Blue Skies: A Parallel Universe

February 11, 2012 at 12:59pm

A-Air, pressure 200 good. Breathe in through the aqualung, check the octopus, good.

B-BCD-Inflate, puffs up, deflate, goes flat, good.

C-Clips- harness tight, waist belt tight, weights as required. Good to go.

Left hand covering the mask, right hand on the chest, fins together, check to see all clear behind, On the count of 3, 2, 1 roll over onto your back and fall off the boat.

Splash……..One second of disorientation…..

And then silence. A peaceful calm surrounds you and the entire world is suddenly weightless and an effervescent green and blue. It’s probably the closest one will come to weightlessness of space travel!!! I am sure those who have been there and done it would have guessed, I am talking about scuba diving. Continuing from where I left off in the previous note, there was thankfully no slip between the cup and the lip and I did get to do the course. Yippeee!! I am now a PADI certified, open water diver. All thanks to a colleague of mine Maheshwar Patel. So thanks to him a bunch of intrepid!! adventure seekers set course to the Andaman Islands this last week of January and boy was it a life changing event. No, even though Mulay proposed that we all cry when we surface from the first dive a la Hritik Roshan in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobaara we didn’t, probably because we hungered for more..

Winging off into the pristine blue skies from Madras as the sun rose to cast a warm orange glow on the wings of the steel bird we were encapsulated in, in no time at all we landed at Veer Saavarkar Airport at Port Blair. This is

Blue Skies

a pretty, clean, well kept little town in the throes of becoming a popular tourist destination with clean roads, less traffic (but people who employ humongous loud horns) and no pollution yet, thankfully. The journey from Port Blair to Havelock was done on the Makruzz, a dishy looking catamaran which was clean, air-conditioned and efficient but a little unadventurous if you ask me. Methinks a sailing boat with salt and the spray on your face would have been more fun. Maybe next time.

Havelock island is North by North East of Port Blair by about 2 hrs by boat and is a pea shaped island oriented North South with beaches on the Easter and western edges. The moment we disembarked from the boat we could see the sea bed of the jetty right from the surface. It was amazingly clear and a strangely luminescent green somewhat like a bottle of sprite!! Forget about the rest of the stuff let me get to the diving part!! You know I was a tad apprehensive about the whole affair, being a weak swimmer. It was actually not that I didn’t know

Sentinel Island

how to swim but rather that I was a little afraid because I had almost drowned once when I was a little boy. This was I think just after the Common wealth games at Brisbane, Australia which I had seen on TV and saw that people just dived into the water and swam like fish, so I thought that it was something natural like walking. So one day when my cousin took me over to the pool and made me sit by the side while he swam, I decided ‘why not?’ found a clear area (which happened to be the deep end) and just jumped in. and then I had to be literally fished out. So ever since I have been a bit apprehensive about water and had a tough time getting through in NDA just because of swimming. I later on learnt to swim back stroke but have not really taken to water.

So after our basic theory classes and ground training we set course in a snappy looking boat, all 9 of us with our instructors Sayeed and Karthik and dive masters Alex and Stephen. The scuba equipment weighs a ton when you are over land but becomes weightless in water. The initial classes were much like aviation, dedicated to procedures, emergency drills, hand signals and trying to control your buoyancy with weights, the BCD and breathing. We really didn’t pay much attention to marine life around since we were keener or rather desperate to stay with the instructor, he was literally like a life line!!! A mother fish herding her school around !! The first day saw all of us drinking copious amounts of sea-water, scraping our knees on the coral reef beds when we sank like a ton of bricks in slow motion or zoomed up against our will due to excessive buoyancy.

