I begin at the end

A beginning, a meandering middle and an end. And perhaps the making of a story?

I begin at the end. I end at the sea. My ancestors did not let the sea be a dead end. They built rafts and sailed to the nearest land. To vibrant greens and luscious fruits. My nightmares of drowning at sea strait jacket me to remain at this end of the sea. In my fake Crocs slippers, cheap green shorts and sea-themed Short Kurta. In front of me, the sun dissolves into the sea in a mess of orange and yellow. Like a paintbrush full of colour dipped inside a cup of water. Children play football, and angling enthusiasts sink fishing rods into slightly muddy waters. As per the dictates of true mindfulness, I have unplugged my earphones. My tired feet (minus the Crocs) now flirt with the approaching waves. This is the farthest into the waters I dare to go. My wet feet have brought me back to the beginning.

I began with a choice: Fake Crocs slippers or Fake Nike shoes. A walk where you don’t have an end in mind is not to be taken lightly. But I did not put too much thought into it and slipped on the Crocs. A video I recently watched explained to me the concept of mindfulness. As a young girl on my screen explained, it was to be mindful of everything - the sights, the sounds, the smells, the touches. Taking her up on her words made me feel a new world open for me. This is a world where the thick bristles on the cheap Ikea carpet tingle inside me like the grass in a beloved park used to. A world where touching the plants' leaves reminds me of a thin blanket that my sister could not sleep without when she was young. A world where I can feel my feet burning inside the cheap Crocs after walking a kilometre.

I began with another choice: To plug in my earphones or not. True mindfulness dictates that I leave behind my earphones at home. To be fully present, I need to hear my present. But baby steps. Also, the newest story in Le Var Burton’s short story podcast sounds interesting. It is about a woman's struggle to understand why her father has begun to teleport spontaneously. As a compromise for the mindfulness dilemma, I opt to listen to the podcast at 1x speed. I will listen to the silences between the words, and I will listen to the spaces between the sentences.

This business of the beginning is sorted. Let us meander a bit in the middle. From the hike to the story to everything that I can see and feel.

This is going to be a long hike, and I am not an avid hiker. I have only recently started to explore areas around where I live. I knew that I lived close to the Singapore Changi prison, but something had stopped me from going there. In this quest to let my feet guide me, I have now reached a road that is lined on one side by an enormous grey wall and a white gate of the prison. Other than the wall's size, there is nothing that hints that people will live and die in the absence of freedom and choice on the other side. The other side functions like a typical city would, and there is a bus stop opposite it. The caged are not a distant memory here. They are an ever-present reminder of how much we take for granted the freedoms around us.

Let’s get back to my ears. Le Var Burton starts his story with a massive gulp of breathing in and out to get his listeners in the mood. Earlier, these were just words for me, and I often skipped them. Today, a sense of ritual grips me, and despite myself, I take a big breath and wait for Le Var Burton to exhale. At that moment, I am teleported into Le Var's living room. It looks suspiciously like an old house where my sister and I listened to my grandfather tell us stories – and Le Var Burton looks suspiciously like my grandfather. And breathe out.

Owing to its size, Singapore often overwhelms you with cruel contrasts. There are trees here that suddenly spring out of otherwise perfectly well-made sidewalks, and instead of a sidewalk, you have broken bits of cement. There are endangered forests here fighting for their existence with the rapid encroachments of concrete and glass. A black-naped yellow oriole will suddenly fly from the prison, over its walls and to a tree just in front of you. Then, in its trademark high-pitched Twitter, it will laugh at your limitations. A bus zooms past me and ruins the perfect picture I was trying to capture of the oriole. I shake my head at the Singapore-ness of the event.

Le Var’s story reaches an interesting juncture. The daughter tries to find her father after he has just teleported and is reported missing. Just then, an older Chinese man wearing a lemon-yellow t-shirt comes in front of me. The brightness of his shirt overshadows everything that I see or hear, or feel. He must be at least seventy. He contorts his face into a smile as he nods at me, and then, in some seconds, he has vanished into the distance.

Like the lemon-yellow-shirted man, Le Var’s story has moved on without me. I remove my earbuds and look around myself for a moment. My feet (smarting from the fake Crocs) have carried me to unexplored territories. I can see a bus stop ahead and walk up to it. The sea beach was a mere two minutes away from where I stood.

In the beginning, the sea was not going to be my end. But I began at the end. And the sea was always my end. I click a few pictures. I write a few notes about the hike. I don’t know this when I write those notes, but it will be nearly 7 years before the notes are fleshed out enough for a blog. It would take a separate trip to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and another set of fake Crocs.

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In other news, I took a longish break from this blog for Diwali and some travel. I can see I have missed so many great pieces from all my favourite writers. Now I catch up.