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Sunday, June 13, 2021

Living in a Boat and Flying Planes

 Sailing Solo Around The World? Shambhavi Mahamudra Can Help | Isha Sadhguru

By the time I was off on my first circumnavigation in 2012 I had spent ten months living in the boat which was to take me around the world. A million dollar live-aboard yacht and a river in Goa perhaps puts an idyllic and romantic image in one’s head but the real reason why I made that choice was neither that nor was it the fact that I was training to spend six months sailing around the earth alone. I detested sharing a cabin in naval messes which were always short on accommodation. This is not to speak ill of the officers I have messed with. But when a doctor-roommate left a baby snake in a bottle on the dressing table and woke me up from afternoon sleep asking for a name to call it by, I thought I had had enough. 

 

I said, “Dog”. Call it “Dog” and go and tell everyone to come and have a look at your new pet, “Dog”. There is enough to roommates to fill a book but I will leave it at that and come to the point where I passed orders to my Man Friday, Leading Seaman Mohammed Alam, to prepare the boat for my imminent move. Alam thought I must be joking or out of my mind but he did clean up the boat which was undergoing repairs after a long passages from Rio-de-Janeiro and Cape Town and I moved in lock stock and barrel. At the beginning it was like setting up a new home as I figured out where the clothes went and where the bags went and how the kitchen would be stocked up and where the shoes would go. I had to decide what fresh supplies I could get onboard and how to store them without refrigeration and without attracting pests. The bosun store was emptied of sails and lines as it became my meditation room, and I set up a hammock amidships where the boat was at its widest. By its swaying the hammock would provide some relief in the hot summers of Goa. Nets were set up on portholes to keep the mosquitoes out but the companionway had no such option. Either I could leave it open and suffer the companionship of little creatures or completely board it up and suffer the heat. It was the latter I chose over pestilence most of the time.

 

One might imagine that the rains would have brought relief but it only got worse because humidity rose and all the hatches and portholes leaked droplets of rain into the boat and everything was damp all the while. The swell that came in from the Arabian Sea made its way through the bay and the harbour mouth and rocked the boat. It did little to help matters and I wondered if a room mate with pet snake was a better idea. One day, the valve below the black water tank gave way and three hundred litres of sewage flowed into the bilges. It took an entire day to clean and sanitise the boat. That evening when I attended a dinner at a senior’s place after putting on copious amounts of perfume I overheard his wife complaining how much her infant son evacuated his bowels. Perhaps he was a sailor, I wondered. Two days later I hosted friends onboard for dinner and their son composed a clever but un-repeatable couplet on what had transpired a couple of days ago. The incident of the black water tank besieged me with a yet to be named phobia and I started using the shore toilet often. One evening I left the boat with a towel and soap for a shower but when I tried to cross over from the pontoon to the jetty they moved apart and I fell through the space in between them. I had to save myself, of course, but I wasn’t ready to let go of the towel and soap either. I swam under the pontoon in the darkness and made it to the transom of the Mhadei where I put her swim ladder to use for the first time. That incident put in me the fear of boarding boats. Now, I have two yet to be named phobias. 

 

Winter had a settling effect. The river flowed quiet, the north easterlies pushed humidity away and temperatures settled lower. I would often finish the day’s work and sit with a drink to watch the catamarans decked out with shining lights and tourists glide past. They would venture as far as the harbour mouth with loud music and a DJ whose job it was to herd people on to the dance floor for which he would tell a joke as he crossed my boat. I found it funny at first but its repetitiveness eventually got on my nerves to such an extant that I wanted to petition the government. Probably thats what forced me to into spending evenings and late nights in dysfunctional light houses and ramparts of forts.

 

I stayed in the boat when we sailed to the President’s Fleet Review at Mumbai. After rehearsals in the morning I could spend the rest of the day gazing at the skyline of Mumbai as lights appeared one after the other appreciating how good it was not to be stuck in traffic. Those were a good ten days. When we anchored at Ettikkulam Bay I stayed onboard as the permanent anchor watch. My crew had found accommodation at INA but when they would report onboard in the mornings I would organise diving and swimming competitions and a hearty meal onboard. There would be days when I would fly sorties with 310 squadron. During the sail to the South East, the marina manager at Phuket impressed by an Indian flagged yacht paid a visit and talked about about Cathay pilots - that they lived on yachts and flew planes. Big deal, I told him, because that was what I too did. 

