epigraph from The Master and the Margarita. I think about it—and the mysticism it inspires—often. Enjoy
It’s difficult to describe the vivid image a beach evokes in the mind. To turn something living into simple, inanimate words. Can you capture nature’s ephemerality? Waves don’t crash with the same vivacity in the hermit’s early morning sun as they do for the puppeteering moon. Sand is coarse when it slips through your fingers yet it’s soft beneath your feet. Do you see the seagull flying? Blessed with freedom though it knows no God.
It’s no shock then that a beach with neither name nor written history goes largely uncaptured. So when Bollywood stars and Northern models began to build their bungalows on the sea, It was skipped over completely. Honeymoons were consummated on Juhu Beach, Pilgrimages were made to rock-cut Elephanta islands. And the universe that existed in the same ocean remained, at best, rumor and, at worst, unknown to the rest of the country.
But the fishermen, the merchants, the dancers. The men, women, youth, elderly who lived on It. They nursed no ignorance. They saw that beach—Its fine sands of gold, Its water like liquid sapphire—every night in their dreams. For them, it was Ananta, eternally in mind and infinitely present. Yet, if a lost vessel or misguided tourist came upon It, neither would find life on the shore. There would be no brown bodies sunbathing by the banana trees and no children’s splashes disrupting the rhythm of the waves. But for the local people, the beach and Its waters were like the blood flowing in their veins, an unconscious necessity for their existence.
And so was life on Ananta Beach.