The Young Man And The Mama Crab !!

Mahika and I were spending our last evening in Montego Bay on the pier, taking in the breeze, singing together and watching a little baby crab, sitting on a tiny water puddle, on the rock below. As we looked at it, it kept batting its eyelids open and shut. “What a cute existence”, I thought.

The two other people on the pier had left and we sang to ourselves in joyful abandon,our voices cresting and falling through the roar of the tidal waves. In that environment, I was semiconscious of  a young man who had stepped on the pier and was prostrated, trying to catch something from the waters below. 

At one point Mahika asked, first to me and then to the man himself, about what he was doing. To which he replied that, he was trying to catch some crabs.He had a short length of line with some bait at the end and a small plastic bucket with a lid, to store the crabs in.

He said that they kept taking his bait, but fell back into the waters, as he tried to get them on the pier. Mahika in her innocence, was prompt to tell him that, there was a crab sitting on the rock. The one that we were watching, a little while ago and he rushed to the spot and exclaimed “Oh, that’s a baby” .

However, by then a bigger crab had also climbed on the rock and he said “ Let me get the Mama” . I was mortified that we would be the cause of its death , yet I couldn’t interfere with the young man’s business. The man was successful in getting the crab on to the pier and was trying to get him closer to his bucket.

My insides were thumping, both with a prayer for and a plea to the crab to run for its life, to not get trapped, not then, to not die. It was only a matter of seconds, but felt much longer. The crab went down the side of the pier and the man held his bucket underneath and my heart sank.

When he raised the bucket, he sighed, “It escaped! I had got it up here on the pier you know” . I said “Yeah, I saw” like I was sorry for his miss while my insides were rejoicing. 

As Mahika and I walked back from the pier soon after, I told her how glad I was that the crab escaped followed by answering several of her “Why’s “ while she tried to understand the ways of the world and life and death. 

The next morning before leaving for the airport, I visited the pier again and saw the crabs darting on the rocks, looking for food and eating what was probably tiny fragments of sea weeds. So I picked a generous helping from the beach where they were plenty and strew them across the rocks. Soon enough a couple of them made way to the weeds and tore them with their claws and ate them. What a bright and sunny day it was!!

The Old Man (Autumn) & The Sea!!

On the beaches of Montego Bay in Jamaica, I have forgotten that it’s December. While I read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which is about his early days in Paris, following World War I, the balmy tropical weather, the pitter patter of the waves and the aqua sea, take the mind to a sleepy lull, where nothing else exists,but calmness.

The autumn that I so loved, just a few days back, exists only in traces, in the pumpkin flavored delicacies, that my Caribbean hosts are trying to infuse into their spread, to entertain their American guests. In sharp contrast to their endeavors, I believe nobody visiting from that part, wants to be reminded, that they have to return to winter and harsh weather. Everything else is tropical, from mangoes to star fruit to custard apples to jerk everything.

Why does my heart, that beats with every leaf of autumn, coloring up with them,swirling through the winds with them, not miss it? I wonder?

To people who know me professionally, I am a numbers and percentages, facts and figures kind of girl. But lo behold, my home is filled with books,  that are filled with dry leaves, from every autumn, since I stepped into the beautiful continent. Pull one out and you will have an entire fall of your own. Spring and Summer are great, but it is Autumn that steals your heart. Everyone’s heart, unless one is heartless, I guess. Every fall, as the many colors throb through the veins of the leaves, my heart throbs into variegated colors with them. And it breaks with them, every time each one severes itself from its source of sustenance, the tree. How did the creator make something so beautiful?How could he break it? But only to revive again? I wonder! After all,I guess I miss them!!