The whales of Dumas: A return to India’s west coast

A few weeks ago, an email arrived from the Marine Mammals Consortium, the kind of routine update I usually skim and file away. This one had a link to a global database of blue whale strandings, and out of curiosity I clicked it. A world map loaded, dotted with blue circles, and my eyes went straight to the western coast of India, which was covered with them.

I grew up in western India, close enough to the sea that the beach was simply part of the week. Almost every weekend we went to Dumas, and in all those years I never once heard anyone mention a whale. Whales belonged in documentaries and in other people’s oceans, somewhere cold and far away.