I am on a self-proclaimed expedition to find out about my writing style. I am a meandering thinker and writer. Will I be able to write a compelling novel? Every NaNoWriMo, I have faced the hurdles of long-form writing, leaving me eyeing the novel counter with longing. At some point, I decided I wanted to find out whether I could write long-form rather than remain with a collection of short poems. The mad rush to get published has abated into a calmer reality. I now want to pursue writing as a discipline rather than merely as an inspired outpouring.
Perhaps that is why I have been thinking about how I read.
I have always had a fascination for the sea, perhaps because I have lived near Marina Beach. My earliest childish portrait, drawn when I was in the upper level of kindergarten, was of a fisherman hanging his net beside his beachside two-storeyed house while his wife watched him from a first-floor window. There were no fish anywhere in the picture. There was a net, a fisherman, a wife, one lone building and a beach. That was my imagination of the fishing world.
Later came television. In our house, entertainment had earlier consisted of Ayodhya Mandapam pravachanam and free kutcheris by well-known and unknown singers. Only around seventh grade did we get a television set. Regional films were telecast in the afternoon, after our mother had drilled us through a hair-care routine. Post-lunch and drowsy, we often watched films in a half-daze, sometimes missing the ending altogether and being rudely shaken awake when the elders needed the television for their afternoon chores.
I remember watching Chemmeen, the 1965 Malayalam film, till the very end. The storm fascinated me because it reminded me of the storm in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which I had read during the early part of my seventh-summer holidays. The turbulent sea and the seafarers were therefore immediately fascinating. But there was something else in the film that puzzled me. I could not understand why the safety of the fisherman at sea depended upon the virtue of his wife at home. It seemed like strange logic, but I was too young to trouble my head with it. I watched the Technicolor movie, accepted its world and let it rest.
Looking back, I realise I had not yet learned to question the premises of the stories I watched. A story could simply present a world, and I would receive it.
My relationship with the sea changed when I encountered Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as a college student. I still had no real image of a fishing community. I had not lived among people whose lives depended upon the sea, nor did I possess any firsthand understanding of fishing. Yet Hemingway gave me enough to create my own sea.
For me, words create images. I do not merely read a description; something begins to appear in my mind. Hemingway’s sea had salt, water, weather, the weight of the fishing line and the physical presence of the old fisherman. I could imagine the boat and the enormous fish. My imagination supplied the world that my experience did not possess.
What fascinated me most was the struggle between the man and the fish. Hemingway had filtered the story almost completely, leaving us with the essentials: the fisherman, the fish, the line, the sea and the weather. There was no armload of people and ships to distract us from the central struggle. Each had his own weapons. The fisherman had his skill, endurance, intelligence and tools; the fish had its strength, instinct and determination to survive.
For long stretches, neither gave the other a way out. I imagined them locked in a death grip, each exhausted and unwilling to surrender because giving up meant losing everything. It was almost like the phrase “till death do us part,” except neither had entered this relationship willingly.
Then comes the smallest change. One gives a little. There is a subtle loosening of the grip, a tiny piece of leeway, and the other immediately uses it. The dynamics of the struggle change without the story needing to announce a dramatic turning point. The tug of war remains alive because the focus remains on the man, the line and the fish, with the sea and weather thrown in for good measure.
That remains one of the reasons The Old Man and the Sea is still my favourite sea story. Hemingway filtered the experience until the struggle became almost elemental. Neither the fisherman nor the fish was simply a villain or a victim. Each was trying to survive in the only way available to him. The fisherman wanted to catch the fish. The fish wanted to remain alive. Both desires were natural.
My first encounter with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was very different. I remember borrowing an abridged edition from the college library. The book itself was peculiar: smaller and more square than the novels I was accustomed to reading. I remember the physicality of that book almost as much as the reading of it.
The story seemed to warm up slowly. The beginning was interesting, and then it became boring in places. There were passages when I could not make out whether I was reading a novel, an essay, or Melville simply following an idea until he had exhausted every possible word. I sometimes wondered whether he had a word count to meet.
Yet I kept going.
There was a sheer need to see the Pequod. Then I wanted Moby Dick to appear. Then I wanted Ahab. I was scrambling through the book because I needed to reach those things. The anticipation itself became part of the reading experience.
I now understand that I was reading then primarily as an appreciator of novels. I wanted to be taken into the story. I wanted to know what happened. Now I am reading Moby-Dick as a writer, and that is a huge difference.
I am still fascinated by the story, but I am also watching Melville work. I am noticing how he turns the rudder of the reader’s imagination according to the direction of his own imagination. His detours no longer seem merely like interruptions. I can see that he is preparing the reader for the whale long before the whale properly arrives.
