Fear. Cold fear clawed at me as I stepped backwards.
Bozo was barking, whimpering, not knowing which direction to run in. I called for my mother, but knew even mothers cannot save their daughters from everything.
She saw it too, allowed me cling to her as her brows furrowed. I could see she was scared too.
“We have to leave.”
I nodded, not knowing what else to say, and ventured hesitantly towards the window. It was like it had never been there. I opened the window, touched the outside of it.
It was wet, not with rain. We lived on the second floor of our building, facing the beach.
I remember mostly images now – the wooden spiral staircase I will never see again, the freshly washed entrance to our building, an intricate kolam drawn in plain white on the washed ground. The sun shone bright when I looked from the main door of the building.
Barefoot, walking around the building towards the beach, colours changed radically. Grey and brown. There was almost no water to be seen, the dirty brown, almost sludge-like water that was there was normal, reticent, not coming very close.
I heard voices, and followed them. Volleyball. People were playing volleyball at that time. The only people on the beach. Laughter, screeches, giggling, chastising... they were teenagers.
The wind was what was abnormal before anything else. Almost as bad as the Scottish winds I’d experienced when I had lived there before moving back home.
Then the wind stopped. The sludge-water receded. For a long time.
The teenagers took no notice, raging hormones, bare skin, adrenalin rush and sweat.
But they heard it too, the low rumble as it approached. “It’s making a bigger noise this time,” one of the boys laughed in Tamil. Why were they laughing?
They ran away from the beach, stood towards the edge, close to where I was, and watched the brown sludge crash onto the shore. It was not as high as the earlier wave that crashed against our windows. It rumbled onto the cars in our car park and receded. I waited for the kids to laugh about that before one of them said, “Asha yengai?”
Pandemonium broke loose as they went in search of a lost Asha, probably dragged to sea by the sludge. Only the best of swimmers could handle the muck in that, let alone the strength of that particular wave.
The skies were dark, looming over my head, the wind had returned after the previous wave receded. We still have some time, I thought, remembering the brief tsunami-training we had received at our workplace some months earlier.
I made my way to my dance teacher’s house, which was a few doors down from ours.
Her husband, an ecologist, was sitting in his chair on the verandah, looking glumly at the sea.
“Didi’s inside?” I asked.
“Haan, Sanhita is inside,” he replied, not talking my ear off for the first time in my life.
She was standing on the other end of her house, looking at the sun, which by then had some clouds covering it.
“What are you going to do, Didi?”
“Leave. What else to do?”
We remained silent. Only when she sniffed I realised she was crying. I did not know what to do.
“Didi...?”
It was when I moved closer to her that I saw what she was actually looking at. The hill in the distance. A tiny excuse for a hall that was a little outside the city, towards the airport. It dawned on me.
“How will I take my mother? And Bruno? He’s old, his legs...”
Her mother had had heart surgery recently, a broken hip the year before. The dog had been with them longer than I’d been learning classical dance from her.
My phone rang. It could only have been my mother.
We looked at each other and she said, “Be careful. Call me if she needs any help. I know how scared I am for Sippy now.” “Where is she?” The daughter was never far from the dog, I guessed both of them were frantically packing in the garage.
She didn’t answer.
“I have to go...”
“Yes, please. Go. Be safe.”
I did something I rarely did, maybe after a performance, but never otherwise. She never encouraged obeisance and incessant touch of a guru’s feet, unlike many schools of classical dance. I knelt before her feet in acknowledgement of everything I had learnt from her. When I stood up, there were tears in both our eyes and we hugged.
I turned around in the direction of my home, one I would never see again.
(author’s note: this is a re-telling of a very vivid dream I had recently)
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