Taken From Him

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Turn away from the arguing voices, be a guest unnoticed, the issue on this slum beach the ancient fort and your group you’re not wholly of — the leader your friend who won’t take No from a gold-badged Mumbai functionary, who swings a hand out like a traffic cop, chops it downward: the fort is off-limits. Hindi translates well into prophetic gestures. He and his two men, uniformly moustached, police the shore, the dubious beach, the huts, the area of the old fort, the view. While in the viewfinder of one’s borrowed camera, distinguished but never to be made friends with, is found the flared gunwale of a skiff, a flash of water light, a patchwork square of yellow-and-gray sail out there for an instant.

Off-limits, the police are saying to our leader, who is not to be taken lightly. Centuries old, its walls stained now, dilapidated, a sight, this fort abandoned but not abandoned, commanding the bay once — now repurposed. A democracy of voices raised, is it India, is that all? — the sheer agitation? Cannot go in there! body language itself warns; while for the visitors, their mentor, an overseas visitor himself this trip, Indian he and his wife, brilliant, famous, quite evidently answers the entrenched official, Nothing says we can’t.

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