 

But barring isolated bragging rights, it was a spartan life of privation compared to a naval mess. There was no refrigeration, no air conditioning, no fans and no help with cooking and cleaning and no civilian bearer to fix my uniform. Electricity and water were rationed because the batteries had to be recharged and the water tanks had to be filled. Life wasn’t easy but it was good. By the end of that year I had put considerable distance between myself and shore life. The boat offered a certain kind of peace that could be had only in the absence of office commutes and municipal decrees. After a long day when the workers would swarm out of the boat I could hear a familiar silence which one would feel when you shut down the engine after setting sails and pointing the boat towards an uncrowded horizon. Truly, “I learned how little a person needs, and not how much.”


Friday, April 16, 2021

In Solitude, Where I am Least Alone



When the nation-wide lockdown was announced in response to COVID 19 I was acutely aware that even if the logistics of providing for 1.3 billion people in their homes could be managed there would still remain the problem of mental health because many were wading into unfamiliar territory. Not so for me, nor for any of my colleagues in the Navy who are regularly sequestered in metal ships and submarines for weeks. Perhaps there are huge lessons to be learnt in how we deal with isolation and the kind of individuals we will be when we come out of it. 

 

In the February of 2010 I landed on an island of twenty square kilometres with a population of two, no roads and a topography so ravaged by winds that trees refused to take root. As we taxied, a sign-board announced its name in red- Bleaker Island- making me wonder if it had anything to do with the isolation suffered by its inhabitants. A year later I was to spend twenty five days in a sail boat cloistered with another soul as we made our way from Rio to Cape Town. I had a first hand experience of the peculiar loneliness that one feels in the company of another, the loneliness that comes from running out of things to talk about.

 

At Cape Town I dropped off my crew, made a pilgrimage to Robben Eiland where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for eighteen years and as winter approached we set sail for Goa. It was the middle of the year and I was alone in my little boat. An easterly breeze helped us at the outset but when the Cape of Good Hope was rounded it freshened into a gale trying to push us back, with the help of the Agulhas current, into the Atlantic. The air was made bleaker by its dampness but what exacerbated my condition were the problems that beset us. The gale shredded a sail and a batten cut lose and made its way into the sea. I lost both of them forever. The generator and autopilot too went on strike. The days got bleaker as they passed and I struggled between my duties as lookout, cook, navigator, sail trimmer and  a quartermaster rendered sleepless without a functional autopilot. It did not help either that I was afflicted with nausea with my stomach trying to find a solution to the multi dimensional problem of sea sickness by retching. Those four days had broken me mentally and I wasn’t sure if I could carry on for another thirty days and make it to India. Everything all around was going wrong and I was angry and desperate because a lot hinged on the outcome of this voyage. 



 

Something had to be done. It was important that I set my own house in order first so that I could perceive things as they were. I set about chanting dispassionate sounds with a solemn voice over the next two days till the mind slowed and eventually stopped reacting to outside cues. I could decide what to feel, and I decided to feel peaceful. As if on cue, the storm outside stopped being stormy and despair was replaced by a stoic resolve that comes after a glimpse of the profound. It had now become simpler to be where I was, which was the present, and continue to remain there until I reached where I had to be. This transition from loneliness to solitude was a seminal experience that I built upon till it was time for the big voyage of 2012.

 

On the 1st of November that year, my life turned a chapter. The Indian Navy  was about to help me realise my childhood dream of sailing around the world. I was casting off to be more alone than any other Indian had ever been and for even longer than one’s imagination would permit. I was to be so alone that it was akin to draining this country of all its people, land, roads, buildings, rivers, forests and everything conceivable and to stand in its geographic centre dealing with a biweekly ration of cyclones. It would be bleaker than Bleaker, and even more remote. It was to be solitary confinement, with the exception that I had not only volunteered but also was looking forward to it, and it was with profound relief that I let go of the lines that tied my boat to the shore and sailed out into a cyclone that waited outside the harbour. Unlike the previous instance, I was better prepared this time.

