Something In The Water

Chapatis are not nice. Anu does not like them and will not eat them. They’re dry, they taste like nothing, they make her thirsty, and her father says she shouldn’t drink too much water on a ship. That she’ll run through the supply meant for the whole crew. He can say what he wants. She’s not eating this chapati.

Elsewhere, something is tracking them. He sees a ship on the horizon, white sails, blue insignia. It is far away, but the creature has eyes that penetrate the line between the water and the sky. He sees everything. He knows everything. He can reach that vessel in a single swoop if he wants.

The creature has been alive for a long time. Almost as long as the sea itself. The sailors--those that have seen him--call him Makara. It means something in their languages, he is sure. And he likes the sound of it in his ears. Makara. It’s both fluid and rough at once, it reminds him of his bony scales and rows of jagged teeth. He keeps the name.

The thing is, he knows when they talk about him. Legends drift across the sea, of gods and monsters, islands and men, and he catches them as they wander the waves. He knows they fear him. He empathises. Humans often fear what they don’t understand.

But Makara doesn’t fear them. They can’t touch him. He has Cosmic Knowledge and Eternal Life. When he swims, the tides follow his course. Where he sleeps, trenches form in the seabed. There is nothing a human can do to hurt him.

They have tried, in the past, because it’s instinctual for them to injure. Makara used to get close to their ships to say hello. Now he watches, as he does now, from just beneath the water’s dark surface. The ship moves rapidly, and he can hear the sailors talking. He swallows their words as they come. It’s the same conversation he’s heard many times before. Humans talk in circles. That’s why their heads are round. Makara has a triangulated skull because he thinks in exacts; directionally. One has to if one is to live in these oceans forever. The oceans are formless and confusing. The deeper and farther one goes, the less and less sense they make.

Humans would get lost in the water. Without their maps and compasses and stars to guide them, how would they know where to go? If they were out here without their tools and their toys, their circular heads would spin into insanity. They would die so quickly.

Better, then, that he is in the water, and they are in their ships.

“You don’t really believe such superstitions, do you, Captain?” A young voice. This human is not yet a man.

“They’re not superstitions, boy. I’ve seen it.”

‘It’. They always use such a cruel word for him. Makara is not an 'it'. They use ‘it’ for things. Disposables. Forgettables. Objects that have no mind, nor a beating heart. It’s reflective of how they see him, Makara supposes. He is not a Being to them. He is a monster. And monsters are things to be disposed of.

“Will you tell us the story?” asks the boy.

“Maybe some other time. Right now, I want us to get out of this stretch. It likes to feed here.”

On the ship, Anu hides the chapati in her fist. It crumbles. She could just throw it overboard, she knows, but it would float, and her father would notice. He’d chastise her for wasting food, the way he does when she wastes water.

Back home--and how Anu misses home!--there used to be a pond with green slime on the surface, circling the pink lotuses anchored to the earth at the bottom. Ducks used to swim there. Anu would feed them, crushing chapatis in her palms and throwing them out into the water. Sometimes the fish got them too. Big fish, bright gold and streaked with red. They’d reflect the sunlight when they swam. She'd preferred feeding the fish. She was fascinated by them.

On her sixth birthday, she’d caught one in her bare hands. It had flopped around and she’d screamed, not from fright but surprise. Neither of them had been expecting the capture. Anu had been mesmerised by its colouring, the way it flitted around the water like a string. She’d only wanted to touch it. To make friends.

But the fish had fought her grip and fallen back into the water. She’d landed backwards on the bank, getting mud on her new clothes. She’d received a scolding from both her parents that day. But it didn’t make her cry. The only genuinely upsetting thing was the way the fish had fled.

Later, her father had sat her on his lap as he lit a bidi and she’d complained about it. Yes, fish were meant for water, but did it have to be so mean?

“A lesson for fish and life,” her father had said. “You must try to meet your friends in the middle.”

“What does that mean?”

“Fish are afraid of air. If you bring them into the air, they will fear you. And you cannot go in the water, Anu, because you will drown.”

“Yes.”

“So what is the answer?”

“To feed them and watch them eat?”

He’d smiled. He had the sad smile of a man who’d seen more than a man should have. “Sure,” he said. “That’s one right answer.”

Of course, it was. Then and now. This is how she can get rid of the chapati. They are on a ship in the sea. There are lots of hungry fish waiting to make a friend. Anu goes to the back of the ship, where she sees no witnesses. If someone spied her feeding the fish, they’d tell her parents. She tears a piece of the chapati and sticks her hand through the railing. “Here, fishy. Here fishy-fishy-fish.”

As the piece falls from her palm, a dark, impossible shape rises slowly from the water. It has an enormous triangular head, like a mugger crocodile, and scales of the most beautiful, iridescent glow. They sparkle blue, gold, red. It is so large, the animal’s head is almost the size of the ship vertically. The rest of its body is still underwater.

It catches the chapati piece mid-air and dives back beneath the waves, alarmingly quick for its size.

Anu just gasps. Then she leans over the railing. “You’re so pretty! Do that again!”

She waits. Is he going to greet her once more? Did the sailors see? Maybe he’s hungry! Anu tears a bigger piece of the chapati and throws it into the water. “Catch!”

Once more, he launches himself out of the sea and grabs it. She’s not sure a creature that big can even taste the chapati, but she’s not going to refuse a chance at making a fish friend. Anu likes animals. She likes pretty fish most of all. And this is the prettiest one in the whole wide world.

She throws him another piece of chapati. Once more, he rises to catch it. This time, the sailors finally notice. Anu hears the alarm bells go off--loud ding-ding-dinging. She hears her mother scream her name as strong hands pick her up and away from the railing. The rest of the chapati falls overboard.

“IT’S MAKARA!” the captain shouts. “OPEN FIRE!”

“NO!” Anu screams, but nobody listens to seven-year-olds. The whole ship shakes with the boom of canons. It smells like salt and burning. The great creature disappears beneath the water without any attempt at a fight. Anu cries for it, struggling against her father as he wrangles her belowdecks.

Makara watches the commotion from under the sea. He has Cosmic Knowledge and Eternal Life, but he has never tasted human food before.

It is easy to destroy a ship. He has done so in the past. But there’s no pleasure in it. He has no hatred for humanity. They are simply smaller creatures, smaller in capacity and intelligence. They will react as smaller creatures do. He watches them fire more cannonballs into his sea. He hears their panicked shouts and the child’s screaming.

He does not like to hear it.

He chooses to swim deeper and deeper, until he can feel the heat radiating from cracks in the earth, and can no longer catch the garbled words of people at the surface of the world’s oceans. Here the water is warm and strange. It is a quiet place to rest, and to understand his very first experience of human kindness.