Nafisa A. Iqbal
The Divine Aquatic
Excerpt
“Pray to Allah for safe harbor,” said the boatman, his face ashen as he gazed up at the moon. Later, he would tell us how the sight of the large bills that had tumbled out of Baba’s pockets coaxed him into forgetting that it was a full moon night; the night the tide is at its highest.
The waves had become ledges that the boat leaped from. Salt water sprayed, sharp as tiny stones, threatening to slice uncovered skin. “I don’t feel so good,” I told Maa as the boat began to pitch and roll, churning my stomach into figure eights and infinities.
Thump, thump. We turned to see the boatman hitting the motor with his fist while the rudder coughed black smoke.
“What’s going on?” asked Baba.
“Just some”—thump—“water”—thump—“in the rudder”—thump.
Waves were rising in crescendos now. The beach towel we had wrapped around us quickly became soaking wet from what felt like gallons of water pouring down on us. Baba pulled us down so we were no longer sitting on the wooden planks, but in the hollow of the boat with our heads ducked. The hull of the boat cried out deafeningly with every lash of the wave. Maa buried her face in my hair, and I felt her lips move against my head, quivering with whispered prayers.
The smell of smoke masked even the smell of brine now. The boatman was screaming. The rudder was on fire. Baba stood up, tripped, and stood up again. Small tongues of flame licked up from the motor. Baba found a bucket where we sat crouched to help the boatman put out the fire, but the boat was slick with water and the impact of another behemoth wave threw his body nearly off the boat. The boatman grabbed Baba by the waist and pulled, but I could see his knees shake, and his arms taut and trembling. Just as the boatman was losing his grip, another wave swelled beneath Baba and cradled him back onto the boat. This is when I should have realized: this wasn’t a drowning but a baptism. Baba lay flat on the floor, panting with his hand on his chest. Warm liquid rushed into my sandals as I realized Maa had peed herself.
I should probably cry, I thought, but the tears would not come and the salt on my lips was just seawater. How could I cry when the water danced so ecstatically around me? When being enclosed in the hull of the boat felt like returning to the womb? What was this chaos but the great heave and suck that preceded birth? Yet, none of this I could articulate or decipher as a child. I only knew that it felt so, so familiar. While the waves smothered the flames from the motor, they had now picked up speed and began to swing the boat around like a pendulum.
“Land!” shouted the boatman, pointing towards the horizon. The swinging of the boat had distorted our sense of direction, but had at last pointed us towards shore.
In the brief second between one pair of waves parting to make room for the next, we saw it too: a sliver of land. A crazed look came over the boatman’s face, his eyes bulging forth with a final determination. The motor was still smoking when he yanked and tugged on the pull cord bringing it back to life. Black smoke billowed behind us as he pressed the engine ever onward for more, more, more speed. The motor growled angrily, but the boatman, knowing the engine could ignite again, did not falter. With the increase in speed, the weathered hull bounced higher and higher, slapping the waves harder with each fall. We felt each impact in our bones, waiting for the hull to fracture from under us and pour us into the hungry sea.
Fire began to engulf the boat, so we chose to swim for our lives. To me, the island seemed simultaneously inches and miles away, but children are new to the world and poor at judging distances. When we jumped off, I was on Baba’s back, hanging by his neck, but the thrashing of the water slackened my grip and the water carried me away.
The sea enveloped me in a crushing embrace, like a mother who had found her lost child. I held my breath till red and black splotches danced in front of me, unable to remember if my eyes were open or closed. Just moments ago, I had been shivering around Baba’s neck, but now a desperate hot wave came over me, warming even my frosted toes. Still, my legs beat under me, moving me closer to land. My screams floated up as dainty bubbles of air at peculiar angles. The blotches in my field of vision began to fade. All of it felt like love. Now, it was all black and I was falling, falling.
Then, I was forming again. My body was molded out of sand. My skin conjured out of silt. My hair shaped from dark kelp. My eyes were black pearls. My ears whelks and my teeth and fingernails little white cockles. Finally, my mind materialized from the inside of a conch, humming. Then, before I knew it, hands were grabbing at me, dragging me from sea to sand. Footsteps, urgent voices, shouting. Only then did I open my eyes and wail like a newborn, gasping fistfuls of air into my jellyfish lungs.
When my mother tells this story, she never ends with us being pulled from the shores by the fluorescent rescuers, though being saved feels like the obvious ending. No, her version of the story ends abruptly as we are whizzing past waves the size of cliffs on a boat with a motor on fire, the flames growing, and amidst it all, her six-year-old daughter, on her lap, laughing rhapsodically. I do not recall this, but know it to be true.
Decades later, this has become a familiar pattern. I watch Sufis whirling at a dervish monastery in Istanbul, their skirts swirling into a hurricane. On a pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint in Northern India, I see a tree full of sparrows dancing to the soulful voices of Qawwali singers. I watch thunder strike a tree on my front porch at sunrise, my ears deafened by the sound and my ribs reverberating in my chest. Each time, my chest caves in from the weight of the divine and my whole body is ripples of warm water. I sink under wave after wave of transcendental awe. I wake myself up from the reverie with the sound of my own inappropriate, ecstatic laughter to meet sometimes turned heads and angry stares, and at other times, silence.
When I fall asleep at night exhausted by euphoria, I dream of the sea. I am floating, alone, miles from shore. When I squint, I see the dark figure of fir trees lining the beach. No, not trees. They are people, standing shoulder to shoulder. Is that my mother I see? My father? Friends and lovers past, present, and future? Their arms reach out to me and I wade towards them, but the distance between us never closes despite how passionately I swim, how hard I propel myself forward. They are of land. I am of sea.
On that day at sea, barraged by wave after titanic wave, salt air whipping ruddy cheeks, adrenaline coursing through young blue veins, I must have been driven to a similar euphoria. Rapture is too voluptuous a feeling to sit comfortably in my body, so it had poured forth, like water from a vessel brimming over, in passionate laughter.
My connection to water never fades. It stretches like a limitless umbilical cord forever tying me to the closest body of water. At eighteen, I am diagnosed with a rare genetic illness with a name like a tongue-twister. My muscles paralyze and freeze like glaciers. For hours my legs are pillars of ice rooted to the floor. Later they thaw but are flaccid as puddles. When the acute gives way to the chronic, my body permanently becomes a lumbering bag of wet sand that I push and pull around space. Everything aches, swells, stiffens, cramps. I wish to shed my body.
When a new neurologist invokes aqua therapy, Baba takes me to a warm-water pool at a physiotherapy center. I have not been in water since my diagnosis. I am afraid of paralyzing in water, but I push myself in. The water holds the contours of my body lovingly, strengthening and soothing my tattered muscles. My pain and stiffness dissolve like powder. Suddenly, I am gliding. I am a thing without edges, fluid and nebulous.
My laughter starts as chlorine blue bubbles. By the time I break the surface, I am cackling madly. The geriatric patients in the warm-water therapy pool give me a wide berth, scowl at me with their mineral eyes, but I am used to it. The way I embody euphoria has always made me an other. Baba is sitting on the nearby bleachers smiling the way you smile when someone tells a joke in a language you don’t understand. I spin like a ballerina or a whirlpool, hop like a frog. I am doing underwater handstands, cartwheels, back flips; moving in ways I never thought I would move again.
About the Author
Nafisa A. Iqbal is a disabled Bangladeshi writer and activist who was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Award 2020, selected from among over 5,000 applicants. The work excerpted here has been published in full at the Rumpus. This year, Nafisa has received the Writing Program’s prestigious Felipe de Alba fellowship.