Chapter 1 — The Depths Of Netrani

Netrani Island
Murudeshwar, Karnataka

The air bubbles leaving my mask were ascending to the surface as I looked up. Although the visibility underwater was good, the boat overhead had blocked the sun rays from penetrating the water, casting a dark silhouette on the surface. I looked down again. The white sea-bed was starkly visible. The water was frigid cold, though a sunny day it was. I felt slight cramps building in my calves. A mild pain had shot in the ears.

I checked my gauge. 45 minutes of oxygen was left in the cylinder. I had got time. I just had to bear the pain building in my ears. With the increasing depth, the pressure on the sinus would mount, and the pain would aggravate. I made up my mind, and stroked my fins to descend deeper.

A green turtle, about the size of a school-bag, swam past below me. Before I could relish its sight, several more came into view, following the first turtle. It was a family, probably on an outing. Green Ridley turtles they were called, I learned later from Ayesha.

As I approached a reef on the bed, an army of golden fish, about a hundred in strength, of same colour and size, looked at us, every pair of those tiny eyes studying the strangers that have wandered into their realm.

The reef, I realized, was teeming with life. It unveiled more animals the deeper I dived. Presently, the dial attached to my waist read 110 feet. Here, the wonders begin! Or so the trainer had said.

Under a seaweed, while everything till this point looked calm, there arose a tiny tornado, throwing lumps of mud around, which caught my eyes. When the dust settled, what I saw was a pair of huge tigerfish chasing each other’s tail, going around in a circle. It looked like a ritual. Or an invite to a date!

“Tigerfish”, our instructor had said on our way to the island, “are the easiest to spot. They have tiger-like stripes on their body. You will find them in abundance here.” My eyes followed this pair of fish for a little while. Then leaving them alone to their romance, I moved on, paddling my fins. A world had come alive here, unbeknown to the world where I live outside this sea. “Occasionally, and if you are lucky, you might even see an orca”, he had added. So time to time, I shifted my gaze as far as my eyes could allow, to check if a massive orca was marching towards me. A small pea-sized jellyfish swam across my eyes, and only when I was about to follow its course, another animal captured my attention, glued on a large boulder towards the edge of the reef: a starfish!

“See, whatever you can. But don’t touch anything unless we ask you to”, the instructor had warned. I wondered if the star-fish was poisonous to touch. It looked too cute to leave undisturbed. I padded my fins closer to the boulder. On its flattened body, amidst thousand of tiny prickles, I saw two little black eyes staring back at me. Unblinking as they were, like those of a curious puppy, I wondered if this little starfish was afraid of me or it thought that my eyeglasses were a nice surface to stick on!

Opposite the island-reef over which I was floating, I spotted Ayesha, her neon-green scuba-suit reflecting light, even a hundred feet below the ocean. I summoned her in a ‘come-hither’ motion of my hand. As she arrived, I escorted her attention to the starfish. We both looked at it, then at each other. She joined her thumb and the index finger, forming a loop and stretching the other three fingers straight. In scuba, it is a question: “All OK?” Though, here she meant: “The starfish is beautiful!” I showed the same sign back.

Here, inside the sea, the things are simpler. You don’t talk much. In fact, you don’t talk at all. The constant hush of your breathing cylinder reminds you that you are alive and your heart is beating just fine. Silence engulfs you in peace, a kind of silence that you had never felt before.

Ayesha pointed at my gauge and raised her thumb upwards. It was time to go back.

We clicked a selfie from the GoPro that she had brought down, the starfish positioned in the centre, and we started climbing up the water. She was quick, and I was late. After spending sixty minutes of clean silence in the womb of the ocean, I heard the outside world for the first time: the waters gently crashing the hull of our parked boat. A glorious sun was beaming down at my eyeglass, welcoming me back to its world. This is how taking a birth must feel like.

Netrani Island is a small uninhabited piece of land jutting out of the water, about 10 nautical miles off the shore of Murudeshwar. When British explorers first arrived here, they found coral-reeves below the waters and that the animal life was in sheer abundance. They decided to leave the island unmanned. Till now, the island has been off-limits for any occupation. Diving teams are only allowed to station their boat near the island, like one of ours, and after the dive, all teams are expected to return to the main shore before the sun sets in the sea. No night-camping. No tents.

Ayesha lent me a hand while boarding back on the boat.“You are shivering!” she said.

“Yes. I shiver a lot. I have a condition. Water doesn’t suit me.” I said, unzipping my suit and grabbing a towel.

The boat was small, perhaps not longer than ten feet. Ayesha had occupied the front deck of it, where the sun shone across her face. The wide waters of Arabian Sea laid naked in front of us. Winds had begun to dry our bodies.

The second team of divers had now descended down. And the ones who had dived with us were yet to come back.

“How long are you in Murudeshwar?”, she asked.

“I am leaving tomorrow,” I said peering out the boat. “I have a bus for Mysore”. The glimmering rays of the sun were bouncing off the water. It was almost noon.

I had met Ayesha on the day I arrived in Murudeshwar. We were part of the same team, clearing out a heap of garbage from a corner on the beach. Then we met again on the boat while leaving for Netrani that morning.

“Do you eat fish, Yash?”, she asked. “Murudeshwar has the best fish on the southern coast, the kingdom of King-Mackerel it is called sometimes.”

“Yes, I would love to.” I tilted my head down to one side and pressed my ear with the palm. The pain in my ear had not subsided yet.

“Relax! It will fade away. It’s the salt-water doing the action. Face it for an hour.”

“How many times have you dived before? You know a lot.”

“Andaman, Mexico, Madagascar and Bali”, she said counting her fingers, “this is my fifth dive.”

“So what time?”, I said, still fumbling with my ear, my head buried between my knees.

“What!”

“What time is our date? The fish, you said, it’s best here. When are we going?”

She laughed. “I am not taking you anywhere. I said it’s best. Go have it yourself, don’t miss out before you leave Murudeshwar. That was all I meant.”

I looked up. She had parted her hair to one side, letting the sun rays glisten at the naked side of her neck. The waves continued to crash at the hull of our boat as it danced, and the seagulls squealed in search of prey.

“Look,” I said towelling my hair, “tomorrow I am leaving from here. We might never come back to Murudeshwar. The fish, you say is awesome. And you look beautiful. Let’s call it a date!” Solo travel had always brought spontaneity in me. But this was outrageous!

“Yash, we met just yesterday. . .”

“And we shall never meet after today. Please? One fish? I will remove the thorns.” I said, placing both my palms at my chest.

Laughing, she picked up a snorkel from the basket and walked to the edge of the boat. “Seven-thirty PM. Purohit Hotel.”

She wore the snorkel-mask on her face, preparing to dive. “But you should know one thing,” she said, looking down at the sea-bed, “No one is getting laid!” She dived into the sea and a splash of water spread across my face. “Funny girl!”, I remarked to myself.

I kept looking at her diminishing figure underwater until she was no more seen. I took a banana off the food-basket, peeled down its skin and sat at the deck, basking under a merciful sun that awaited its own journey back into the sea.

My journey around South India had just begun.