(not) About a Dive Trip

by Syed Yasin Shahtaz Emanee (India)

I didn't expect to find India

“Mother! Come!”, “There you go Mother. Did you have a good bath?” Mother, the most unexpectedly named dog rubbed herself into Mel’s lap. Why and who named her, no one would tell me for certain. Abha reckoned she was found with a litter. Shaunak said it was because someone in the diveshop was missing their mother real bad. Anyway, after getting the hang of the name, calling out Mother as she walked back calmly after a late night swim became a routine. My decision to learn scuba professionally was taken a year back when I first had the experience on a family trip. Whether it was the feeling of being weightless, or discovering the basics of a primitive seeming sign based communication eighteen metres under the water or simply the hapless romanticism of floating around in a forbidden world, I could not rank in order. But what I was sure of, was that I needed to do it again. It also happily happened to be my first solo trip, and the energy had just the right flavour of anxiety. And so, hundreds of vlogs later, Shaheed Dweep, erstwhile Havelock, waited in its serenity to grin sheepishly at my confidence of what to expect there. The most important unexpected discovery was the group of people met. Dhruv, my instructor, like most of the other people who came in from the mainland to seek a new adventure out here in the islands, was a jolly fellow who would not shy from the occasional underwater muffled yell when we would do our skills wrong. Malya, an entrepreneur was on a bucket list with her daughter. They had spent the last four winters in Gulmarg learning to ski. This time it was scuba. The next on their list was surfing. In the evenings she would tell me how she had progressed from a panic driven mom to someone who preferred giving space instead; from someone who would splurge all she could to someone who would give herself the thirty day test: for things she did not need and only wanted, she would wait for thirty days. If she still felt it was necessary, only then would she buy it. And then there was Shakya, who had decided to learn scuba at 52 because he thought it was time to finally get out of his comfort zone. He had a group of four friends who would go on a trip every quarter, ranging from short road trips to transcontinental backpacking trips and he said he was always envious of how the others would comfortably dive into the realm of adventure sports while he would hesitantly pull himself back. And finally Lynda who would take time off her airport job to travel every year to India out of an unexplained love for the place. Something else equally unexpected was the experience of night kayaking with Zanat, a national Kayak champion who could read the stars and seas with equal ease. The highlight of her tour were the bioluminescent planktons which gave a surreal feeling of hands being dipped into an ethereal cold flame. Zanat would then stop the Kayaks, let the tranquillity settle in, and narrate the stories of Cassiopeia, Orion and the Gemini twins. At pitch dark, stranded midwater, we imagined how the ancient sailors lived their times. Zanat had once kayaked for eleven hours to get to and back from Barren island with only star navigation. And then there was Full Moon Café, the restaurant which excelled in Bengali Fish Paturi and Falafel alike. In the evenings they would light candles inside pretty ornate golden shades. One could just sit there with a drink and watch an entire evening and night pass by without a hint of a drag. The place had a library from which one could exchange books, and thus had a sizeable collection in European languages. The feel of a whole world inside the old bookshelf of an island resort. What amazed me after I came back from my trip, was that every time I tried to sit down and write about scuba in Havelock, I never expected to write mostly about the things other than Scuba.