July Jewels: Monthly Missives from The Dream Pedlar
It's only early July as I type these words. But if all has gone as planned, as you read this, I'm basking in warmth and love at my parents' home on the outskirts of Chennai in southern India.
Yes! I'm back in the land of my birth after 11 long years.
Which is why this month's missive won't contain my usual ramblings as I'm in the midst of travelling and meeting family and friends, many of whom I haven't seen or perhaps even spoken to in all this time.
Instead of the usual reflections, Tales for Dreamers, and book recommendations, I'll share with you a short story I wrote a couple of summers ago after my second visit to Vancouver.
This tale, titled 'Underwater Treasures for a Pretty Penny' is inspired by a sculpture I was mesmerized by in Vancouver. Located on a rock in the water beside Stanley Park, from the shore it looked like a sculpture of a mermaid. Turns out it isn't.
It's a 'Girl in a Wetsuit', a life-sized figure representing a scuba diver. It was created by an artist of Hungarian origin, Elek Imredy. Here's an interesting article on how the Girl in a Wetsuit was inspired by Copenhagen's statue of The Little Mermaid but became its own icon without getting embroiled in copyright issues.
On a quick aside, if you're looking for book recommendations, let me point you to this wonderful website, Armed With A Book. Created by Kriti Khare, a voracious reader and book lover I've been lucky to connect with and get to know over the past few months, it is full of book discussions and reviews as well as author interviews.
If Armed With A Book were a real, tangible place in the physical world, I'd simply pack my bags (maybe just a change of clothes and endless coffee supplies), and go live there without further ado.
It's unlike any book blog/review website you may have seen so far. Kriti's love for books and stories shines through every single post. While I can tell you how much I love a particular book, Kriti has this awesome ability to show you why!
Remember how much I was raving about Herman Hesse's Siddhartha a couple of months ago? Kriti's review of Siddhartha shone light on why I felt that reading the book was like a homecoming in more ways than one! There's so much to relate to in her book discussions.
Check out her website! I'm sure you'll find many books there to pique your interest! 📚
So, dear Dreamer, I shall leave you now with my story Underwater Treasures for a Pretty Penny below.
Hope you're having a grand summer. I'll write to you in August with tales from India.
~ Anitha
Underwater Treasures For A Pretty Penny
You think she’s a mermaid. To be fair she can be mistaken for one when you see her from a distance—the way her swim fins splay out like a mermaid’s tail, and the way her diving mask frames the top of her head like a crown. And when she dives into the ocean, she stays underwater for days at a time, for weeks on end, as if the bottom of the ocean is the only place she can truly call home.
She doesn’t like to be called a mermaid, though. She has her own reasons, she says, though she refuses to divulge them to you. And that’s OK too, because this is not a tale of labels, though it does help to name creatures and things if only to distinguish one from the other, you explain (and I agree with you wholeheartedly).
But, she argues, that’s the whole point. She doesn’t wish to be anything apart from the ocean itself. And so you suggest you could call her Ocean, (great idea, by the way!) and she gives you an exasperated sigh, because you were the only human in a long time she believed would understand her conundrum.
Yet, she holds no grudge against you. She simply changes the topic and asks what treasures you seek. You request her to bring a simple jewel from the bottom of the ocean, something that will show you what that place looks like, a place you’ve never been to before.
That’s easy, she says, but it will cost you a pretty penny, she warns before she jumps off the rock she was perched on, straight as an arrow, without disturbing more of the surface of the water than she needs to.
This time, it takes her months to return. Much transpires in between. Someone you gave your heart to breaks it over and over again. Another someone you thought would be around forever dies, and your broken heart is crushed by more loss than you believe it could possibly endure.
You vow to never love again, for that is the only way you seem to be able to carry on with your work and your life. A human needs to feed oneself, after all. To live is still to breathe and to walk and to eat and to drink, after all, no matter how badly love and loss may have ravaged your heart and soul.
You go for a run earlier in the mornings these days, now that panic has begun to jolt you out of restless nights at 3 a.m. You pound that familiar path before dawn breaks over the waters, before all the other runners spill out onto the trail and you are compelled to return their nods or waves or smiles of greeting, good manners and all that. For how can you smile and wish someone else a good morning when a part of your own heart wishes you had not woken up to see this new day?
It takes you several days to notice her. But she has been watching you this entire time, from her usual perch on the rock. Watching you run from yourself. Watching you coerce your muscles into becoming strong enough to carry your heavy heart.
“Hey, you!” she calls out at last when it has become clear you will not be the one to notice her first.
The voice is familiar and distinct enough that it makes you turn your head even as your legs continue to lead you away. But soon sense prevails, and the light in the world shifts as you see her and remember a time before all the heartbreak and the grief.
Hey Ocean, you call back, and she rolls her eyes but then laughs, and you find yourself smiling too. And it feels strange and familiar all at once, the way your lips push the corners of your mouth upwards in a curve you had erased from your face a long time ago and hadn’t even realized it.
Tears well up in your eyes—but you had forgotten your eyes were capable of such a miracle, hadn’t you?—and roll down your cheeks. And you tell your friend from the ocean about all that you had endured when she had been away treasure-hunting.
She listens to you long after you stop speaking. She listens to the sound of your grief rising from the deepest parts of you only to fall at your feet.
And when you shed your last tear, she coaxes it away from your cheek onto her fingertip, where it wobbles like a drop of pearl trying to find balance on a new perch, where it dazzles like a mélange of rainbows made by a thousand suns, and she whispers, “A pretty penny.” Like the ocean itself, she means, even though she doesn’t say it explicitly.
And now that you have unburdened yourself, you are ready to receive. The not-mermaid, not-Ocean places something in your palm. You had forgotten about that too, your request for a jewel from the bottom of the ocean and the price you were once willing to pay for it.
It is a flat stone that seems to have borrowed its colours from the farthest reaches of the blue sky. A jewel caressed over and over again by the ocean until its jagged edges have smoothed over.
It confuses you at first. You had expected something black. For isn’t the bottom of the ocean devoid of light? Isn’t that what you’ve been told, told by countless others who dared not venture to such depths themselves but merely repeated to you what they had heard from other ignoramuses just like them?
“The bottom of the ocean is devoid of light, that is true,” she says. “But it certainly isn’t devoid of colour. Pluck a jewel from the darkness it lives in. Then let its colours dazzle you.”
You peer at this nameless object she has thrust in your hand, coaxed from the very belly of the earth, and your heart explodes with a joy you had forgotten the taste of.
She who lives at the bottom of the ocean waves a hand over yours, and a string of silver snakes its way around your wrist, tying the sky-blue ocean jewel to your being, from where it can hear the distant rhythm of your heart.
“There,” she says with the satisfaction of a job well done.
For she has give you something that will gently hold you by your wrist when your fingers are too tired to grasp anything, even air. Something that will never let go, not even after you’ve cast it away.