 

In the next five months I sailed around the world alone. The voyage itself was well documented in blogs and media. People noticed the equatorial heat, the fickleness of doldrums, the certainty of trade winds and the magnificent Great Capes of the Southern Hemisphere. The vicious gales of the Southern Ocean reminded them of the age old adage that there were no rules south of the forties, no laws south of the fifties and no gods south of the sixties. They saw how the boat and I were battered by storms and calmed by lulls, how we were chased by whales and dolphins and albatross, how in the tropics flying fish would kill themselves by flying into the boat and how I survived on rain water after diesel mixed with drinking water. They met the people I met - the sailor off Isla de los Estates on Erica XII, the pilot onboard an RAF Hercules close to Bleaker Island and the Chinese watchkeeper of MOL Distinction in the trade winds. And when I arrived, they saw the grand reception that the Navy had arranged at the Gateway of India, and how the story of the voyage was recounted. What they did not see though, was the mind that emerged after being subject to such solitude.

 

Pointers of what was to become of me at the end of the isolation emerged within a month. The first week was spent in forgetting land- both its trappings and the exhaustion one carries from having to ready a boat- as you realise that you have become a little self sustaining planet.  I had also lost the sense of time because there no longer existed a need to synchronise mundane chores to the convenience of others but this I regained by the second week. By the third week I realised that I wasn’t dressing to conform to an image, or to an occasion, but to what was necessitated by convenience and that made clothing optional. It took me four weeks to see the freedom that came from not having to form opinions, of having to worry about the opinions of others and of the constant necessity to impress someone else, or outthink and out manoeuvre them.  


 

The storms began as soon as we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn which coincided with the first appearance of the brown albatross. The first storm, which seemed like the gale at the Cape of Good Hope, shook me. Powerful winds heaped mountains of water on us but it was not the force of the passing storm that made me afraid but the memory of the previous one. I got used to this, because once you understand that fear is a projection of your mind it can be controlled and experienced in the manner you want. Even without that understanding, it is the faculty of human mind that it can endure what it can’t change. The mind, in that world devoid of stimulations where everything was the same every day, learnt that forgetfulness was a powerful and natural ally. I could no longer remember what yesterday was like, or the day before or any other day right until the first day of the voyage, and whatever memories I had were fragmented without time stamps or had to be recalled from a written journal. I, for one, existed only at that moment. The mind that was unstimulated by the outside environment turned inwards and becomes reflective. Life’s philosophical questions that need long periods of contemplation are best engaged in such uninterrupted solitude. In the absence of society, products of belief systems broke down. In the absence of transaction, money lost its meaning. In the absence of society hierarchy broke down. There was no way of determining one’s position in the order of things and, therefore, death, which in a way of speaking is a cessation of relationships, became non-existent. Without death, the conventional idea of god necessitated a replacement. When one hasn’t spoken at all, one has stopped lying and, by extension, one becomes sinless in solitude because there hasn’t been anyone to sin against. Without sin there was no guilt, and without guilt and conversation I started to see things as they were because my highest and only moral obligation was to be truthful to myself. That is how I lived for five months. It was in that time without the burden of memory or expectations that I was free.

 

 We celebrated two New Year’s Eves as we crossed the International Date Line, rounded Cape Horn on 26th of January 2013, crossed the Prime Meridian on Valentine’s Day, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in a storm, dodged a cyclone off Madagascar, sailed past Mauritius on their National Day, ran out of water before Syechelles, recrossed the Equator on the day of March equinox and were back in Mumbai on Easter Sunday. There was a tremendous reception arranged by the Navy at the Gateway of India as thousands gathered and the President of India flew down to mark the end of the voyage. 

 

 It was interesting to be thrown among people. Was it a coincidence that I re read “Moby Dick” about that time and my attention was drawn to these lines : “Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is - which was the only way he could get there - thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely his was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that.”