He nodded.
She said, “You’ll have them again.”
* * *
—
They spent the morning in a suspension of light and heat. Sunny retreated to the other hammock, drank more beer. Neda drifted in and out of sleep while Santosh made the occasional round, opening a fresh beer for Sunny, indulging him. Soon Sunny was sleeping too. When she woke next, Santosh was smiling as he stared out to sea.
“What are you thinking?”
“Fishing,” he said. “Later we go fishing.”
She stretched. “Do you swim?”
He giggled. “No.”
“Is it safe to go swimming?”
“Not if you can’t swim.”
She laughed. “I can swim. But I don’t have anything to wear.”
“It’s OK,” he said. “You go how you like here; no one cares.”
* * *
—
Around noon he arrived with plates of rava-fried prawns, shark curry, rice, papad, mussels with fresh pao. They devoured it with lemons and raw green chilli and drank more beer. When they began to eat, she recognized how hungry she was. As they were eating, Santosh told them he was heading out, he’d be back in several hours. Sunny opened his wallet and counted a thousand rupees for Santosh to take.
* * *
—
She waited for Sunny to continue their conversation from last night. It was the only thing she wanted to talk about, but she couldn’t bring herself to start. She couldn’t understand if it was the sun and sea air making her lethargic, or her reluctance to pick at the wounds, to ruin this idyll he had conjured around them, which felt like the end of something. She could feel Sunny’s tension. The ride down had done the opposite of its stated intent. He seemed more tightly wound than ever. Every time he finished a beer, he opened a new one.
“You might want to pace yourself?” she said.
But he ignored her.
She climbed into the hammock and slept.
* * *
—
When she woke, Sunny was still sitting at the table with his shades on. The tide was receding, revealing a deep shelf of sand that caused the waves to roll and crush wildly. She climbed out of the hammock. “I’m going in the water,” she said. “Are you coming?”
He shook his head minutely, his aura oppressive. She turned and undressed without a word, stripped to her underwear. She checked the beach—it was still deserted. She ran down through the sand. It burned the skin of her feet. She charged through the waves, broke free of the undertow, dived under the swell, and emerged beyond the breakers, where it was smooth and calm. She swam front crawl straight out to the horizon until her arms began to ache. She floated in the sea and looked back at the land; it looked so different from out here, the beach vast yet insignificant against the jungles and the Western Ghats that rose in green undulating waves, higher and higher to the mountains inland. She could make out Sunny at his table, his shirt open, smoking, sitting in his shades, surrounded by dead beer. Trails of dark smoke rose from hidden homes along the beach. She let herself float and drift, and the only thing she could hear was the gentle slap of water against her skin. Every time her brain tried to ask necessary questions, the ocean intervened. She felt as if her memory were being wiped clean. She closed her eyes and tried to rise from her body, look down on herself, see herself as nothing but a speck, an insignificance, nothing at all. From the heaven of her mind she looked down on the coastline. Bombay to the north, Sri Lanka off the southern tip, higher, higher, rising into space, the Arabian Peninsula, the East African coast, Europe, the Americas, the curve of the planet, the deep, impenetrable void.
* * *
—
She came out refreshed. “You should go in.” She sat next to him, dripping wet, pooling water in the sand around the plastic chair. She couldn’t see his eyes behind his shades.
“I will.”
“It clears your head.”
He said nothing, didn’t move. He was like a stone. She ran her fingers through her hair, started squeezing the ocean out. “It’ll help.”
“I said I will.”
“At some point we have to talk.”
“Don’t . . . ,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“Ruin this.”
They fell into silence, then he stood and walked wordless through the trees, down toward the beach, crossed the sand toward the waves, tottered up to his ankles and peed into the surf. He stripped off his T-shirt when he was finished and immersed himself. His body had become soft in the last six months. She felt such sadness seeing him, bloated and broken, floating just beyond the breakers.