by Cole Beauchamp and Sumitra Singam
In the car, chubby thighs fart on leather seats. Five children in three spots, the ripe smell of cousins and siblings on holiday, left to go feral. Sandhya keeps her eyes fixed on the horizon, grateful Australians drive on the same side of the road as back home in India, that her sister is such a confident driver. She keeps her hand on her belly, trying to quell her nausea. Hopefully the sea air will help.
The Commodore sputters to a halt. Hands scramble for door handles, push slow-to-move bodies, and stretch to the light. Heat slaps them, burning melanomas into the crowns of their heads.
The mothers hand out straw bags, towels, stacked containers of food, buckets and spades amid protests and squeals of laughter.
Sandhya grips Vidhya’s hand as they step onto the beach, her balance off in this new country. She shouts a warning to her daughters, but a gust snatches it away.
Vidhya calls out to her oldest son to look after the little ones. Naren nods.
Sandhya exhales. Her nephew is a capable boy, like his mother. And a worrier like her. He won’t get distracted.
* * *
Naren leads the jubilant children who scuttle like crabs behind him to the shore. Staring at the headache-white sand, all Naren can remember is the last time he was in the ocean, his balls shrivelling to raisins in the shock of the bracing cold.
He’s been crowing to his sisters and visiting cousins about the majesty of the sea, running on baking sand, ice cream melting onto your wrist. But he’s only been once, with his father, and has forgotten the brutal heat, the icy water.
He watches the roiling waves, panic gathering in his throat. His father warned him of hidden rips that suck you under, gulp you down and spit you out miles from shore. A rogue wave catches his toes, cold as an injection. He snaps his foot back.
Five-year-old Leila laughs at him, “You’re scared, Naren Anna!” She rushes in, splashing her sister and her cousins.
* * *
The mothers snap a sheet into hot air, lay it down, anchor the corners with bags.
“Akka,” Sandhya begins. Not quite sure how to start this conversation with her older sister. Vidhya continues to unpack the bags – plastic plates, napkins, cups, bottles of lemonade.
Sandhya watches the waves surge in the distance while the children squall in the water. An answering tide pulls the ocean within her. “Akka,” she repeats.
* * *
Cold water foams over Naren’s foot while the other is buried in scorching sand. His twelve-year-old body holds these dualities tight, as if a sacred duty.
He keeps his sisters and cousins in sight as they shriek and splash. His mother and aunt are further up the beach, laying out the picnic. His head swivels between the two groups like he’s at a tennis match.
Overhead, fragments of conversation float, the gulls snapping at them like they are insects.
A squealed “Don’t!”
A half-whispered, “It’s too much…”
“Throw the ball to me!”
“…gift from God.”
“Naren Anna, watch me!”
His name whooshes inside his skull. The moment builds, the weight of responsibility threatening to engulf him. “Leila, not so deep!”
The surf swallows Leila’s tiny body, a swirl of white. His breath comes in gasps, mouth dry as the salt in his hair. He wades in, cold water sloshing against leaden legs, his father’s words echoing in his head. He imagines Leila’s tiny, limp body. Hears his aunt’s fury.
Hours later – a minute later – Leila emerges, spluttering. He scoops her up but she wriggles away, skin slippery as a fish. “I don’t need you! I can do it!”
In his relief he scolds her, more harshly than he intends. Tears well in her eyes. He clucks his tongue, fetches the ball, says, “Come on, kutti, let’s play.”
* * *
Sandhya asks about doctors here in Australia. About what might be possible.
“It’s too much with the girls. I can’t go through this again…”
But her sister is not looking at her with sympathy or understanding. There are no arms around her, no soft mutterings or pats on her arm.
She had forgotten how Vidhya can be. This is the Vidhya of I’m going to tell on you, of this is not how you play the game. This card does not belong. That is my marble. It is my turn.
It’s not enough to travel thousands of miles with nausea backing up her throat, rejecting food, rejecting liquids. It’s not enough to have the girls bickering over every toy and item of clothing and sign of favour. It’s not enough to have her husband pressing against her at night, oblivious to the new tenderness in her breasts, the watery swish of her insides, the squirm of a tiny life multiplying and multiplying. Now she must bear this moment of Vidhya’s tight mouth, her eyes of judgement, telling her it is a gift from God.
* * *
Vidhya calls the children out of the water. They form a circle, sand coating their bare feet and shins, gathering in soft piles on the sheet as they jostle each other for prime position, closest to Naren.
The mothers dole out plates of biryani for their children in silence. The earthy smell of slow-cooked meat, the sweet-musky fragrance of fennel and cinnamon spices the air. Naren feels the rice catch in his throat, sharp as a fish bone.
Sandhya refuses the plate Vidhya offers. No point pretending. She sits down on the blanket by Naren, nudges him and says thank you, gesturing towards Leila. He swallows a gulp of lemonade fizzing like the surf and feels his stomach relax.
The two of them share a smile, watch the mighty ocean splintering in the sunlight, think of the waves lapping their homeland on the opposite side, sharing a single body of water.
As Naren feels the terror subside in his belly, Sandhya feels the mighty succussion in hers, an echo, an answer.
Cole Beauchamp and Sumitra Singam met on an online writing course and became friends over WhatsApp despite their incompatible time zones (UK/Australia). Neither of them live in their country of birth. Their late night/early morning convos on WhatsApp run the gamut, from infertility and menopause to growing pineapples in England to rejection bingo. They wish they could invent a time machine and go back to 2002 when they both lived in London, so they could have real-life chats over chai. They are both widely published, including collaborative pieces with Icebreakers Lit and New Flash Fiction Review, and hope to produce many more stories together now they have met in real life and sung a few karaoke duets.
Our thoughts on collaborating on this story:
We’ve worked together on four stories now, and it is such a rewarding process – it frees each of us up to try things we might never do solo, because we know the other has us. This story came from a series of ‘what if’s, and we just surrendered to the process. We love what we’ve come up with, and hope you will too.
