Blogalot

TV screen flickered with urgency, weather maps with swirling ominous spirals, anchors speaking too quickly, panicky, words like Cyclone Ockhi clubbed with a rare supermoon, a storm prediction.

India’s coastline, they warned, was bracing for massive swells and unpredictable tides. In my father’s office at Delhi, this news played on loop on 29 November 2017. Beach shacks being dismantled for their safety, fishing boats pulled ashore hastily and various people from the local administration losing their sleep.

But my father had a smile. In this chaos, he saw an invitation. While officials calculated risks, he was predicting timing, precisely when the eye of the storm would pass over North Goa. He was planning to apply for leave. Not to avoid the storm but to meet it.

For him, the ocean is not just scenery. He doesn’t merely stand at its edge, he listens, studies and waits. He dreams about the sea, carving through a wave’s hollow as it curls overhead, paddling across its restless green expanse, wind tugging at a kite line as the sun dissolves into the ocean’s horizon. His WhatsApp DP hasn’t changed for over a decade and it reads “Let the sea set you free”.

I think, it began long before I knew him this way. Learning to windsurf on a quiet lake near where he went after school. A contained body of water, predictable, almost polite. Something must have stirred in him there, a restlessness that lakes cannot satisfy. Because ever since, no matter where life took him, mountains, plains, places far from the coast, he found his way back to the sea. As if answering a calling.

Goa was inevitable. Surf schools, watermanship villages, a first proper board, slow rituals of wax and sunblock. Then the addiction, rash guards in every color, zinc smeared across cheekbones like war paint. He didn’t just learn to surf, he starting living his dream.

Then, he took me with him. My earliest memories of the ocean are not gentle. They are loud, disorienting, cold and alive. At Muizenberg, the riptides didn’t greet us like the ones at Goa, they grabbed at us. We were spun and shoved, thrown into something that felt less like water and more like an angry washing machine set to tumble wash. I remember salt in my nose, the panic of losing the horizon and missing air for water. But he was there, steady, teaching me how to read the chaos.

Later, in Bintan, we went farther out than I thought was possible. The shore became a distant suggestion and fear crept through my spine. There is a moment, when you are that far out, when the sea stops feeling like something you can leave. It surrounds you not just physically, but mentally. Yet, he kept me calm. I clutched onto the board and tucked myself between his knees. I saw him watching the swell sets, measuring intervals, setting pace to keep us oriented, as if decoding a language I was only beginning to hear.

Mirissa and Weligama were different. Softer, almost dreamy. Waves that rose and broke with a kind of predictable generosity. We lingered there for long slow rides, sun soaked skin, the satisfaction of getting it right more often than wrong. Seas and oceans we experienced, changed their character, but never the essence.

We got hooked to ocean kayaking and took to the Atlantic off Cape Town, where the water felt darker, heavier somehow. In Dubrovnik, the Adriatic stretched out in impossible clarity, every stroke of the paddle cutting through glass with ocean bed clearly visible. We took to sea swimming and swam in places that blur together now, Hvar, Split, scattered coasts across Southeast Asia, each one leaving behind not just memories but lessons in small recalibrations.

Ocean teaches us like no one else can. It teaches us to duck-dive under oncoming heavy splash instead of meeting it head-on. To hold the board as an anchor, when the waves turn rude and impatient. It teaches us that the best waves are rarely at the shore, you have to earn your way out, through discomfort and safety, to find them. It teaches patience. You sit, you wait, you listen, not just with your ears, but with your body. There is a subtle shift when a wave is forming behind you. A slight tension in the water. And then, timing becomes everything. Too early, and you stall. Too late, and it passes you by. The right moment is not obvious, we have to feel it more than we see it.

It teaches humility. Some waves are not ours to take. Some remind sharply, that over confidence without awareness is just recklessness. Most importantly, it teaches recovery. Because you will fall. Spectacularly, sometimes. You will swallow water, lose balance, misjudge entirely. And then you laugh, shake it off and paddle back out, a little more attentive than before.

These lessons accumulate, I didn’t notice them forming, but one day I realized they’ve settled into how I should think and approach things beyond the water. Which is why that November evening stays with me. The storm warnings, anxious broadcasts. And my father, looking at it all as if the storm was not something to escape, but something to understand. He has fallen more times than I can count. Bruises, scrapes, the occasional cut that stings longer than expected. None of it has diminished his dream, the greatest ambition to not just to surf a wave but to surf that wave.

“The eye,” I read somewhere “is where it’s calm.” A strange truth, that at the heart of the turbulent storm lies stillness. To be there, in that fleeting corridor of calm, surrounded by the full force of a storm, not conquering it or defying it, but moving with it, precisely when it allows, is probably quite a dream. And perhaps that is what he has been teaching me all along. Not how to avoid the storm, but how to find its eye.