Munroe is an island residing in the braids of Ashtamudi Kayal ( backwaters). From Kollam town you wake up early at around 4 AM and reach the isle at the break of the dawn. You get in a canoe, a tiny one which would tilt when you shift your mortal weight from one side to another. It then carries you through the grooves of the lake around the island. These canals are banked by coconut trees and mangroves and houses and temples. You can see the routines playing out on the roads close to the canals, the milkman, the newspaper boy, the fathers brushing teeth, the mothers in kitchen all getting ready to face another dawn.
For you this ordinary would suddenly vanish as you move further into the canals. The light of the dawn is possessive about Munroe, it would only illuminate the island partially, you need to engage to understand the contours of the island. You then start feeling the sweet pace of your canoe, it moves with a such care as if it is treading on your dreams. It is the pace with which you would like to approach your lovers, to tell them that you have infinite tenderness for them. A pace with which dew falls off leaves or ink spreads on tissues.
This pace affects you. It makes you shed, shed all the things you have been overthinking, shed the dead of the past and the angst of a future. It reduces you to the present, and to the very moment you are in. It brings you to your very pulsating self. Only the lagoons can offer you such a pace, a pace where you cannot say whether it is flowing or stagnant. This would then merge the constant and the change in you , the Parmenides and the Heraclitus in you. It will liberate you from the ideas that you are stagnant or you change too fast. The lagoons would merge the binaries in you and everything about you would be fluid and free like the present.
The waters of Munroe are like the Maidaan of Rumi, sahi aur galat ke aage ( the field beyond the ideas of right and wrong). It is a space where ideas of a man and a woman merge, the space where definitions dissolve. Aur main wahan miloonga tujhe ( I shall meet you there ). Yes, you will meet you in the waters of Munroe, you shall meet your essence.
Come to Munroe and I shall meet you there.
