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Srishti-2022   >>  Short Story - English   >>  The Picnic

The Picnic

I fixed the ruler straight on the page and carefully tore it away. It was my second attempt at writing the assignment in a better handwriting and I was pretty much sure of my third attempt too. Looking at what I wrote–letters arranged in a not-so-straight line, leaning towards the left and right as they felt like– I thought of Aneetta Mary’s italic letters, neatly noted down in a straight line.

That was enough for me to lose motivation but what I had in my other hand was an incomplete math homework which even Amma couldn’t solve. She told me that Aneetta would help me solve it if I go to her place in the evening. Little did I bother to correct her that Aneetta and everybody else in my class were enjoying the picnic today while I was clinging to the minute hand of the clock, deliberately trying to rotate it.

I wasn’t keeping well since the past week or else I would have been one among them. But no matter how much I tried, I wasn’t able to brush away the images of my classmates making the most of the day, enjoying the serene beauty of the Thattekad bird sanctuary and finding considerable bliss in the boating trip. Appa told me that he would take me there if I had my medicines properly but every time I held the cough syrup bottle, I thought of sacrificing the trip–they tasted so bitter that I’d started to flinch at the very sight of the bunch of juicy strawberries in its label.

Leaving behind the assignments and homework, I grabbed one of my Tinkle digests and walked to the hall. Amma was watching her favourite serial and Ammachi was sitting beside her, with her head bowed down; I wondered how she dozes off so easily sitting on the sofa, in front of the television. “Ammachi,” I whispered in her ears. Startled, she looked at me for a moment and asked me to lie on her lap.

The quietness of that afternoon was interjected by a telephone call. Amma seemed agitated after hanging up and rather than answering to Ammachi’s queries, she asked us to go inside the room. In a little while, Sunil uncle and his wife, our neighbours, came home and were mumbling things that looked very serious. Standing behind the slightly parted door, I tried to overhear the conversations, but the shrill ringtone of the frequent phone calls ruined my efforts. Ammachi was kneeling down beside me, nudging me and kissing the rosary every so often. She was giving me the creeps; I closed my eyes and searched for Appa’s face.

Within an hour, half of our neighbourhood were at our place. I could see anxiety, fear and concern plastered on their faces.
Taking a quick look at the TV screen, I pulled away Ammachi’s hands that were gripping my forearm and ran to have a closer look. All this while, I hadn’t noticed why we were running the news channel; I’d always considered it as an obsession of the grown-ups.

‘Thattekad Tragedy- Boat Capsized,’ the news read. I shook my head, pushing the woman who was trying to drag me back and stood there picking up a few more words like excursion, overload and death.

Subsequently, someone else scooped me up as I kicked them, calling out for Amma, who was talking to Appa, standing in the veranda.

**********

I was sitting next to Aneetta, listening to her brittle voice and adoring the sparkle in her eyes as she was giving me an account on the excursion. From the number of ice creams they had over the entire journey to the humorous bit where Johnny Jose had an irresistible urge to pee seeing an enormous elephant in the forest; she vividly explained everything. When the bell rang, she grabbed her bag and stormed off.

“You should have been there..,” she yelled. I flashed an awkward smile and followed her to find that she’d disappeared the moment she crossed the door.

“Aneettaa...,” I called out, running after her and hit upon the fact that the floor beneath me was no longer solid.

After letting myself go through an absurd count of seconds, hearing the water bubble out through my mouth, kicking to uncover a surface, experiencing the struggle of holding on a little longer against what I had my mouthful, shuddering to the sense of drowning against someone’s push on my head for them to survive and finally coming out of it screaming and spewing out water, I lay on my bed wheezing.

Amma cuddled me tight, stroking my forehead. “I’m here for you; you’re safe,” she repeated.

“You should have been there...” a voice played in my head.