by Tanim Ahmed

The rumble of waves didn’t fail to make me restless. They never did. The sterile interior of the Gran Melia and the almost inaudible whirr of the air conditioning were making me all the more nervous. The warmth of the soft comforter was no help either.
   I needed to feel the sandy moisture of the beach between my toes and smell the salty breeze that would be blowing over the Atlantic. Besides this was Cancún, that Mexican tourist resort famed for its debauchery and beaches. It was well past midnight when I finally made my way through the maze of corridors and hallways to the back of the hotel that opened to the ocean. I knew it would be a disappointment even as I looked out at the rough uninviting ocean. The beach looked meticulously well maintained, as if adhering to some compliance standard requirement for an ISO certification. But then beaches, or oceans for that matter, never failed to disappoint me.
   They say the bluest of them all is the Mediterranean Sea. It is only part true from what I had seen. In the summers the sea is like a rippling sheet of emerald. The waves don’t even splash on the shores. It is more like a swish. Then there is the sound of bubbles bursting as the foam disappears. That was mostly when my father would take me swimming, invariably be the high point of the day.
   Sometimes, I would pester my mother to let me go to the sea even when my father was at work. She would never agree though. I would persist, trying to impress her with a six-year-old’s infallible logic, ‘But I can swim. Just the other day I swam this far and abbu did not even hold on to me.’ For obvious reasons the sea was out of bounds. The beach, however, was quite another story.
   Almost every evening—and evenings were long on those shores—I would go there for a roll in the sand mostly after a fight with the other boys. By some inexplicable twist of events I would unequivocally end up as the villain of the entire affair despite being outnumbered and a broken crown or a swelled forehead attributed to me. I would make my way down to the beach and collect seashells that the waves piled up on the shores, all that time wondering how many complaints my mother would get by sunset and how my father would react to it. And whether I would be grounded. It wasn’t that not being allowed to play with the boys bothered me. It was a bar on coming to the beach that I secretly dreaded. I still wonder what happened to all those sea shells once I got home.
   Curfew was at sundown. I remember walking back home reluctantly, watching the blue catch fire from the sun as it dipped into the sea. The orange hue would linger for a while longer near the horizon.
   Winters were strikingly different. The Mediterranean would go through a metamorphosis. The emerald green transformed into a blue borrowed from the darkest sapphire. The waves would rise with foams on their top and hurl themselves on the shore with vengeance. It would roar through night and day for months on end. Even the shore intimidated me then. But despite the dreary sunless days of the winter the Mediterranean never ceased to be breathtaking.
   It was a strange contrast, the orange Sahara and the blue Mediterranean. Both have had much history between them and seemed equally mysterious. Both had a rippling surface and equally impressed me with their infinite vastness. Sometimes, when we went to visit friends in Tripoli or Benghazi, from Sirte, where we lived, there would be the occasional herds of camels passing by. Sometimes they would cross the road neither looking at their right nor left, but staring straight ahead into the horizon absorbed in deep thought and completely impervious to the vehicles. They came out of the orange sand and disappeared into it on the other side. I could never make out how they survived the desert.
   My earliest memories are from that seashore. With time they have become like torn scraps of pages of a moth eaten book. I had my first pedal car there. It was all red with black wheels. And the very first day I got it out on the streets, I came running to my mother scared that the speeding car would hit me. I remember learning to ride the bicycle on that street too. It had solid wheels and no brakes or bells. I would bump into walls to stop the bright green bike. Slamming against a wall at all the speed I could muster, became a sadistic pastime. This naturally also led to a number of bruises and cuts. The more serious ones I could not hide. The other ones my parents would find out somehow.
   It was also on those shores that my father told me about bullfighting. Apparently it took a lot of courage to become a bullfighter and they were very honoured. Even at that tender age—I could not have been older than seven or eight—the fatality of the deadly sport was captivating. The chivalry was quite appealing even though I could not have fully appreciated the gravity of taunting death at such close quarters. But as I found out about a decade later, reading Hemingway, the charm was still there. It was about another decade since Hemingway that I actually had the opportunity to watch the sport.
