Breaking of Innocence

I was only eleven when Amaya married a tall, long haired man with an amicable smile and the gentlest of eyes. He gave me an affectionate pat on the head, and gently brushed his lips with my crimson cheeks before he left with my sister.

He must not have known it, but he was the first man to kiss me. My father was a good man, but he paid more attention to the fish he caught than to me. He said I was a nuisance. I knew better. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together to see that my black eyes, my straight black hair, the tiny dimple on my right cheek and my skin the color of snow reminded him of mother. She died at child-birth. I do not remember how she looked but everyone in this village thought I was much like her, if not a shade lovelier.

I grew up crying on the shoulders of my sister who used to spend sleepless nights holding me in her arms, gently rocking me while she sang to the night birds and the wind. The moon must have been mesmerized by her voice, for it was never curtained by clouds when she would walk to and fro in the verandah. She taught me what rain was and why it came late. When the sand castle that I had built after hours of tedious work was washed away by the waves of the ocean, she spoke at length about the erratic mood of water. She taught me how to braid my hair, how to catch and cook fish, and how to read. My father was of the opinion that I would learn more at home than at school. Amaya thought otherwise, but took it upon herself to be my teacher.

When she left, I sensed such a morbid emptiness in my heart that I spent days sitting on the rocks at the beach with my legs in the water. I let the wind play with the hair around my ears while I cried my eyes out and my feet got numb in the icy water. I felt lost, helpless and without a friend. I missed Amaya and prayed for her to come back but I knew it would not be so. She had a new life with the gentle eyed man, while I was stuck grieving on fond memories of the past.

Late one evening when the orange sun seemed to have given up on me and was retiring into the heart of the ocean, my eyes fell on an absolutely ordinary sight; a boy helping his father with the day’s stock of fish. Tall and lanky, he must have been fifteen. As he heaved crates after crates from the boat onto the wagon, I sat admiring the leanness of his muscles and the tautness of his skin that had darkened by hours of tiring work at the sea.

I was captivated by his broad shoulders and the sweat that trickled down the sides of his forehead as he engaged himself in drawing the boat out of the sea. I was tempted to dive into the depths of the chocolate pool that his eyes were.

His eyes were looking at me. I had been staring.

Embarrassed, I looked down and began fumbling with the ends of my blue skirt while they worked. My heart did not slow its beating until they had almost left. I allowed myself a tiny peek at him and found his eyes studying me. Scared, I ran back to the confines of my four walled hut. I wanted to talk to Amaya.

I was so intrigued by him that I stopped feeling miserable from being lonesome. I thought of my sister’s husband and of his gentle eyes. Then I thought of the boy at the sea with the chocolate brown eyes, and I felt a warm fizzy feeling gushing inside, that sent a blush across my face.

I asked my father if I could catch fish with him. People in the village who saw us walking together to the beach must have thought I was a very nice daughter to help my old father, but I had my reasons for wanting to be on the beach. I was disappointed; for I did not see him that day, or the next. On the third day, he was there just like I had seen him before, heaving crates with his father. My heart skipped a beat. We worked for two dreary hours in the sweltering heat. I stole glances at him while he was working, all the time dreading the thought that  he too could sense it

Two days later when my father left me alone at the beach, I struggled to pull the boat out the sea. One edge seemed to be stuck in the mud. I was losing hope when all at once two masculine hands grabbed my hands from behind and tightened my grip on the rope. The mud gave way and the boat lifted itself up onto the sand. I was silently overjoyed for I knew it was him who had helped me. I turned and gave him a smile of gratitude. He inched closer and his fingers grazed my thighs. Then he left. I stood standing for the next ten minutes at the beach, trying to understand what he did and why. I felt a tad embarrassed but I could not understand why. Amaya would have warned me of what was going to happen, but then if Amaya was there, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

I had begun liking my work at the sea. It was strenuous but it gave me an odd sense of satisfaction, as if there was a reason to haul myself from the bed at dawn. I felt alive and relished the small fish I had for dinner. After that strange encounter, I was unsure of how to approach him, but I saw him with the Gods and was certain that nothing wrong had happened.

