My Favourite sunset

While there may be many shades to everything (including fifty shades of grey apparently), some preferences are pretty binary. You’re either or. You either like tea or like coffee. Either mountains or beaches. Either like cats or dogs. Either summer or winter (Unless you’re from Chennai, then you choose from Burning Summer vs. Very warm winter). Either you like Chinese or do not (silent ode to the husband – who does not like Chinese!). You’re either a sunrise person or a sunset person. I’m a sunset person. No shame admitting that sometimes waking up very early to see the morning sun doesn’t look even half as exciting as watching it go down. Sometimes its cloudy, rainy and foggy impairing visibility and then you’re just sitting on that cliff, blood pressure rising, reminding yourself that you could just be sitting snuggled in bed with a blanket, but here you are! 😐

But, sunsets.

Sunsets are beautiful – Warm, all encompassing, gradual and teasing but that grand close like the crescendo to a song and then, everything goes quiet for a few seconds. If you’re watching the sunset at a beach, even better. The waves are still lapping up against the shore, still dancing away with those last few rays of the sun, but you know its gone. I’ve seen some utterly beautiful sunsets – In the mountains at Ladakh, in the forests of Kabini and Bandipur, on the shores of pristine blue waters in Maldives, on a houseboat in the backwaters of Kerala, from the top of the world (Okay, obervation decks on the 147^th floor which do feel like the top of the world) and a million more memorable places. But, there’s one I cannot ever forget.

It must’ve been the 18^th of December, 1998. Mom, Dad and me had reached Cochin after a very long drive from Bangalore. We were staying at the Taj, Ernakulam which is smack on Marine Drive, the promenade by the ocean and in addition to its various perks, also offered sunset cruises on one of those Ya ya mayyayya (Inserting loyal Goan reference) type of boats. It was just the three of us and one foreigner on the boat. We were to cruise around for about an hour and see the sunset and return. Dad had recently snagged a handycam, he decided he’d take more videos than photos. Which was sad to me at the time – there was little that came close to the thrill of sending the film for print and then inserting the squeaky fresh photographs in those old fashioned albums. Nevertheless, I think he got almost 45-50 minutes of film of the cruise. As the sun went down, the boat stopped for a bit to allow us to really soak this in. The boat bobbed up and down on the waves, like a toy duck in a bathtub. We all ran to one side of the boat and the tourist took a picture or two and sat down to watch the sun go down. They’re surprisingly and generally less excited about photos and videos – unless they’e Chinese; then you’re truly doomed! Dad though filmed the whole thing – The sun turning into an orange ball of fire from the otherwise bright yellow, how it really started looking like a big sphere as it neared the waves, how it went down a little bit (resembling the ones in the bad drawings I used to make) and the aftermath. The orange and purple skies, the glistening waves, he got everything on tape. And of course a lot of our funny background conversation. Me saying Papa, I’m hungry. Mum telling him about the houseboats in Kumarakom and how they serve Pakodas and Chai (Sigh, us Indians!) on the cruise, him getting a bit fed up saying Tum dono chup baitho. Mum and I are in the frame often, but he never is. Yet his voice over is happy – it tells you without him saying as much, how much he wanted to take this vacation and how this cruise is still fun for him.

Eight days later, our lives changed forever and he left us. Among the rubble and recovered items from our crash, was this handycam. It had precisely two scratches, but tapes intact and worked just fine. Many weeks later when we were home from the hospital and discovered the AV cables and how to hook this up to the television, Mum & I watched this video several times over, the sun setting, us crying over food, him admonishing us. It remains my favorite sunset till date, because it is the last sunset I saw with him, the one true lover of sunsets I knew (He would time our drive on Agumbe Ghat, because we could reach the sunset point just in time to see the sun go down, while Mum would worry about covering the rest of the Ghat in darkness afterward!). Its my last memory of being a carefree and happy child, watching the sunset in amazement, no trace of sorrow or pain, not 1% (Well, if you exclude my then worries of having forgotten my favourite pen at home, what would I write with on this holiday!). 20 years on, I still remember how the boat bobbed, how he looked, how we went back after the cruise and bought chocolates from the Christmas pop up shop at the hotel. 20 years on, I still close my eyes and the memory of this sunset brings me warmth, a smile, a tear, a fond recollection of my happiest times all at once.