Cape Comorin: where the Sea splits you apart

Every time I talk about my life in India, I’m told I should write a book. Today I will tell just a breath of one year in the Subcontinent, and of what shaped the twenty years that followed. I will not speak of the extreme contrasts that stretch the country, nor of its lacerating poverty, but of a place that profoundly split me: Cape Comorin.

It is there that three seas clash, where you are nothing but yourself, with your fleeting and insignificant convictions, emptying out like the beach when the water retreats. I have always favored places that are noisy in a different way, places that shake your perception of the world we have, a perception that is often mistaken.

It is there that two tablecloths, hanging on an almost elegant line, were made to sway in the almost overbearing breeze of that monsoon July, where nonetheless the sunsets were incomparable. Cape Comorin is a fixed point, and when you arrive there after days of travel, you feel forcefully important—but only for an instant—before slipping into a state of heavy uselessness, as you realize you are as big as a grain of sand that enters your eye. You try to extract it from your pupil, but it does not want to come out, and so your sense of futility turns into a strange perception of being, somehow, relevant nonetheless.

And so, on that tip of land, I felt divided, like two people who form one and are forced to get along. The seas meet but are not always the same. At times they quarrel and defend themselves, violently spraying water, only to then calm down and allow the reflection of the sun to melt with them into the wet expanse.

There are apparently empty places that completely shake you, sending you home with many questions and few answers. At that time, I did not know Islam, but I was drawn to those tablecloths that someone had hung outside the house to let them dry. Now I know they were not mere rags, but colorful abayas taking in air after the passing of a monsoon storm. It is the details that make a journey unique, those dots on the i’s that we do not see with the naked eye, but which reveal backgrounds even before they come into being.

And in my mind, I hold a memory shaped like a painting, in which three elements appear: water, abayas, and sun, in which the garment protects both from wet and from dry, dividing two opposites, like Cape Comorin, which keeps three elements separate while allowing them to interact beneath the fabric of pride. This is a subjective impression of a place that inspired me and that today has a very clear meaning.