An excerpt from The Gravity of Desire
Climb the gunwale into the skiff. Nets and spears, a box of dull knifes with sharp tips, bits of oyster shells in the hull beneath the tiller. The oblong chunk of stone tied eightfold with rope sits beneath the seat. When she is ready, she will tie it around her waist. It will guide her to the bottom.
The mast is naked, the sail tied to it with the main halyard, the length of which is wrapped around the boom. In the wooden container below the plank at the hull, lies the folded burlap cloth she has brought for the day’s journey. Folded inside sits half a raw onion, mathi and mango achaar for a noon time snack, a tin can of dried yellow lentils they will spoon into their mouths with their fingers. There is a jug of fresh water and a ladle for when the sun slips inside the skin.
She is already in the hull and moving towards the bow when he pushes the skiff against the waves. He handles the oars she has already set for him in the gunwales, and he rows while she scans the horizon. Her palm against her forehead and lips pursed like the professional second mates on the other oyster boats. There are distant clouds massing in the sky, but they are miles away, miles high and white and tall and pose no threat.
She hums while he rows for an hour. The land is far now. She asks him about the wind and the patterning of the waves with their crests of white. He grunts. He tells her that the strong wind is good for the return. It makes for less effort on the arms. His skin is dark from the sun like hers. Unlike her young, soft eyes, which are cracked in the corners into a thousand places, fissures like the hard dry land of the seashore village. When she hugs him, helping him through his crying, she loves the smell of the sea in his hair. Papa, you are my whole wide world. And you are mine, little one.
While he rows, she sings to him the songs of the sea. Another? she asks. He nods without smiling. There is already happiness in his eyes.
When they reach the spot, he stops rowing. She helps him drop the anchor. He knows this place for the good oysters because of instinct or habit or experience and not any maps of the sea. The best spots to dive are known to him as intimately as the myths he has passed to her since her birth, tales of gods and demons, warriors with monkey faces or the heads of birds. The sea is as charming as a lover he told his wife once, a long time ago, before the daughter was born.
The anchor line falls into the sea, unspooling into depths of a hundred and fifty feet, descending into depths she will guide herself by when she dives with the chunk of stone.
He has told the girl during nights when she could not sleep, that the pearl is the oyster’s response to sadness, to pain. When the oyster feels his heart broken, he produces a pearl so perfect that its beauty breaks the hearts of those who see it. You are my pearl, little one. My little Sirene.
The pressure of the water is strong against her chest as she descends. Earlier, sitting on the edge of the skiff, she emptied her stomach of air, exhaling until the pain climbed in, and then slowly inhaled. She filled her stomach first, expanded ribs, and then her lungs filled with air. She pulled into her body every molecule of oxygen and then dove into the water cool and calamitous. The rope-wrapped stone pulls her down. The anchor lead she will use to return.
Water darkens. There are shoals of mackerel, jellyfish pods, a curious angel fish. She holds her nose and gulps. She stills her mind and relaxes all tension in her body. She knows the dangers of descending too quickly but also the threats of rising. It wasn’t the escape of oxygen that could kill but the build-up of the poison in her blood. She descends, knowing not to waste movement so as not to waste breath. She descends, three minutes pass, five minutes, seven.
Here is the stillness she so loves, a calmness, a peace, the tranquility angels must feel when flying. A wobbegong peeks its eyes out from under a cloud of sand and resettles. Rainbow fish pass around her, and she turns to witness their soft swimming. In these cool depths space has no dimension, so time has no magnitude. Life and death and time are illusion, just tricks by Maya.
It has been twelve minutes since she has entered the cool waters. One hundred feet below the surface. She does not look up to gauge the boat, but she is aware of it. She skips across the fertile anemone, the coral, the base of shells of astonishing variety. She reaches into her sarong and produces the knife. The oyster shells are clumped against ancient boulders around which the waving kelp grows. There are buried columns of marble just visible, and arches and a foundation stone of some forgotten empire defeated two thousand years before the birth of the modern world.
