The Old Man and The Sea

Somewhere deep buried inside me, there is a place for Santiago! Not the Santiago from the alchemist! He too has his home somewhere in there, but this one I am talking about is a very different Santiago! One who has shaped much my life for the better and has set me on a path which is becoming narrower yet more exciting at every instance of me walking through it!

I am a proud fisherman! Well, I do not own a boat or a skiff! Nor do I earn my livelihood by selling sea creatures! But still, in heart, I am as much of a fisherman as Santiago was! By now if you do not remember or do not know who this Santiago is, I urge you to read the book, the old man and the sea!

The first time I had laid my eyes upon Santiago was in a dream! There he was, walking on a faraway beach with the whitest of sands with a mast on his shoulder! He sets it on the skiff that looked as wrinkled and old as he was! And under an intrepid enchantment, I followed his footsteps, only for him to turn around, look at me and say, save yourself, kid! You do not want this! But his eyes, those blue eyes, as if the ocean mother herself had made those for him, said otherwise. They said, there, in the vast sea, expanding horizon as far as the eye can see, there lies the answer to everything! That is where Cthulhu resides, and that is where you must go!

Almost a decade later, now I too have turned into this fishing junkie! Quite literally following his footsteps!

Such endeavors of mine have taken me to quite a few places! I have fished in the mountain streams, in shallow but strong currents! Almost every type of fishing spot my country has to offer, except the sea! And the way life is progressing these days, I might become an old man, a failed fisherman who has never been to sea! Well, I have been to sea, but under circumstances which had said otherwise!

A few days ago, I went on a fishing trip to this long yet not a very wide lake! On a hunt for Boal, generally called Wallago Attu! I do not get this one thing tho! Why does it have to be called wallago attu! What the hell does that name even mean! To satiate this query of mine, I had asked many of my comrades what the name meant! Most of them didn't know this fish was even called that! I digress!

So, at 10 pm that night, with two fishing rods and a big bag of bait, I got up on my bike! A few hours later, me and my friend, who I had picked up on the road, who had planned this whole trip, set up shop near the bank! We got our rods out as fast as we could, and a few minutes later, there it was! The radium bobber, bobbing up and down with the waves!

An hour went by, nothing happened. Two hours went by, we changed our spot, nothing happened! It was almost dawn, yet we had not a single bite! We were about to change our site again for the last time, when something finally had taken the bait! The bobber slightly but surely went up and down and so with every ounce of force in my body, I had snapped back the rod and managed to set the hook! I immediately looked at my friend, and even in that eerie darkness, I could see the happiness in his eyes! After almost three months of being unable to catch anything, we had it! The drag indicated it was something monstrous. Every time I reeled the line a few inches, it dragged it out three times more. And my friend, breathing down on my neck, with a shaky voice, had uttered 'Shomoy ne bondhu!'!

The radium boober was telling me where the fish actually was. And like an almost blind man, I was fighting with the monster purely based on my instinct! And nearly half an hour later, I gave the fishing rod to him. It had wore me down! Very slowly, with steady hands, he reeled the fish in! And there I was, in my shorts, standing in the water, with the catching net in my hands! The radium bobber was quite bright, yet I couldn't measure its silhouette with my eyes! But I understood how humbling its size was as soon as I netted it! My net, which is labelled to easily handle 30-40 pound fishes, couldn't get the whole fish in it!

My friend, Hashmi, with a torchlight in his hand, slowly climbed down the bank! And with hazy watery eyes, we saw the marvelous river creature in all of its glory! It was no Boal, a similar type of catfish but more vicious and rarer! It was a Goonch, Locally called Baghair!

We ended up releasing it, mostly because there was no way for us to bring it up without another set of hands! And even more so because that was the right thing to do! A fish of that proportions meant it was ancient! Older than perhaps even me! And so who are we to ravage such an elegant creation! Without even saying anything to each other, we had come to an understanding! As if we were actually Santiago and Manolin standing on that bank looking at the rising sun while the Goonch swimmed and whirled right in front of us, just before going away towards the sunrise! Some day, another greedy fisherman might catch him, or he might die of old age! Whatever it may be, I am not someone who could decide its fate! What I managed to do was only make a friend right before sunrise!