Beautiful - Anu Nawa and the old man

The sea and the old man

My father was an old man. He was alone in a small boat in the warm current, fishing for fish in the ocean. Forty-eight days had passed. But he had not caught a single fish. Oh... my luck, my father... In the first forty days, my father had been a companion, a helper, a boy, and two of them had been able to swim. He had been able to find companionship. But now, it was not like this.

When he couldn't catch a single fish, Toto's parents decided to stop their son from working for his old father and bought him another fishing boat. This boat caught three big, fat fish in a week.

Every day, when he saw the old man returning from the sea with nothing but sorrow and sorrow, the little boy made it his eternal duty to help the old man, who was weak and weak, to carry the ropes, the fishing net, and the net house from the old man's fishing boat. He had to carry the sail, which was wrapped around the mast, to the shore. If you were to look at the old man's sail, it was patched with sacks of flour, and it looked like a tattered flag, not a flag of victory, but a symbol of eternal defeat.

The old man was tired. He was tired. Even in the trapezoid, the wrinkles and folds that were the signs of old age were still there. It was as if death had already come. Not only that, the skin on the old man's wrinkled cheeks was thick and thick to withstand the intense sunlight. The heat of the tropical sun was so intense. Even the tender human flesh had become hard and wrinkled. The hard skin covered his face from top to bottom due to the power of the sunlight. The ropes used to pull the big fish were so thin that the old man's hands were badly injured by the ropes, and the deep scars were a testimony to the old man's hard and miserable life. The times when those injuries occurred and came were long ago. They are not new injuries.

For example... those wounds are like the cracks that form under the surface of the vast ocean. The cracks in the vast oceans where there are no fish are like the cracks in the hands of those who cannot catch fish...

No matter where you look at the old man, he is already showing signs of aging. However, his eyes are still alive. He can smile. What a powerful spirit that never gives up...

Sometimes, as the disciple pulled the boat up to the top of the mountain, he would say to his companion, "Father Santiago... I've made a lot of money. Let's go out to sea together." The old man taught the boy everything he needed to know about the sea. That's why that land was so friendly to the old man.

The old fisherman said, "Don't go with me... You're lucky to be on the boat you're on now... Just go with them."

Until then, the little grandson replied, "No, Grandpa... Grandpa and I didn't catch a single fish for eighty-seven days. But the next three weeks, we caught big fish, didn't we?"

The old man replied, "Oh, my dear... I remember that very well. I know that after that incident, you left my boat and went to work somewhere else, not because you doubted my fate."

"At that time, Dad... I was still quite young, wasn't I? So I had to listen to Dad."

"Oh, okay... I understand."

The old man answered this.

"My father... is not a person who believes in fate, Grandpa."

"Oh.. that's true. But we believe in fate, don't we..."

"Yes, of course, Grandpa.., come on Grandpa.. I'll buy you a beer. Then we'll put the things on the boat on land, okay..."

"Oh.. of course."

After a while, the grandfather and grandson went to the beer garden. The other fishermen made fun of the grandfather. The grandfather was not at all angry. Some of the fishermen looked at the grandfather and felt sorry for him. But the grandfather was not happy. The other fishermen, feeling sorry for the grandfather, talked about the currents, how deep they had to go, how the weather was going to be better, and what they had seen. When the fishermen who had come to the sea that day had come back to the harbor, they had tied their boats to the docks and, after finishing the big fish they had caught, they were carrying the dead fish to shore on two planks of wood. The fishermen, who are carrying the weight of the fish on two flats, are struggling to transport the large fish to the motor lorry where the fish is cut into pieces and iced, and to the city of Hamana. On the other side of the harbor is a separate processing plant for fish. Fishermen who catch sharks take their catch to the plant. When they arrive, the sharks are pulled ashore from the boat by pulleys. Some have removed the hearts of the sharks and kept them separate. Others have kept the shark fins to sell at a good price. Others have carefully removed the shark's water and are trying to process the shark meat by salting it and drying it.

When the wind blew from the east, a strange smell came from the shark factory on the side of the harbor. That smell turned out to be the smell of shark oil. But on this day, after playing for a while, the wind returned to the north and circled around. Then the wind calmed down and went away again. So the land was calm and the sun was shining brightly along the shore.

"Santiago," the young man called again.

"What the hell," the old man replied, and as he held his glass of wine, the old man pondered the past, his mind wandering... as if he had lost consciousness. His mind was still wandering over the past years.

"I'll go and get the big sardines that you'll need for work tomorrow."

The young man said to the old man.

"No problem, Kev... why don't you go and play football? I can go fishing on my own... and Shigelio can go with me and shoot the net."

The old man replied like this.

"No, old man... I... am the kind of person who wants to go fishing with old man... Even if I can't go with old man, I'm the kind of person who wants to help old man."

"Hey, Aye La.. Dad knows you're a grown man.. You're even giving Dad a beer now, aren't you?"

"Wait... Old man... How old was I when I first started rowing with my old man?"

“Wow... you can't even remember..., when you first went out with your father in the boat... you were only five years old.... That time... we caught a big fish... do you still remember..., the fish kicked you in the face... don't tell me... the boat was about to break apart and you were about to leave, do you still remember?”

“Ha... don’t you remember, father... the big fish didn’t live or die... don’t tell me that it rolled around on the boat... I was shaking the little fish... You had to hit the head of that big fish and kill it, right? When you hit the head of the fish... my father made me stand at the front of the boat, didn’t you? At the front of the boat... there were a lot of wet ropes... And when my father hit the head of the big fish, the whole boat was shaking... My father hitting the head of the fish was like knocking down a tree... the smell of blood was so strong that it made me bark.”

"Wow... you really... remember... you think you're repeating what I said before... yeah..."

"I don't remember the first time my father and I went fishing together, but I remember those times very clearly."

The old man looked at the young man with love. His