A Seaside Holiday

The sea beach was crowded with tourists. Most of them had flocked from a nearby city for a much awaited holiday. You see, all of them had to escape.

              

  The little girl in the red sequined skirt, jumping about in the water, gleefully had to escape from her torturous Mathematics tutor. Who wanted to solve an exercise full of algebra problems, anyway? She wanted to be an actress, like Vidya Balan. The sea knew it. Nobody else did.

Casuarinas grew around the beach. That young couple you saw just now were heading towards the casuarinas. Yes, the boy had spiked hair. And the girl wore bright pink glass bangles. Would you like to follow them? If I were you, I would. But aren’t you the very civil bhadralok?  You wouldn’t disrupt their privacy, would you? You know they would indulge in obscene activities. So I set out to follow them on my own. The boy played a flute. The girl lay on his lap, listening to the tune with wide eyes. The girl was his Radha. The duo was escaping a society of bhadraloks who worshipped Radha-Krishna, alright, but had no respect for their defiant little romance.

I was nobody’s Radha. I had always been too ordinary for that. My bespectacled eyes were not mysteriously kohl laden. Neither did I cuddle stray kittens. I was here to escape my ordinary existence of metro rides and sweaty walks. I was here to surrender to the sea, extraordinarily.

But my story is boring. Do you want to know why the group of elderly women had come to the sea? Oh, so you heard them talk about their rich husbands. Did you know, most of them never returned at nights? That woman you see in a handsomely embroidered blue saree is Sipra Masi. I think she didn’t tell you that the scar on her forehead was not from an accident.

You see that married couple sitting on a boulder near the chai stall? Yes the husband is slightly fat. The wife is drinking coconut water. They both look satisfied and almost happy. It has been twenty five years of a working marriage. They had witnessed each others’ ups and downs. They had also witnessed their daughter run away with a vagabond. The wife silently blamed her husband for not letting their daughter take up literature instead of law. She wrote poetry. She sang folk songs. The father had a deaf ear for them. The mother lacked courage to support them. They were at the sea to escape shredded memories of the daughter they had lost.

The man that sits on the beach with his laptop is not doing his office work. You civil bhadralok, you are highly prejudiced and stereotypical. He hates the corporate world. He is actually making comics. He is on a holiday, far far away from his much hated office.

It was getting dark. The sun had disappeared long back, behind the monsoon clouds. The chai walas were wrapping up their stalls. The fishing boats were returning to the shores. Scattered around the beach were people, silhouetted in their regrets. The tide was setting in. People were breathing, in and out, in a nagging monotony. Tomorrow they would all return to the lives that they wished to escape. The sea saw it all and silently shed seven tears of salty water for seven thousand such regretful lives.

It was 3.35 pm, the next day. The painted little train was full of faces, bleak ones. They were all going back. To the city of brokenness that they had all learnt to tolerate and at times, love. The holiday was over. None of them had escaped.