Shark

By Isheta Singh

I am a 60 year old women with progressive dementia.

I am slowly forgetting everything.

Right now, It’s just small things-they caught it early- but still it’s all downhill from here.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to finish my daily chores.

That’s why it was such a surprise, when I woke up today and my brain was flashing like a big neon billboard. Suddenly recalling an incident.

An incident that took place when I was 19 years old.

An incident which feels like a lucid dream now.

But however surreal it seems, I am pretty sure it happened.

Thank god, I haven’t forgotten how to write yet, so I will now document maybe my last coherent thoughts on this planet ,before I permanently become a piece of furniture.

Here we go.

So, I had a beautiful home.

Brown wooden exterior with big glass windows.

Shingled roof, high ceilings, sturdy fat pillars, a coveted patio and an honest to god, shining white picket fence, running around the property.

I loved my home, and even when I will have completely lost my mind and know nothing anymore, my subconscious would remain anchored there, forever.

I will always remember my most favourite place in the house, a small nook besides my bedroom cupboard.

It was a small rectangular area, which had a trap door behind it, which was locked.

I wasn’t able to open it, however hard I tried. Though Grandma used to say she had kept the key to the door somewhere.

I just liked to sit there and read for hours, in calm and peace. Also, there was a small circular window above it, like a porthole in a ship’s cabin, and if you stood up, you could have a fabulous view of the neighbour’s vast backyard.

It was from there that I first got the glimpse of the “ Yummy boy”. His actual name has slipped my mind now.

But this was what I thought of him, when I first saw him.

He was our neighbours’ son, on vacation, from college. I hadn’t laid my eyes on him before, and I really liked what I saw.

He was about my age, tall, lanky, with a headful of brown wavy hairs.

He would be out playing ball with his dog or doing some chores around his house and I used to keep staring at him.

And one day he noticed.

Then he waved at me to come out.

I didn’t needed to be asked twice.

I went out, introduced myself and we ended up hanging out for almost 3 hours that day.

We gradually got to know each other, and I began falling for him.

He would comment sometimes, playing with my hair, that I was so pretty, absolutely ravishing, and it just tickled my teenage heart so much, I would just about burst with scandalous joy.

The thing is,I was never short of love interests at my college, although I went against every “ popular girl” trope.

I was never slim or even average-sized.

I was, chubby and overweight although my grandma used to phrase that as “ healthy”.

However much I tried , I couldn’t stop overindulging myself with food. Food gave me comfort whenever I was sad or depressed, and hence the figure.

But one of the qualities I had was ,I had extremely long and sexy legs.

And even though I had a pretty broad tummy, with significant “ tires” in the middle, I also had- at the risk of sounding a bit risqué- prominent assets in the front to sport.

And , additionally , at the risk of tooting my own horn( which some guys had unabashedly admitted ,doing to my aforementioned assets in their dreams) I had a charming personality too.

I had a great sense of humour and the ability to blend in with any social group, be it the nerds or the jocks.

And still, somehow, I always ended up being unlucky in love.

Maybe I gave the impression of someone who did not wanted to go steady with a guy, or was of flirtatious nature.

But swear to god, all I wanted was a guy with whom I could feel at home, a guy whom I could shower with all my love and care and who would love me back.

I yearned for love.

And that’s why I fell hard for yummy boy. He made me feel good.

He made me feel special.

And then, one day, he tried to molest me.

Yup, did not see that coming, right?

I didn’t either.

But thank god, he wasn’t successful,

No need to get into details. Just know that I fought hard.

The whole experience was horrendous .

I hated myself for being so gullible, for believing him when he asked me over, at midnight ,at his home, when his parents were out of town.

And for not realising who he really was, a predator, who wasn’t ashamed of taking advantage of a love-sick girl.

I Wanted to kill myself ,after I made my way back to my house that night.

Not going to lie.

But was able to control that urge after I gulped down two fat chunks of cheese.

Next day, only grandma observed that something was off with me, nobody else cared.

She asked me what was troubling me, I made up a silly story like I had a bad breakup, then went straight to my room and cried the whole night.

But grandma had sensed something, and over the next few days, she kept bugging me with questions.

I kept dodging them.

I was harbouring a victim’s guilt that it was all my fault , and I had somehow given that guy the impression that he could do whatever with me and get away with it.

The most infuriating thing was that, there seemed to be no resentment from his side at all. I never talked to him again but he went on with his life as if nothing had happened.

