I glance at the twelve containers of ice. I put them in the saloon, stacked them on the red wool upholstered couches. It’s cramped but I can still reach the cooker, the instruments, and I can creep into the forepeak and sleep there later, but not out here on deck, not on the open sea.

In the course of the morning the wind picks up—a light, early-summer wind from the southeast. I raise the sail, and the wind catches it—that’s how it should be, just like that, surging forward in a broad cross. I adjust the wind vane—I’m so glad I have it instead of autopilot; those cheap mechanisms rust just like that. The manufacturers advertise that they will last forever, that they are maintenance-free, but at sea nothing is maintenance-free: salt and water will sooner or later have their way with everything, the way nature sooner or later destroys everything man-made.

I drag cushions out of the cockpit’s stowage space aport, lay them on the bench, and settle in there, turning my face toward the sun. It is warm, prickling my skin. It has been a day and a half since I last slept. Now I shut my eyes and drop off for a few minutes, then awaken again, glancing around me quickly. No vessels in sight, land is already far behind me. I can glimpse only a strip of land on the horizon in the east—there is nobody here but me. I can rest a little more because I have control over the boat, can steer it alone, like so many solitary skippers before me. Like Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail around the world alone. How did he manage it, without a wind vane, without GPS, or an echo sounder, for seventy-four thousand kilometers? He was fifty-one when he started in 1895 and his journey lasted for four years. He completed the sailing trip but perished in the end, was lost at sea and nobody found him. Maybe the Spray is still sailing the seven seas, maybe I will meet it out here, maybe only time and gender differentiate us, for the solitary sailor’s loneliness overshadows most dissimilarities.

The skipper’s nap is also something we have in common, under a blanket on the leeward cockpit bench: five minutes of rest, dark sleep, dropping straight into a dream before I wake myself up, get onto my knees, and look around me for a few seconds. Still no boats, no skerries, no obstacles. The seconds I am awake scarcely exist. I sink down on the bench again and am back in the same dream.

The wind and the rushing roar of the ocean become the rumbling of a river. I am beside the River Breio, standing on the bridge, a rough construction of sun-bleached wood. I am young and an adult at the same time—I am just me, the person I have always been, whether I am fifteen, thirty-five, or fifty. I am running late for something, a flight, to India, I have to catch a flight to India. I will be in Narmada for months, protesting against the dam they are building, the dam that will put villages underwater, force thousands out of their homes, protesting against the untouchables’ lack of rights.