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Journalism of Courage
For the landlocked it’s a sound that makes you quicken your steps towards it — that distant hushing sigh of waves breaking on the shore, as they expire in a welter of lacy bubbles. This morning, the ocean is grey-green, deepening to blue in the distance, and you can’t wait to wriggle your toes in the shallows. You scour the dark sand — it seems bereft, but you know, it takes a little to get your eye in. And sure enough, a section of the dark sand appears to shift sideways: crabs — either soldier crabs or sand-bubblers playing hide and seek with you. Reassured you move ahead, scanning the rocks that have been stranded by the retreating tide.
A large crab poses theatrically at the tip of a rock, being watched by a solemn biscuit-coloured sand plover. There is a whole convention of sand plovers on the rocks, picking up titbits or just standing around solemn and demure, unbothered by your presence. Amongst them is a grey reef heron, mincing about delicately and picking up morsels with all the fastidious finesse of a cocktail party socialite picking canapés off a tray.
You scan the rock pools: ah, there in a crevasse just beneath the water, a movement. Ghostly, it morphs into a crab, its limbs splotched electric blue — possibly a blue swimming crab. It half-emerges from its hideout, its pincers open wide ready to embrace any visitor to its humble abode. And there is more than one, all moving in that slow-motion manner that filmmakers so love to use for drama and spectacle.
Your attention is caught by a man and his son, photographing something amidst the rocks and you join them and are blown away. The creature, over a foot long, like a piece of tubing, is quite dead, black with a giraffe-like pattern in ivory all over its body. Its wicked-looking mouth, slightly open, is armed with inward curving teeth and seems a little bloody. Certainly, an eel of some kind.
“What is it?” I ask and the gentleman has already consulted Google and found out: a leopard or laced moray eel! It has also been described as having a cream base with black spots and there appear to be very colourful versions too, which make it a popular contender for aquariums. Apparently, a night hunter of fish and crustaceans in rocky reefs at depths of between 8 to 60 metres. It’s supposed to have four pairs of nostrils, two at the tip of its snout, and two above its eyes, to enable it to precisely target its prey. There were no signs of injury (apart from the slightly bloodied mouth) on its body and I wondered if it was just by-catch that had been discarded by fishers. Scavengers hadn’t discovered it as yet. All the other dead fish we came across were eyeless and had been cleaned to the bone.
On a subsequent evening visit to the same beach — Morjim in Goa — the tide was far out and there was more activity. You spot a collection of what are probably hermit crabs, occupying sea snail shells, clinking past your feet — but can’t tell whether they were scuttling under their own power or were simply being rolled along by the waves. Then you come across an attractive arrangement of shells on the sand, the star of which is a long, caramel-orange spiral shell, (a screw shell going by the name, Turritella terebra is the closest match I could find in my book on shells) which believe it or not, had a neat bullet hole in it — the victim of an assassin? You pick it up, and it’s too heavy to be empty and seems occupied — another hermit crab rental you wonder? You know, knocking is of no use — they will not open for a Dilliwalla!
The rocks are festooned with hordes of dead barnacles — which can work like a cheese grater if you fall against them and some of the rocks have a strange criss-cross pattern on them, like the bars on windows. There were also strange moss-like growths on some of them, which would break off, and were pockmarked with holes, which as a friend remarked, made them look like beach row-houses!
I normally avoid the more popular beaches but set off one morning at eight to Baga — usually a horrendous place by the late afternoon and evening. Even now there are a surprisingly large number of people on the beach — but mostly families with delighted, hyperactive children. The raucous drunken youths have yet to stir and break into bottles of beer. The water is clear as gin and suddenly you realise you are standing amid a constellation of starfish, aka sea stars!
Their undersides are creamy, and their topsides are grey and match and merge with the sand perfectly. Their ‘arms’ are fringed (with legs!), and several are short of an arm or two. You know that doesn’t really matter too much — starfish can regenerate their broken-off arms and get this: grow into entire new starfish from the broken-off limb itself. Their mouths are in the middle of the ‘central disc’ and they may eat by enveloping their prey with their stomachs, a talent any child would greatly envy! But they will die if left stranded on the sand — and there were several that were beached. But help was at hand and you watched happily as children picked them up carefully in cupped palms and took them back to the water, gently releasing them there. And miracle of miracles, there were no hysterical shrieks from their parents of ‘chod do — katega!’ (Leave them, they will bite!).