He kept hanging out and frolicking around in his backyard. Once he even had the gall to give me a flying kiss when he saw me out on the street. I retreated inside fast.

One day I was sitting in my nook , reading, when Grandma came inside ,sat beside me, and asked in a no nonsense tone, “ You don’t hang out with that boy next door anymore. Why’s that?”

She was that sharp. She had, somehow, guessed.

I almost jumped.

I tried to make up a story but stammered.

She said, “ Tell me what has happened sweetheart. No lies.”

And just like that, I couldn’t control the misery anymore. I started crying- no, bawling- and the whole story came out in one go.

And I will not lie, I felt so much lighter afterwards. As if, some great weight had been lifted from my chest.

Grandma listened to all that with patience and calmness.

And after I was finished I hesitantly looked up at her, to see whether she was angry at me or something.

There was absolutely no expression on her face.

She just said one line, “ Sweety, you are alright now. And don’t you worry about that loathsome boy. He would pay the penance.The shark would take care .”

She then patted my head, got up and went out.

You see, this was one of the eccentricities of my grandma.

She was a bit weird at times, which all of us chalked up to her growing senility.

Grandma thought there was a shark living under the floorboards of our house.

She said that it was an old pet of hers, which her father had bought for her, when this house was built and which had never left her side.

When I was younger, not knowing any better, I had tried convincing her otherwise several times, asking questions like, how did she thought the shark was surviving down there without any water?

Why was the shark there in the first place? Why did her father bought a shark as a pet?

Not a dog, or a monkey, or a turtle , but a shark?

It did not made any sense at all.

But I gradually realised, this was just a fad of hers, some story that she had churned up in mind to make her feel happy and special, so I gave up negating her.

I did enjoyed her depictions of that famed creature like some weird version of night-time tales, though.

She would tell me how the shark was the greatest friend of hers and how it had helped her out of all sorts of bleak situations in the past. How, in fact it was the shark that had gobbled up grandpa when he became too much to bear.

This figment of her imagination, especially, tickled me a lot.

My grandpa disappeared when I wasn’t even born, and most of us thought that he had fallen down a cliff or something, while being stupendously drunk.

And to think that my grandma thought that she secretly had him killed through her beloved pet, felt tantalisingly attractive to my teenage brain.

And swear to god, grandma was such a good storyteller, she spun the narrative so well,

that sometimes, in the dark of the night, I really did imagined hearing the shark, swishing in water, beneath my bedroom floor.

So, that line of hers of the shark taking care of the boy, didn’t really surprised me much. It was her way of making me feel better and secure.

I resumed my routine life again, and my mind slowly began recovering from the horrible incident.

I was almost successful in pushing that harrowing ordeal to the back of my mind, when one day my father announced at the breakfast, “ The neighbours’ lad has been supposedly kidnapped ”

My jaw dropped.

He went on, “ The parents had been out of town for three days, and when they came back, they couldn’t find their son. His room was disheveled, signs of scuffle around the whole place, the wooden floor had scratch marks on it, the jug on the night stand overturned , with water and his belongings all over the floor.”

It seemed a morsel of my sandwich was stuck in my throat.

My father continued, “ But my theory is that that junkie boy of theirs ran away. He always seemed no good to me. Though the parents have filed the report of kidnapping at the police station I think it’s a waste of time.

I think he will return when his foggy brain has cleared a bit.”

He went on with his theories but I stopped listening.

I didn’t knew what I was exactly feeling, maybe part alarm and part relief but I sure was panicked as hell.

I got up from the table, went to my room, sat in my nook ,and don’t know why, but started crying.

God knows, that abominable asshole didn’t warranted even a single tear in his name.

I sat there the whole day, peeping through the window at their backyard from time to time.

The cops came and went.

It started raining heavily, water started seeping through the window, but I still kept sitting in that corner playing with the swinging trapdoor and staring at the darkness behind it.

An unpleasant odour started wafting from down there, possibly from the overflowing gutters outside.

Then I finally got up, went to bed and buried my head in the pillow.

After a while I heard the bedroom door open, I raised my head and saw grandma standing there ,staring at me, with an expression on her face ,I couldn’t decipher.

I knew what she was thinking, she knew what I was thinking.

I blurted out, “ What do you think happened to him, grandma?”

And though I am a women with flailing senses now, this is the one thing I know I won’t forget till the day I die.

I will always remember the exact words she uttered.

“ Why, shark, of course. The shark happened.”

By Isheta Singh