It was only in the second day that we were a lot more comfortable and actually looked around in the water and

the love affair with the subterranean world began. I’ll try and say it through words but believe me it’s something you really need to experience. When sitting on the boat you can feel the wind in your hair, the salt of the spray on your face and the dip and the rise of the boat with every swell. When you are on the surface you feel the choppiness of the sea, with every wave as it pushes you towards or away from the boat, you can also feel the current tugging at the boat, the line and you. When you are under the surface you feel nothing…..just a sense of peace and calm and serenity. If you focus on the bed then maybe you can see the current as it takes you along but otherwise it is magically still and quiet. Only broken by the hissing sound of you sucking in air through the aqualung and the budu budu budu of the bubbles of air escaping from your mouthpiece. The quality of silence is almost eerie, its like you can hear the thoughts in your head!!! Believe me the Bose noise cancellation headphones don’t even come near!!! We dived at the Nursery, the Pilot reef, Lighthouse and the Wall. As we became more

comfortable, we were able to keep ourselves horizontal and vertical a few inches above the sea bed and swim along looking at stunningly colourful marine life surrounding us. It is an amazing feeling when you see shoals of bright multicoloured fish and you are swimming gently amongst them and the come right upto a few inches from your mask and then turn away, you can see every detail of their eyes, the mouth the fins and the scales. The power of Gods creatures is revealed to you as you see them effortlessly glide away as you intrude in their domain.

To see a live shockingly purple coloured clam with its lips(?) parted, clam up as soon as you take your finger near it, lots and lots of clown fish (remember Nemo) snuggle in and out of sea anemone, long finned banner fish looking a lot like black and yellow striped zebras, a fabulously camouflaged scorpion fish which even

Karthik failed to spot, a huge napoleon wrasse (it was about 4 feet long and about 2 feet wide) serenely swim past you or a barracuda flash by, it is a different world. And one which is controlled by the amount of air left in your tank, a lot like flying – the amount of fuel left in your tanks. I learnt and utilised a number of similarities between flying and diving. Attitude makes a difference. To go down, lower your head and kick with your fins, to rise up, raise your attitude and do the same and its wonderfully yogic (pranhayamic) too. Karthik loved to suspend himself in mid air oops water just using the amount of air in his lungs to stay still while we kept going up and down like cork being popped from a bottle of champagne!! The equalization you do to balance pressure on your ear drums every few THOUSANDS of feet in flying jet fighters, you need to do every FEW feet as you go down. Though we saw lots of starfish, coral,
Underwater world (No Filters !!)
interesting shells, lobsters etc, Karthik would not let us touch anything, let alone take it. But he did show us how all the small fish swarm around your hand peacefully till you snap your fingers and they go whoosh!! Like fired from a gun. Its unimaginable that ocean life is colourful till you see it. It was not an out of the world but rather an underworld experience….

These guys were a different breed, probably like the call of the sea, this was the call of the underworld (no pun intended)!!. Lanky and lean Karthik, Sayeed with a deep baritone-so deep it appeared to be coming from the

Me and my Hammock

reef, Vikas the equivalent of the Chief Operations Officer were all engineers who had just chucked it all up and Sarah and Stephen were MBA graduates!! It was not just in the water but in the whole island that there was a distinct disconnect from the maddening frenzy of the outside world. We could see it in the languorous life of the people at Dive India and its Full Moon Café, on the beach as they played cricket or football daily, read their books and their kindles on the hammocks, their concern at the sea life as Vikas rescued a bloated puffer fish which the local fishermen were carrying to play football with. It distinctly reminded me of the life they portrayed in the movie The Beach. And yes the waters and sand were just as clear and clean as in the movie (look at the photographs). I really understood the meaning of the word aquamarine and azure, you could see the colour of the sea change with the depth of the bed changing underneath. I also saw one of the cleanest and most beautiful beaches in India at Radhanagar where the tropical rainforest makes its way right up to the beach. I

In Quiet Contemplation

t was great fun to walk along ankle deep water in shallow tide to try and spot crabs and fish and I renamed Deshu’s daughter Anamika ‘Ouch’ coz she kept saying it so often on these jaunts!! Just as beautiful was the forest a little bit of which George Thomas and I explored on our daily morning walks and the cycle trip we did into the interiors. George was nice company, athletic, enthusiastic and appreciative of nature. And we found that without an alarm we both could get up before the crack of dawn to savour the sun rise and fresh air and the thick canopies of the tropical forests. After coming back to Bangalore, I still woke up at 4:45 for a few mornings till the daily stress took its toll and now I have to drag myself out of the bed every morning. Sometimes when I walk along the roads in Bangalore, I see how I have to navigate rubbish on the footpath and am reminded of how I had to navigate shells and hermit crabs and coral on Havelock. Like in the movie The Beach, it’s a parallel universe……

Some Glimpses of Havelock