A toast to seastars!

A toast to seastars!

I was walking on the beach – a rare luxury in these times. The feel of the ocean breeze on my face and the sand beneath my feet lifted my heart. After being cooped up at home for so long, I wanted to soar up into the sky like one of those seagulls – unfettered by the chains of society and social distancing. My eyes on the sky and thoughts afar, I felt a faint prickle at my feet and almost tripped to stop myself from stepping on a starfish. The starfish shuffled off towards the waves, flawless in its radial symmetry, perfectly in rhythm with the universe. Marveling at its instinct to find its way to the sea unerringly, I remembered another tidbit I had read about the starfish. Starfish have the unnerving ability to regenerate meaning if a predator bites off one of those limbs, the starfish can grow the limb again. Nothing short of a miracle if you think about it. If only humans had the same ability - instead of being plagued by phantom limbs we would be able to grow new limbs. Build life anew.

And that’s when it hit me. I stood there, still as a lighthouse, and myriad faces of people came to mind like holograms – some of them I did not even know –like that surfer whose arm was bitten off by a shark --- and some I knew – like the colleague who had just been through a bitter divorce and was rebuilding her life, a friend who had moved to another country and was replanting roots in new soils, another who had given up a lucrative career in finance to be a fitness trainer. There was that one young girl I knew who was learning to be a single mother because her live-in boyfriend of many years refused to have anything to do with her and her baby. There was that dear aunt who had fought a long and painful battle with a senseless and tenacious disease and had landed on her feet embracing all the modifications to lifestyle that came with it. There were those young parents who were redesigning their home to cater to the needs of their autistic child. There was that old woman who lost her husband and her son in the space of two days to coronavirus. All of these women were regenerating a limb of their life much as a starfish. It takes the starfish as long as a year sometimes to grow a severed limb. It will perhaps take these women months or years to rebuild their lives.

As these faces melted away, I looked to see the starfish had reached the waves and disappeared into the vast sea to fulfil its destiny.

I was still rooted to the spot as a multitude of new faces crowded in. These were people whose battles were not open for all to see. Nobody saw their battles nor their scars but in all honesty they were regenerating in their own way. I read somewhere the other day “Every stage in life demands a different version of you.” Is it every stage or is it every day or is it every moment? It could be any of those. Each one of us, regular women -- working big jobs, small jobs, homemakers, full-time mothers --- leading the most unheroic of lives are reinventing ourselves every day of our life. Every new recipe we try or chuck in favour of eating outside defying traditional expectations, every time we step outside looking for a new address or when we stay at home from work caring for a sick child, every time we keep our mouth shut in the name of peace in the family or speak up to let our voice be heard, every time we take up a new hobby or let go of an old one that stopped making sense, every time we use google pay instead of cash, every project completed, every deadline reached, every online school session completed, every video conference carried out, we are reinventing, regenerating. Every day we are growing, we are building a life brick by brick, investing time, effort, and love in every task, every relationship, and every chore.

For years, marine biologists tried to rid the starfish of its misnomer because it is not really a fish. It’s a sea star. Well, ladies, here’s to us! We are all sea stars!





Bakul pradhan