Melville builds Moby Dick through stories, rumours, encounters and evidence of violence. He creates an imagined terrorism around the whale. By the time we are ready to meet him, we have been prepared for something enormous, dangerous and almost supernatural. Melville has built the expectation so carefully that the reader holds a breath for the moment of encounter.
And then we meet the whale.
What strikes me now is how ordinary he can seem in comparison with the mythology surrounding him. From the human perspective, Moby Dick has become an enemy, a monster whose violence justifies the extraordinary pursuit mounted against him. But from another perspective, he is simply a whale in the deep sea, minding his own business and doing his dude stuff.
Then the humans arrive. They pursue him, attack him and attempt to capture or kill him. He defends himself. In the process, he has chewed off Ahab’s leg, and Ahab carries that wound into an obsession that consumes him.
The whale does not necessarily know that he has become the villain of Ahab’s story.
Ahab sees an enemy. The crew sees a legend. The reader is encouraged to see a monster. But the whale may simply be trying to survive.
Hemingway Filters, Melville Accumulates
This is where the difference between the two writers becomes clearer to me.
Hemingway gives us one man and one fish. Melville gives us an armload of people and ships against one whale.
Hemingway filters. Melville accumulates. Hemingway takes away until the struggle becomes almost pure. Melville piles layer upon layer around the struggle until the whale becomes larger than the creature itself. One writer gives us the intimacy of two beings locked in an unavoidable encounter; the other gives us the enormous human imagination crashing against another living creature.
Yet there is another difference I notice now. When I read Moby-Dick today, I am deliberately slowing down. I am allowing myself to notice the subtle humour, the undercurrents between people, the peculiar personalities aboard the Pequod, the small shifts in power and affection, and the ways people connect or fail to connect.
These things might have seemed like detours to the younger reader who wanted to reach the whale. Now they are part of what I want to see.
The younger reader asked, “What happens?”
The writer asks, “How did the writer make me want this to happen?”
That is the difference.
The thing that puzzled me as a child in Chemmeen—the mysterious hand of luck governing a fisherman’s safety—quietly reappeared when I met Santiago.
In Chemmeen, the sea seems to have a moral and almost supernatural order: the fisherman’s fate is somehow connected to the conduct of the woman waiting on shore. As a child, I accepted this strange logic without having the framework to question it.
Then Hemingway gave me Santiago, already marked by luck—or rather, by the absence of it. He has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish and is regarded by the other fishermen as salao, profoundly unlucky. Yet Santiago does not surrender to his bad luck; he goes out again, armed with his knowledge, endurance and stubborn hope.
In Moby-Dick, the hand of fate takes yet another form. Ahab refuses to accept what has happened to him as mere misfortune. He curses, rages and turns his wound into a vendetta, setting himself on what is almost a death voyage against the whale. But Moby Dick is not a passive object of Ahab’s revenge. The whale recognises the threat, resists with enormous force and fights for his own survival.
In all three stories, the sea leaves me with the same unsettling question: how much of a human being’s fate is shaped by skill, how much by circumstance, and how much by that mysterious hand we call luck?
Going Down With the Ship
My fascination with the sea began long before I knew anything about seafaring. It began with a child’s drawing that contained a fisherman, his wife and a net but no fish. It grew through Sunday-afternoon films whose assumptions I accepted because I was too young to question them. It deepened through Hemingway, who gave me just enough of the sea to allow my imagination to construct the rest. And it expanded through Melville, who showed me how far a writer can take a reader into a world the reader has never lived in.
Perhaps this is also why I still believe we need world literature. We need opportunities to enter lives, landscapes and imaginations that are not our own. We may begin without understanding everything. We may resist, misunderstand, become impatient or wonder why a writer has taken such a long detour. But somewhere along the way, words create images, and images become experience.
That is what has changed most in my own reading. I am no longer in such a rush to finish a book. There will always be another writer waiting, another world to enter, another sea to cross. I still have Russian writers lined up for reading, with Chekhov remaining a permanent presence in my literary memory. But now I want to stay a little longer inside each book.
Perhaps reading is a little like boarding a ship without knowing exactly where it will take us. Once we have truly entered the story, we are willing to go down with it—not literally, but in experience. We allow the writer to take the rudder of our imagination and steer us somewhere we have never been.
And sometimes, after all the detours, the ship appears.
Sometimes the whale appears.
And sometimes, to our surprise, the whale is simply minding his own business. Perhaps that is when we realise that the journey was never only about reaching him. It was about learning how the writer made us wait.
Credit: In Convo with Mira (AI Powered ChatGPT)
Itinerant Storyteller 