Limpid

Nachi Keta

photo credit: Nachi Keta

The river wriggles. Its waters murmur and catch twinkles of light trying to submerge--but can’t.

Why do we prefer washing dishes by the riverside, instead of in our own kitchen sink? Why do we want to sit by the side of a wriggling river and pose with the plate we just washed with its water, rather than the familiar tap, which uses ten liters of water to wash five dishes?

It’s not environmental anxiety. We do it for ourselves, for a being in us that forever tries to crawl out and invoke that primordial animal which used to defecate and love under a canopy of stars.

I am on a stone. My feet are submerged. The water plays with the hair on my calves as the wind rushes across the valley, through which the river meanders like a train.

Sounds of the Satpura jungle eternally embedded in my ears. I know it is immortality. We always know when something is eternal, and when something isn’t.

Washing dishes by the riverside is therapeutic. It evokes those subconscious memories from when humanity was still in its infancy.  

Call it Sufism. Buddhism. Animism. Ecocentrism. Pantheism, Spiritualism. Doesn’t matter.

Tariq sits by me and my bum feels the cold of the water. I am in shorts. A few of us swim; a few discuss seemingly serious matters; a few of us flutter and throw water at each other.

A few are hidden behind bushes. After washing dishes in the valley – where the world seems to have stopped – our hearts are quieter than they’ll ever be. That’s why we try not to prolong it. We try nothing. We just let the hours flow, the river whispering like a quiet dream.

Some of the best ideas come to you when you are defecating. Everyone knows that. Perhaps when we are on a toilet-bowl, our mind becomes free and creative. When we wash dishes by the river – animals looking at us from behind moving bushes – our minds think of things that it might never have thought otherwise. Manual labor straightens out our minds. It slows time and allows us to think more deeply.

The hours are limpid. Centuries seem to whiff by and we still sit. We feel like gods. I stare at the infinite in front of me—the green and brown cornucopia of forest where they say tigers roam. Tariq sits by me, staring at his knees, which got bruised after he made a poorly timed dunk into the river.

We prefer washing dishes by the riverside because we are all poets. What is poetry if not the labor of imagination? We love washing dishes by the riverside because it reminds us of Eden.

“What’re you writing?” Tariq says. “I have no idea,” I say, and add, “Perhaps…” but before I continue, the alarm rings.  It’s 1633. Four-minutes and thirty-three seconds have passed. So I stop writing. And pat on Tariq’s back before standing up.

I have to shit.

A Kidney Transplant Recipient, Nachi Keta considers himself too old for this world, which is too full of healthy bodies, which is too stuffed with words, that are too despairing for this world, which is too young for him. He loves his privacy and does not tweet as SAGE (@KetaNachi). Also, he edits a quarterly journal called Literary Impulse.