I love the sea, the waves, the sand and the beach in their entirety. It is bewildering to look at the sea as it makes me feel very small but it also makes me inexplicably happy. I think I am passionately in love with the vastness and the complexity of the sea. I am also scared of it. Still, I love playing with the waves and staring at them for hours and hours together. I also love watching the red sun slowly disappear into the sea leaving behind a wave of darkness and gloom.

As a child who grew up in the coastal cities of Trivandrum and Kozhikode, the sea was a part of my growing up years, rather the weekends. Almost every weekend, my father used to take us children to the seashore. Sometimes only the family would be there but many times, our friends also would be jam packed in the car.

Once on the beach, we were permitted to do whatever we wanted. We made merry building sand castles, collecting sea shells and playing catch. But what I loved the most was playing with the waves. Though I didn't know swimming, I challenged the sea and the waves, and. I could never have enough of playing with the waves. As the waves moved back, they carried with them the sand under my feet and suddenly I there would be a sinking feeling in my belly. And how I loved it!

It was similar to what I felt when I went up and up on the swing. Standing on the swing and wildly swinging, the challenge was to touch the leaves of the nearby mango tree with the swing and I always did it, swinging almost parallel to the ground. When the swing came down, my stomach had the same sinking feeling but I loved it maybe because I had won a challenge. The waves went back without moving me as I stood like a statue with my little feet firmly placed on the loose sand. It was a Herculean task but it made me feel like a hero!

Small waves didn't excite us children. What we did was, we used to write with our feet on the sand, "Kadalamma thottu" roughly translated as, the sea, the mother failed. It was some of my friends who told me to do that. It is believed that such challenges infuriated the sea; as if she felt, how dare these small kids challenge me? I don't know how it worked but it worked! The moment we wrote on the sand, a huge wave would come and wash the words away. We would go back and write again challenging the sea to come behind us. And, believe me, it always did!

I still remember whenever our parents would ask us to come back, we would say, one more wave and we would be back. But our hunger for more never got over. Waiting for the biggest would never get satisfied. But when the red sun slowly went down and disappeared into the darkness of the sea, it was time for us to run back.

As a child, I played with the waves but as an adolescent, I enjoyed quietly watching the sun go down and it also gave me a feeling of emptiness inside. Every time I saw the sun set in the sea, I felt miserable and sad. It was as if you were losing something that was so dear to you. But the very thought that you would be able to see the same spectacle another day would make you get up and walk back, albeit disappointed.

The sun setting in the sea was so much a part of my life that it was such a big disappointment for me not to see that happen after I came to Chennai for the first time, a decade ago. Where is the red glowing sun, and the sky streaked with red lines, I wondered as I sat at Elliots beach in Chennai for the first time. It didn't occur to me then that I was looking at the eastern sky. I was so used to seeing the sun disappear into the sea that I just couldn't come to terms with an evening on the beach where the horizon on the sea only turned dark and not golden red, and it spread only darkness everywhere and not bright red. It was such a big disappointment that even today, even after a decade, I don't like to sit on the beach in the twilight hours. Nothing can compensate the heavenly twilight hours on the beaches of the Arabian Sea.