Sitting on sand facing the east wind, my friend Namrata and I absorb the quietude of Thiruvanmiyur beach in the company of a few others taking a stroll along the coastline, playing catch, or contemplating how best to make the jump into the water. It’s a cool December evening in Chennai. The crows seem to enjoy their kabaddi with the waves without the slightest hint of tiredness. As the sun sets behind us, casting longer shadows by the minute, we talk about how this beach is different from the other main ones – Marina, Gandhi and Bessy. After an exacting Maths exam on a hot day, if you feel like getting wet and some sea breeze, you can take a dip here. Get completely drenched and wash away all the stress that might have built up until that mysterious Maths exam. Namrata has done this quite a few times, and how I envy her for having a beach as a backyard. A calm one that tells you peace is not far away.
That was about two years ago, when I first went there. If you ask me one place in this city where you can be left to your thoughts, with an ocean of quietness around, quite literally, I would say this is the place. Thiruvanmiyur Beach is definitely one where abating anger is easy. Hence here I am again, in the midst of a game of cricket, dark grey clouds and the unmistakable smell of salt. As the waves keep lashing on, my thoughts linger on the word peace and its many synonyms. Ever since I can remember, peace, happiness, stability have all been subject to something. Like if I get more time to finish my assignments, I’ll be at peace; if I get this I’ll be happy; if it rains I’ll be happy; if I drink coffee I’ll feel better. The thing I needed most was to be sought from outside, when conditioned to certain people/events/things. Most of us have been brought up in a way that tends to outsource such things. But hardly have those times of happiness lasted for long, or even felt wholesome. While all along we could’ve looked inside, we searched and searched all the world and landed into all kinds of shallows.
I got introduced to spirituality four years ago by my school teacher. And since then I’ve been pondering on what it says. Through watching a TV series and reading books on it for so long only now am I beginning to understand and experience the essence of it. One of the things it says is that what you believe to be unconditionally and undoubtedly true, will be so. So long as you truly believe it in that way. Which means, if I think I am peaceful (using the personification device here) and I am happy, I will be completely peaceful and happy for as long as I think that. It was much to think about when I was told this first, and I didn’t start doing it until much later. For thinking that one is filled with peace from the inside during times of turmoil is way more difficult than blaming the person/event/thing that triggered it all. When you believe that you are filled with those that you seek most, you put less blame on the outside, for you already have what you seek and therefore the need to look for it elsewhere is no longer there. The states of mind which are most sought after externally, are there all the time internally. Just shut the noise out for a moment and you can feel it wanting to show itself to you. Which, this place helps you to do. Peace is truly not far away, and definitely not in Thiru beach.
Further south along the coastline is a police booth at an elevation on the already elevated pavement. The four or five steps lead into a cabin that gives you an even better, aerial sort of view. This I’m saying out of pure guesswork and I have not really been inside it (although I plan to ask the police guys someday). Behind it you can find construction work going on for what looks like a holiday home. The sounds of cutting stone and hammering planks of wood are loud indeed, but not louder than the silence from the sea. The white benches are good spots to sit on.
Back in the northern part more people start to come as it nears six o’clock, by walk, on bikes, bicycles and sometimes in a car. As we prepare to leave, Namrata tells me of the time when she was here during Vardah, the cyclone that swayed the city in December last. Electricity was cut off, and there was no light but for tiny dots coming from mobile phones’ torches, and the moon. Silver light on the ripples of the sea cast a cheer-up charm over the sandy, a little bit grassy, beach. I immediately made up my mind to come here as often as possible to experience all the nuances of this place. Because, whether one is at peace or not, an ocean of silence coming towards you hugs you warm and makes you take a deep, stomach-ballooning breath that exhales half the anxiety from inside.
Footprints on water 