”Just tell us how long ago?” he asked with impatience laced in his voice. I stand there in the sand, the ocean behind my back. All I can see are my feet. My toes are buried in the sand, my entire body is shaking even when I want to stop it with the force of my mental willpower my head is shaking too. I don’t want to be here. Suddenly his hand cracks across my face, snapping it back with the force of his blow and causing my head to reel sickeningly as it lurches back. When black dots and blue colored electric rays stop covering my vision, I am still standing there on the sand although I wish I could be somewhere else, anywhere but here.
“How long ago?” he asks again
“I don’t remember. Some twenty minutes?” I ask instead of telling as I try to recollect as best as I can, but it might as well be a complete lie.
A couple of hours ago I had tagged along with a couple of school friends to go to the 7 stones beach. It’s an isolated stretch of sand cradled between large houses facing the ocean. It’s a rainy morning in the middle of July. As we take the bus down to the beach, there is not a soul on the road that is usually teeming with people — Which is weird. After all, this is India.
“Who the f*** goes to the beach in this rain?” Praveen who is almost a foot taller than me asks nobody in particular.
“Enjoy it while you can. The schools start back up on Monday. This is going to be our last outing”, Harminder, a lean gangly Sikh kid pipes up from my left. I laugh as I reach out and try to pull him by his hair tied in a bun which he slaps away easily.
Later, as we fool around sitting on the rocks in that torrential pouring rain, I worry about how I would go back home and explain these wet clothes. My father would be back home around 4.00 and mom soon after, so I would still have enough time to get back and change into something dry. It’s not a worry, but I am a Virgo and need things to be sorted out in my head.
As I straighten a few minutes later and stand, my eye catches something in the sea — A head is bobbing in the water. The swimmer is clearly out of his depth — but how is that possible? Not in this weather. He can’t be more than 10 feet from the shore. On a normal day, you can wade out 30 to 40 feet before your feet can no longer touch the bottom. I think idly — a big coconut. I scan the beach. My friends are all there.
That morning, as I glanced at the sea as we came, I saw that the current had shifted. The bay was still fairly calm but a little choppy, no longer clear. To anyone unfamiliar with these waters, the change would be imperceptible, but I understood its significance. Beneath the apparently benign surface, a treacherous undercurrent was building, doubling the depth and sucking anyone out to sea. I had almost been caught in it once before and the force can be startling. “See how the current’s changed?” I had called Shankar gesturing out to sea. He had cast a brief glance, but could see nothing, and had turned his back. We had the rocks to ourselves, so it seemed unimportant, and the thought soon drifted out of my mind.
Now I take another look at the black round sphere bobbing up and down in the water. It was only seconds ago that I had spotted it but it was already moving further away from the shore. I scan the beach again when the idea suddenly shocks me. My gaze snaps back to the swimmer. That can’t be…can it? I squint my eyes in the rain. It can’t be, but I think it is.
“Do you know where Harminder is?” Praveen asks scanning the horizon. I can see Shankar my other friend out of the corner of my eye, but Harminder is not to be seen.
I hear Shankar shout out loud, yet it’s not clear in the pouring rain. He is flinging his arms violently above his head, calling on to us. I don’t want to go, but something pushes me ahead. It’s not every day that Shankar is that excited about something.
“I saw Harminder go into the water for a dip but I haven’t seen him come back. It’s been a while now”.
As I turn around ninety degrees, I freeze. I see the green shirt a little away in the sand. The white slippers with the blue straps are just another foot away. At that time, my mind shuts down. I try to remember what exactly happened after that. All I remember is the fishermen with nets running into the water, and later the stout men with mustaches and short-sleeved shirts asking questions and the hard slap across the face as I snap out of my dream. The panic flooding me like ants, my body itching as my hands scratched my chest under my soaked half-buttoned shirt. But even as I stand, I can’t believe seriously in my fright. Surely this can’t be a genuine emergency. These kinds of things happen only in movies to clueless people who we already know are actors. It’s just that they don’t know it yet.
I don’t remember much of that day besides the rain, sheets of rain. My mind has shut it down, erased it with the passage of time, and sanitized it into something vague — Distant, and disproportionate. Yet, in all my daze, I do remember that Sikh man, just slightly crestfallen standing next to the other men looking at us with those fierce eyes and saying ever so slightly —
These three, they killed my son.
I have often wondered what I was doing at the exact moment of my friend’s accident. I might have been sitting on the rocks or laughing or dreaming about the day. I might as well have been running close to the water, I don’t know. How could I not have felt it happening? I was on the other side of the beach, just a short distance away, but still — how does the fabric that connects us rip into shreds without our knowing it? The morning of his accident, I had the only allergic reaction I’ve ever had to anything before or since. My chest was covered with a red rash all the way down to my belly. I had that morning became hot, itchy, irritated — as if some alien force had become trapped inside me and was desperately trying to claw its way out. Coincidence? Probably.
But it’s hard not to feel that my body knew something that the rest of me didn’t.