   So there I was in Cancún, still unimpressed by the Atlantic a week later. There was little time to contemplate on the beaches in all that time anyway. I had been busy covering a ministerial summit of the World Trade Organisation. Not all of it was bad though. I managed to get the minister mad at me, which told me whatever it was, I must have been doing something right. And to top it all off, the entire negotiation collapsed on the final day. I stole a large banner from the convention centre to bring home. It still hangs over my head at work complete with our original artwork proclaiming, ‘We trashed it!’
   Now it was time to indulge. The beach was out of the question. The only other obvious choice was the bullfight which would be held the next day at the Plaza de Torros — bullring — of Cancún. The childhood fascination had grown into an obsession as I read and reread Hemingway. Growing up in the city, I never had much of an opportunity in game hunting or fishing. But the bullfight was something I was not going to pass up. I wanted to witness raw courage. I wanted to see man stare death in the eyes and remain still as the bull went to him.
   It must have been out of my admiration for the matador’s guts and the machismo surrounding this deadly sport that I was bent on going to the bullfight. Intent on getting first row seats, I headed out of the humongous five star hotel about two hours before the corrida was supposed to begin. Bullfights are invariably held in the afternoons and the most prized seats are the ones in the natural shade since the plazas are open to the skies. As the Spanish say, the sun is the best torero. Without the sun, he is not there. I watched with delight while my shadow danced at my feet. It was pitch dark against the harsh sunlight. The day would be good for a bullfight.
   The plaza turned out to be covered, probably caring more for the comfort of visiting tourists than anything else. As it turned out, the corrida was entirely a touristy affair with no efforts whatsoever to maintain its authenticity. But even then it was man against beast in the bullring.
   I could see the black bull as well as the matador from my vantage point near the barrera. His eyes were watching the bull with great intent. The matador’s ceremonial outfit with golden decorations shone from the middle of the ring. He perspired in the sweltering heat. Blood dripped from where the bull had been piced. Soon the matador’s manoeuvres lost their playful touch. He would call out to the bull and the bull would begin its steady dash, his sharp white horns forward. The matador would wait till the last moment before swaying the capea and letting the bull pass by, the horns dangerously close to his torso, as he stood still. The bull would turn around and watch the matador, as he called to him again for another pass.
   The bull was taking longer to charge and watched the matador more intently then he had at first. The matador looked cool and unnerved. The bull heaved audibly. There was no mistaking the intent to kill in their eyes. The matador changed his capea for the smaller muleta and hid the sword behind it. I had lost track of time by then. Did the matador wonder if this would be his last day? Did he think about it before every corrida? I had read that the Samurai would write poetry or paint before they went out to fight a duel. What would a matador do before going out to the bullring in Madrid, I wondered.
   As it turned out, the bull had been destined to die. The matador brought out his sword and held it out pointing to the bull. Their eyes looking back at each other, the bull made his final charge. The thrust of the sword went deep between his shoulders. The bull fell after a while and the crowd was up in its feet. A real bull fight would be even more spectacular, I was sure. I knew now, what I only thought I had known for years. I wanted to face the bull and test my courage at the ring. And if I died by the horns of a bull, it would at least be an honourable death. At least it would not be like withering away in a hospital bed with nothing to do but waiting for death to come. I wanted to goad death and dare him to come to me. There is a strange sense of exhilaration in the idea of actively participating in one’s own death. Perhaps that is one reason why I find bull-fighting so thrilling. The matador gets to risk his own life for the sake of his art. The more the risk, the finer the art.
   It was becoming a bit too heady so I decided to leave by the time the matador cut off the bull’s ear and showed it to the crowd. The sun still shone outside the bullring but the bars were warming up as American tourists began crowding them.
   A few hours and quite a few tequilas later—and any self-respecting tourist should refrain from everything else in Mexico—I found myself once again on the beach. Two burly employees of the hotel guarded the beach to prevent tourists from straying into the sea since it was still rough and thus out of bounds.
   The memories came back as they always did in fragments and snatches from a labyrinth. There was my room with my bed in one corner. It had a rather effeminate illustrated Little Red Riding Hood bed cover. The blue carpet, almost as blue as the wintry Mediterranean itself, was quite a contrast. I had discovered secret places to hide things, which I now realise were not secret at all.