Once it started raining heavily. I saw the grey clouds darken the sky as they passed a shadow on the churning sea. A storm was approaching, and soon the waves would take us all inside if we stayed there. I looked for my father but he must have left. Scared, I looked around in desperation and found myself being dragged away from the water forcefully. It was him, my chocolate brown eyed boy. Relieved, I let him take me up on a small alcove formed by black rocks on the edge of a cliff where we would be safe from the waves. It seemed big enough for ten people.

I was completely drenched and shivering from the cold.

“Thank you.” These were my first words to him.

I saw him studying me again, and suddenly the alcove was too warm. He came and bent over, and started putting my hair away from my face, behind my ears. He hadn’t said a word to me till now and somehow it seemed that he wouldn’t. I wanted to tell him so many things, but he seemed more interested in making me dry. He wiped the water from my neck and off my blouse. I did not understand why he was so concerned with me being wet, and then he tried opening my blouse. Feeling awkward, I resisted but he forced it open and moved his fingers over my chest. I was too young to know what he was doing, but I knew that he was hurting me. I saw the look on his face and it scared me so much that I started crying. Then the look was gone, and he saw me with those chocolate eyes again that seemed frightened and confused. They were asking for forgiveness, begging me to understand that it wasn't his intention to inflict any pain or resentment on me. But then he got up and vanished, I don’t know where. I curled myself into a little bundle and cried.

I thought I had found a friend. Who was this monster? My innocence was broken, and no one could help. Not even Amaya.

Summer of 69

It was the summer of 1969. I stood leaning quietly against the poorly cemented wall of my terrace, brooding on the intricacies of my insignificant existence. I was disheartened and plagued by loneliness. It was that unfortunate phase in my life where I sensed that God had wantonly abandoned me. I kept an eye open for idly gazing at the buzzing market scene below. It appeared somewhat similar at any length of the day as if ignorant of the sweltering weather that made me so uncomfortably hot.

In that sleepy state of mind, I lazily tried to decipher the various people. They seemed only concerned with their own petty affairs of buying or selling goods, mostly fruits that could no more be seen in the hot baking afternoon heat more than the tiny black flies that covered them. The fruit sellers could not have appeared more unbothered, fanning their perspiring brows as they sat squatting in their khadhi dhotis that must have once been of the color white.

Next to the fruit stalls was a tiny repair shop- if you can call it one- of four bamboos loosely tied to the ends of a cloth of the color of the sun. The cloth roof sheltering from the direct blistering heat drooped down as low as to almost touch the head of the figure working beneath it. A young scrawny boy with dirty slipshod hair who looked no more than seven was absorbed in his work of thread and needle. It was if there was no life outside the universe of his shabby yellow shop and sewing served the sole purpose of his life. His small brown hands kept at his work with such cleverness that it was a while before I could notice the beautiful lady towering above him. I was that engrossed.

When I say beautiful, I mean that hers was an unearthly presence in that ordinary third grade place where the air is always putrid and everything appears to be rotting. Her dark brown curls were cozily cushioned against the sides of her silken cheeks. Her taut velvety skin was delicately wrapped in a blue sleeveless cotton dress that came to just above her knees. As she laughed at something the boy said to her as he held outright her pair of silver heels with his two bony fingers, she straightened the light brown straw hat that had been drooping to the right side of her lovely face. I caught a glimpse of those hazel eyes that saw the world around her only through the light shades of innocence.

It was a sign. I had seen an angel fallen from the sky. Her name was Hope.

The heat suddenly felt unbearable, and I felt a burn forming on the sides of my cheeks. I shut my eyes briefly for a few seconds to drink in as much of her as I could. In those moments she vanished, never to come back again before my eyes.

That was a good twenty years back, and the sight of her altered the course my life would have taken if I had wasted my youth any more on those dreadful thoughts. Here I am now, laughing and reading bear stories to my four year old daughter. She will have a good night’s sleep because her daddy takes care of all the boogey monsters. Her curls often do remind of the summer noon that was.