it.  The chemists go with bottles and walk with determined strides towards the beach to collect samples of what looked like water.  But water is a universal solvent and yet pieces of stuff of origins unknown were floating on the surface.  A closer look would have surely told her the origins, but she didn’t want to know.  Or she would have wondered if the experiments had to be conducted at a pathology lab.  The biologists went armed with questionnaires to interview the fisher folk on their consumption habits.  But one look around and a simple breathing exercise would have told anyone that.  Not that this writer was doing any of that.  She looked ahead blindly towards the horizon and acquired a concentrated look, with the effort of trying to not look around and to hold her breath at the same time.  The result was not complimentary to her looks, but she continued on her solitary walk.  The sun beat mercilessly on her shoulders already burdened with a back pack.  In her hands was her camera to collect evidence of the sample collection, the surveyors in action and the physicist doing what not. 

What followed was the result of all the blind looking at the horizon.  One foot forward and the next one…something crunched beneath her oft worn Reeboks. Her eyes were brought down to earth literally and she along with it.  The bulging eye, staring unseeingly at her open mouthed, as if the creature was surprised to be cracked thus, even in its dead state.  It is a fish, a dead one,her own eyes registered and her shoes had just cracked it like some dead branch.  From the comatose state, her eyes looked around finally downwards.  She was standing on a bed of dead fish and trapped well and proper.  Why, there were masses and masses of them, strewn about her, and each of them looking at her all bulgy eyed and reproachfully.  She died just a little, then and there.  Her brahminic state of mind and body coalesced and she asked forgiveness for adding injury upon the fish’s already de`mean’ed status.  The fisher women were coming with more of their catch to spread them on the muddy ground. The place resembled a battle field and she walked gingerly away in the general direction of some steps.  Even seated there, she felt threatened and rightly so, as soon, a bird from its lofty perch on a tree above her, decided to choose her hand, not in marriage but in another less social and more fundamental bodily function.  It was her sustainability she worried about now.

She walked away in another direction and climbed a few steps to reach a higher plane, of thought and being.  She stared myopically at all the small figures of reds, blacks and blues, trying to identify the physicists, the chemists and the biologists, all in various postures of scientific enquiry.  All that was scientific in her life began with burning small pieces of paper under the scorching Vadiveeshwaram sun’s  rays through magnifying glasses and ended with running around with packets of salt in Mumbai’s monsoons, chasing earth worms and putting judicious pinches of salt on them to see them shrivel and die.  She did not enquire much scientifically into that degenerative tendency.  Students these days had to do so much more than she ever did.  That’s what comes out of asking why and why not all the time.  You get scientific, that’s what. 

She decided to let her mind wander as taking shallow breaths was becoming easier with time.  She thought of Walt Whitman’s lines `the smell of the sea is like victuals to me’ & `the life of a sailor, ahoy, ahoy.’  Not for this writer though.  She had other fish to fry.