   I still remember a dream that my father had bought me a large red fire brigade truck that had this long extendable ladder. I woke up the next morning and asked my mother where the truck was. She rightly dismissed it as a dream at once. But I was so sure there was one. I had played with it just the night before. I was certain she did not want me to play with it then and was only hiding it.
   My father did bring me a kaleidoscope once. He had made it with three microscope slides at the hospital he worked at and put in coloured bits of paper. Inside, there would be unique designs every time I turned the thing he said. I was mesmerised at the simplicity of the whole thing. I do not remember what I had done with it. Like most other toys, I probably took the whole thing apart to see what was inside.
   There was a large map of the United States pinned on the wall beside our dining table. I remember standing up on a chair learning to read the names of American cities and there were the lakes. My father had said they were larger than even the whole of Bangladesh and although names lakes they were bigger than many seas. I looked out to the sea from our living room and thought if the great lakes were indeed as big or as blue as the Mediterranean.
   For many years after our return, those shores remained my secret escape from the suffocating environs of our house in old Dhaka. I couldn’t even look beyond the next house. Even the narrow alley in front of our house was out of bounds. Afternoons were restricted to the courtyard in front of the house, which was quite large for a few ten-year olds to play. Evenings would gradually give way to nights and I would not know where the sun sank. Even my large school bag was a misfit at the fashionable English medium school. It was a source of much laughter and attracted the kind curiosity many of us reserve for aliens. The sense of not belonging was all too overwhelming. I took refuge on my shore. I watched the sea rise and fall. I listened to the waves swish and rumble.
   Perhaps it was the tequila. Perhaps it was the long awaited bullfight that made everything heady. That evening the sky over the Atlantic looked almost as vast as that over the Mediterranean. That is one place where the night sky would be truly fractured with blue stars shivering far away and the immense nights become even more immense due to the absence of the beloved as Neruda would have probably found.
   It was something I discovered much later, and naturally, many years after I bade farewell to those shores. I had always wanted to return, and walk by those shells on the shore. At some point the shore had ceased to be a secret refuge I wanted to guard from the rest of the world and not let anyone enter. It became one of those places like the Grand Canyons, Swiss Alps or the Serengeti where a visit all by oneself is bound to seem empty. I do not quite remember when my solitary walks along those shores began to feel lonely. I had painted the sea an emerald green fading into the dark blue towards the horizon. I would imagine the waves heaped up the largest and the most beautiful shells in big piles and only I knew the spot on the shore. I did not take note when I had stopped collecting them. I cannot recollect when I had stopped running on the beach or even rolling in the sand. I yearned to hold a hand and take the beloved for a walk on those shores. The waves would creep up to our feet. I wanted her to feel with me that swirl of the sand under the feet when the waves fell back to the sea. We would sit on the sea-weeds and watch the sun set. There would be no curfews. We would stay out on the beach long after the sun had set. We would smell the wind and listen to the swish. I would tell her where the sea piled up the shells. I would take her to my house on the beach that I wanted her to fill with her laughter. It was the kind of house that Melquíades would have liked to visit when passing through Macondo.
   It was also from these very shores that I had seen the old man set off to catch his merlin. I saw him come back with that large skeleton tied to his boat only to set off the next day. His hut could not have been far from our house. I knew well that Hemingway was not referring to any place even remotely close to the Libyan coast. Even now most of the imagery of seas and oceans strike me as if they were set on the Mediterranean.
   Perhaps it was a few too many shots of the tequila. Perhaps it was a week of hyperactivity witnessing betrayals and payoffs, consensus and concessions as some despaired and others compromised, all in the name of globalised economy and international trade negotiations — an area that has come to be my specialisation. Everything was complex and almost necessarily crooked. They crunched numbers and spewed out figures and spoke in jargons making it all seem like a benign theoretical exercise, whereas in reality those numbers and jargons would mean prosperity or decay for some. They would mean life or death for some others. The talks fell apart and my hearth rejoiced, naïve of the implications.
   Standing in front of the Atlantic that evening in Cancún, I knew nothing could really compare to the shores of my Mediterranean. That no place on earth could ever be as captivating. I left my childhood on those shores. I smell my innocence in the salt wind. I hear it in the rumble of waves.