“. . . he said I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here. I have two names which meet and part… I have two languages, but I have long forgotten— which is the language of my dreams.” -Mahmoud Darwish

She spoke slowly in a deep voice, with every word tacked deep into the beams of my mind, “The sea can separate the land but not the souls.”

Her tone had a strange mix of emotions that I couldn’t comprehend.

She told me that she received the news a day prior to my visit. Pakistan had released 68 Indian fishermen who had unwittingly crossed over to the other side. They had boarded a train to Lahore from where they would be taken to the Wagah border and shall be handed over to the Indian authorities.

Her husband has been imprisoned in Pakistan since the last seven years. He was arrested for violating territorial waters when his boat drifted into the Pakistani side.

She said, “I am happy that our people are returning home. I don’t know about my husband though. But, at least somebody is coming. They would tell me about my husband, perhaps.”

“But, I’ll only believe it when I’ll see him. I don’t trust the news anymore. They lie,” she said.

She woefully continued, “The sea defies all our attempts of partition and rejects all shackles. It cannot be caged or divided. It is beyond all that can be divided. Yet, we suffer.”

Who can blame the sea?

Unfortunately, she is not the only one. There are many families of Indian and Pakistani fishermen who share similar stories and are frequently detained for illegally fishing in each other's waters.

She cursed the sea and lamented, “The Arabian Sea does not have a clearly-defined marine border and the wooden boats lack the technology to avoid being drifted away.”

Then, speaking boldly, she said, “We are a different tribe. We risk our lives every day. We don’t cry.” She told me that their tribe records the stories of the courage of the fishermen. Not many people know these. She shared some of them with me.

She told me how risky it is to lower down the net in the ocean. “But, this is how it is. You cannot change everything about life. We have learnt to live with it,” she said.

The woman believes her misfortune to be the curse of the mermaid. She told me that her husband caught a very big golden fish the day before he went missing. She thinks that the golden fish must be the mermaid’s child, who had cursed them.

“We are the cursed tribe. It must be karma. Fishermen on both the sides repay their debt to the sea,” she said sadly.

I don’t know all that. I only know about the curse on humanity for creating such victims of divisions, wars and sufferings.

She introduced me to her beautiful teenage daughter who is diagnosed with bone tuberculosis. Her two teenage sons still go fishing. “There is no escape. The sea is our refuge,” she said.

I remembered some notes from my diary:

“Father, have you heard what has happened to me?
The sea closes no door before me.
No mirror I can shatter makes a path
of its slivers before me...
And all the prophets are my family,
but heaven is still far from its land
and I am far from my words."
-Mahmoud Darwish

I could not find even a drop of tear in her eyes as she spoke to me. Perhaps, she has drained them all in the sea. The sea takes everything she told me.

“Days decay like food, fish and rotten dead bodies — all that we find in the sea. Nothing remains. It all decays,” she said matter-of-factly.

And we forget.

Yes, we’ll all forget these fishermen.

Every time they release a group, she waits for her husband, but he does not return.

“If he’ll not come this time I’ll pray for his peaceful death. I hope that would set him free, beyond the borders of the land and the sea,” she said resolutely.

I didn’t say anything.

“It is the best thing to happen,” she said.

Freedom by any means. She meant that, perhaps.

I don’t know what happens when people overcome fear. Do they win always?

There are questions you don’t want to answer. And I have learnt not to arrive at conclusions for most things in life.

I looked at the sea from her small half-broken window. It looked serene but regretful. I wondered, what can be more free and peaceful than the sea?

Yet people claim ‘their land’ and ‘their sea’.

It turned dark and cloudy and I left her place with many unanswered questions. I did not bury them, nor did I drained them in the sea.

I wanted to read her the verse of Agha Shahid Ali:

“Can you promise me this much tonight,
When you divide what remains of this night,
It will be like Prophet once parted the sea.
But no one must die!”

But I left silently, leaving the verse suspended.

I sat on the shore for some time and heard the sea breathing, heavily. The breeze carried a nip of melancholy in the air. And the sea carried the guilt.

There, at the shore, I offered prayers to the Prophet for the day when the sea will merge all that it carries and reclaim the peace.

Amen.

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