The poetry of the sun, the sea

I can hear the sea at night nowadays. The rolling sound of the tide coming in, and then the distant crash of waves on the shore. After a pause the sequence is repeated, the rise and fall, the rolling, the crash. The steady rhythm lulls me to sleep like some otherworldly lullaby.

It's funny how very large shells seem to capture the very same sound. I gave a large cowry shell to my niece Maithili when she was five, and I watched with pleasure the wonder on her face when she put it to her ear and heard the sound of the sea. It's the never ending story of the sea, I told her. She was amazed that the sea somehow lived inside the shell, telling its tale, never stopping once. Intermittently through the day she put the shell to her ear to see if the sound had stopped. What story is it telling? - she wanted to know. And I told her it was probably about life under the sea, but we would never know because we didn't know the language.

There is probably some dry scientific fact that will explain it all, but sometimes I like the imaginative truth better.

Not always though. Many a time I want to know the why of many things I see and wonder at in my ignorance.

Like yesterday. The evening sun was a huge blazing orange ball. I could glimpse it through the trees and I hurried a little, hoping to see it set over the sea.

Why is the setting sun sometimes so huge and at other times just a regular size?

And why does such a glorious sun, which is almost a blazing ball of fire, not result in an equally glorious sunset?

By the time I reached the sea the sun had just set. And there was not even a hint of all that fiery, fantastic orange to be seen in the sky. Anticlimax. How could it all have just vanished so utterly and so soon?

Maybe not knowing and always wondering is precisely what makes the sea and the sun eternally enthralling. I know a poet called Nazim Hikmet must have felt something like this.

I came across his poem just yesterday:

as a kid he didn't pluck the wings off flies
tie tin cans to cats' tails
lock beetles in matchboxes
or stomp anthills
he grew up
and all those things were done to him
I sat at his deathbed
he said to read him a poem
about the sun and the sea . . .