Raging Waves and Fading Light

Illustration by Gemini AI

Fiction

Why does the sea rage endlessly? Varghese asked himself as he sat on the listless sands of the beach looking at the sinking sun beyond the raging waves. When rage becomes quotidian, no one notices it. What is unnoticed is futile. Like my life, Varghese muttered to himself with a smirk whose scorn was directed at himself.

He had turned seventy that day. That’s why he was on the beach longer than usual. It wasn’t the rage of the waves or the melancholy of the setting sun that kept him on the beach. Self-assessment kept him there. Looking back at the seventy years of his life made him feel like an utter fool, a dismal failure. Integrity versus Despair, Erik Erikson would have told him.

He studied Erikson’s theory on human psychological development as part of an orientation programme he had to attend as a teacher. Aged people reflect on their lives and face the conflict between feeling a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction (integrity) or a feeling of regret and a wasted life (despair). Wisdom lies in a successful resolution of this stage. Varghese had no regrets. But there was no sense of fulfilment either. There was only a helpless awareness of futility. Like the waves that never gave up.

Varghese never gave up. He kept on writing blog posts as he did in the past many decades even when he was a teacher by profession. He had always wanted to be a writer. He wrote a few books too. None of which sold more than a few score copies. Nobody, not his colleagues, relatives, or students, nobody was interested in his writings. Varghese chuckled and a wave almost touched his feet in acknowledgement. The sun had already sunk into the ocean. As the evening grew darker, the waves grew fiercer. Funny, age doesn’t wither them, nor custom stales their infinite longing. Varghese smirked to himself.

“That fool of a Varghese is on a wild geese chase.” Varghese remembered his first headmaster Reverend Lawrence de Mendez remarking to someone about his writing ambition some half a century ago. Varghese on a geese chase, ha ha ha.  “He’s too straitjacketed in his own ego to write anything called literature.”

 Decades didn’t erase that remark from Varghese’s memory. Because he knew it was true. He realised the truth of it rather late in life. When you learn things late in life, that is called disillusionment. And disillusionment can make you turn over a new leaf or die slowly on the old leaf.

Varghese is a funny man. So he smirked to himself again. Leaves didn’t matter to him really. So he keeps writing blog posts. Which, he thinks, nobody reads. Except when some blogger-community organises some reading projects for promoting one another.

Until his grandson texted him on WhatsApp one day. Unexpectedly. Miraculously. Whateverly.

“I am what I am today because of your blog, grandpa. Happy birthday. A sweet hug.”

Daniel’s hug from Canada did taste sweet. Distance lends enchantment to hugs.

He must be making fun of me, Varghese smirked to himself. Or just being kind to an old man.

The mobile phone rang. Varghese’s wife was waiting for him at home. For dinner. Anna is gentle. She waits, she reminds, she prays. She doesn’t make irrational demands like normal spouses. Maybe, living with Varghese made her abnormal.  

It’s got later than usual. The waves raged more furiously. The sun had died long ago.

Did Daniel mean what he texted? That question would give Varghese some dreams that night. A few of them would be nightmares in which Daniel would look like Reverend Lawrence de Mendez with his characteristic sneer.

PS. This is fiction and bears no connection with any real person, dead or alive.