With her dull knife, she snaps them from their clinging places and places them into her net. She can feel the pressure in her chest growing heavier and she has the urge to scream, but that would be wrong. She has been gifted a talent for breathing underwater and a job and she must help her father so they can sell the pearls in the market. But it has been twelve minutes since she has taken a beath. Her lungs ache. She cuts more oysters, spies a few dozen more, and then rises to the surface, using the anchor lead. She breaks the surface of the water, gasping for air.
In the boat she counts her treasures. Forty-eight. Not a bad yield, but incomparable to the commercial fishing boats that pull in thousands upon thousands. Their large hulls crash the waves, sending shocks through the sea.
She tells the father about the wobbegong, and of the prehistoric species that roam the waters undetected, and of the pods of jellyfish that pulsed and floated around her, their nettles streaming below them like threads. She tells him that the depths were cold this time and she shivered but did not lose her faith. He reaches out his hand and strokes her cheek and smiles. Are you ready to go again? She nods, all too happy to comply.
The cool seawater cradles her body. She falls through the levels of current that seem to erase all detail, and erases distance. She falls weightless, surprising a twisting mako that turns and swiftly swims away.
Jogging the sea floor, spear in one hand and knife in the other, her feet cover the sharp distance of coral and shells and the stony flats. Her face is pure concentration. Her mission is to release the shells from their clinging places and reveal their jewels, the drops of pearl-like ocean tears. She finds fewer this time and every year there are less and less.
She gathers them into her net, ten and twenty and fifty, and sensing her breath diminishing, rises again, climbs up with the help of the life preserving lead, trailing bubbles of bad air.
The sunset against the horizon, pastels of purple and orange and red. The day has been good. Ten dives today. Five nets filled with good oysters, but some not so good, small ones, babies. She unfurls the cloth and sets before her the dry hard mathi and the spicy mango achaar, and pries open the tin of dry yellow daal with her knife. She slides the tip of her knife between the smiling lips of the shell, tearing apart the two halves. She fingers the soft fleshy meat clinging to the base shell. She scrapes and cuts the cords across the bottom shell. She offers her father this gift of the ocean, the gritty meat bathed in the ambrosia of brine and sugar. He shakes his head, No. You have earned this through your effort. She tilts the shell back and it passes into her mouth. The taste is of the sea, of the sacred places in the sea.
She sets a tray of shucked oysters between them, the gray meat silvery at the edges, holding a sensuality she will one day discover. After a prayer of thanks for a good yield, for the strong clean oxygen, for her father’s strong assassin arms, and the good wind for the sails, they eat, tossing the empty shells over the side.
There are no pearls in the ones they eat, no sphere of perfect white in which the secrets of the sea lie protected, but perhaps the next if she is lucky, if she is worthy, and if the gods ordain.
They return to shore, tired from the sun and the effort. She yawns, shielding her mouth with the back of her dark hand. It is too late to return to their modest house, the walk is long, and there might be trouble from the children who roam unwatched. So she sleeps in the boat, pulling the sail over her body while the warm wind tussles her hair. She sleeps while he stands guard, smoking a bidi he has kept for days like these. There is a promise in the yield. He feels it in his body as a gentle peace. His daughter is protected, and safe. His daughter dreams of fish and falling in love with a god someday. Towards dawn they sleep, huddled together, father and daughter, free of want as another day begins. They sleep, the stars above blinking infinitely in a cosmos of endless collisions.
Contributor Notes
Surya Kanwal Kalsi earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco, a BFA in Creative Writing, and a minor in philosophy from Cal State Long Beach. His debut novel, The Stove-Junker is a harrowing, lyrical meditation on loss, heartbreak, and the power of memory. His short stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Santa Fe Writer’s Project, among others, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Northern California in the shadow of wine country with his wife, a chef, a zombie-loving, precocious son, and two destructive cats.
