Joshua Newton is a multiple award-winning Indian literary essayist and author whose work explores the light and shadows of the human mind through cultures, histories, identities, landscapes, memory and the overlooked...

It was dawn. I sat on the white beach. The green and blue lagoon was still. Cold, calm, inviting. Puffs of clouds drifted in the sky. Orange patches on them highlighted their whiteness. In the air hung and wafted away a faint smell of wet coconut leaves, wet after the night’s rain. The green chundi plants and the tender plantains stood fresh as if they had just burst out of the white earth. Sometimes, their leaves moved. There was nobody around. At least all human endeavours—resort men cooking for travellers, travellers getting ready for another silent day, islanders helping islanders with simple chores—were hidden from sight. Around me were just the white shoreline, the blue sky and the green shoots. A bird or two, tiny and flitting, trilled on the trees. In the distance, on the water, in the glimmering light of the tropical dawn, I saw the pale shadow of a distant fishing boat. The boatmen’s faint voices came in shreds floating in the breeze. The colours were contrasting and the quiet, disquieting. Yet not a thing around me was pronounced. Everything seemed to merge into everything else.