The Unnamed Pull

The birds are already at it. Frantic, diving, loud — working the shoreline like they have somewhere to be. The dogs aren't paying attention. They're just lying there, salt-heavy and unbothered, like they've already made their peace with this place.

I haven't yet.

I came from the city. Left it — or maybe it left me, I still can't say which. Something pulled me here, to this particular stretch of Konkan coast, to this work, to this region. And the honest answer, the one I keep circling back to, is that I cannot name what that something is. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Was it expected? Was it meant to be?

Both feel true. Neither feels complete.

The rocks are wet. The sand is the kind that gets into everything. Waves come and go without asking permission, and somewhere behind me the world I used to live in is still running — meetings, noise, the particular exhaustion of city air. I miss it. Parts of it. But standing here completely alone on a beach that is asking nothing of me, I think —

This is something I can work with.

Not a revelation. Not a clean beginning. Just a quiet, surreal, beautiful fact.

The surrealism hasn't left, by the way. It sits underneath all of this — under the beauty, under the birds, under the strange certainty that I am supposed to be here doing this work, for this environment, for this coast. I don't know how it turns out. I don't know what changes. I just know that everything already has.

Life takes us to places.

Sometimes you see it coming. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes both are true on a beach in Konkan, with dogs that have figured out something you haven't, and birds that are too busy to care either way.

Just a beautiful start to the day.