Tony Deyal AYURVEDA, AN ancient Indian art of healing, is based on humours and elements. One of these is "kapha" or water humour. This is what I attempted as I sought to communicate with the fish in the Gulf of Paria, the body of water which separates Trinidad from South America, and which flows into the Caribbean Sea off Trinidad's north coast.
Fish are different from hot-dogs. Zen and the art of hot-dog making is a simple philosophical construct. Make me one with everything, is how that's expressed. It works for subs as well. But fish are more comic than cosmic, and reaching them is difficult. First I tried one-way communication. I dropped them a line. Then, to better foster dialogue, I utilised a herring-aid. But fish are more adept at de-baiting than we mere humans, and it was merely a matter of time before my water-humour was running thin from having to deal with the demands of dissatisfied fish demanding a re-bait. It is enough to make a man "sell-e-bait" rather than celebrate.
WATER HUMOUR
My water humour is not appreciated by my family. "What lies at the bottom of the ocean trembling," I ask my son Zubin. He laughs merrily. Same with Jasmine, my daughter. My wife prefers to pretend she is not listening. "A nervous wreck," I say triumphantly. "What did the ocean say to the beach?" "What Daddy? What?", Jasmine interrogates me. "Nothing," I respond grandly. "It just waved." "How you mean nothing?", Zubin asks. I look and the coastline about a mile away, "Let's head for the mainland." "I don't want to go to the mainland," Zubin says. "Shut up and start swimming," I want to say but that is not good water humour and would get my wife angry. I am a water sign and she is an earth sign and together we make mud.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if I was lost at sea for a few days instead of the usual few hours. Bill Cosby, the comedian, says, "If you can find humour in anything, you can survive it." Perhaps this is how the water humour business came up in Ayurveda. The ancients must have found themselves catching their Ark like Noah. My own philosophy and the basis of my finely-honed survival skills is that in the middle of crisis there is always opportunity. There is an ancient story about coping. It was revealed to the sages that the world would end in three days. In three days, everything would be covered completely in water and everyone would drown.
PERFORM
The Egyptian Chief, upon hearing the news, ordered his followers to perform their death duties and to go into their pyramids to await the deluge. The leader of the Zen community told his followers, "Now we will get our chance to be one with everything." The Hindu holy-man told his followers, "Don't worry. We have three days to learn how to swim under water." This attitude is something for which I envy the dolphins. Every morning we went out to the Boca or what the English called the "Dragon's Mouth". Just as the sun starts its rise above the Northern Range, pods of dolphins head out of the Gulf of Paria, through the Boca and into the Caribbean Sea. They hang around the boat. Last Saturday one large dolphin leapt high in the air for us. Dolphins have a happy-go-lucky outlook which pervades everything they do, even the routine of feeding themselves. They don't need to drop the fish a line. They use face-to-face interaction. It is this facetiousness that dolphins display instead of fatalism that I admire. It is something that we should adopt to help us through troubled times.
TROUBLED TIMES
And these are troubled times and there are many troubling people around. The American Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, for instance, was angry that some journalists questioned the presence of people like the Minister of National Security at the Fourth of July, Independence Day celebrations of the embassy. This was two days after the Americans had sought to pressure the Caribbean into signing a waiver to exempt their people from prosecution by the International Criminal Court. In fact, the Ambassador's country of birth, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, is one of the countries involved. The Ambassador, who admitted at a news conference that he was a "teacher masquerading as a diplomat", accused us of behaving "like schoolboys". I must tell you that being deemed a schoolboy was a learning experience.
I started to hyperventilate. My breath came in short pants. But then diplomacy is supposed to be the art of saying "nice doggy" while searching for a rock. The problem with rock-slinging, and even mud-slinging, is that the privilege of casting the first missile is supposed to be the prerogative of those without sin. The Ambassador also could not understand why so many citizens took objection to the concrete and steel barriers that block off an entire street next to the American Embassy.
BARRIERS
As I sat in an old pirogue in the Gulf, looking at the Caribbean Sea outside, I realised that even for those of us born in the region, there are many barriers to communication and sometimes the best way to deal with pressure is merely to close "la boca grande". But those are deep waters and we would not want to create another diplomatic incident by preventing American subs and hot-dogs from being one with everything.
Tony Deyal was last seen attempting to rescue an American diplomat. The man was trying to play water-polo and his horse almost drowned.
