I am standing on a beach in Auroville. It is low tide…the waves come and flow over my ankles and toes. My feet go lower into the wet sand with each new wave. the sun is setting behind me. I am facing a sky in myriad shades of twilight blue.
I begin walking towards the water. I can go quite far into the ocean - the Bay of Bengal. It is shallow and the waves are soft.
I am reaching out to another me - a Natasha who is one with the ocean and the sky. A Natasha who had left me and gone away a long time back. She was good, she was pure… she was confused, she was free. She left because that seemed to be the more practical thing to do at that time.
Guess what I was like after she was gone?
LOST. Always a little bit like a waif. Too lightweight. Fearful. Timid. Small voice.
I did okay. I finished school. I went to college. I fell in love. I moved on. I learnt to make myself whole again. Doctors, healers, books, films, flowers… sometimes an evening sky in Delhi after the monsoon rains. I read poetry. Sometimes I wrote it.
I learnt to earn money. Laugh from the pit of my stomach again.
But the waifness would return. Never whole.
Maybe I needed to enter a water body wholeheartedly and I would find the rest of me… emerge as more of me than I had gone in.
That day on the beach in Auroville, I turned and took a selfie with my husband. My daughters were in the background, laughing and playing. There were small dogs behind them.
The wind in my hair reminded me that I am whole again. I am one with the little girl. We are together. Again.
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