That Boy in the Beach Shack
A short story about a child immigrant's life.
It’s late afternoon and the boy from the nearby beach shack is sitting on a small rock and trying to count the waves. He couldn’t count beyond twenty hence repeated them again and again till he got bored. He felt like he was losing himself to the sea.
The boy is now looking straight ahead, his eyes measuring the depth of the horizon — blank or full of hope! He is tired of cleaning plates and utensils behind the dingy kitchen of the lighted shack on the beach. He is not allowed to get into any part of the restaurant except the kitchen area from where he picks up the used plates for cleaning. He has had a full plate of food not of his choice but what customers didn’t like. The boy is happy as he will go back to the kitchen only by evening.
The boy is sitting clueless with his mind full of thoughts without any answers and his feet wading the water. He felt something crawling up his bare foot. It’s a tiny crab. Greyish or brown in colour. He didn’t move his leg but allowed the small creature to crawl over his foot. He observed the crab and remembered his coastal village in other side of the country. He used to run behind the red crabs spread across the entire beach like a carpet. They were in millions, all over — red and shiny. He could run for hours without catching any of them and yet without any fatigue. They were quick and swift as they disappeared into their self-made tiny holes that were all around the beach. His father would be sitting afar, by the side of a sand dune, against the shade of the quarter sun fixing small weights to the fishing net. While his father would have mended the fish net and ventured into the sea, he would have returned back to his palm-leave-thatched hut to help his mother, clean and dry up last night’s catch. In afternoons, the local college educated lady would round up all children of his titchy fishing village and teach them some basics of word making and counting. And then, it’s play time. They would run, climb, jump all over the dunes around the beach. Pick up shells and fight for one odd conch. Never ending happiness.
The boy’s eyes are getting moist recollecting his good old days of village life. The new plantation project made his entire village taken over by the forest department. His ten odd year old brain could not understand the rules of the land that made them shift overnight. He could appreciate the circumstances only when his father explained about their moving from a small river side village after it changed its course and engulfed the entire village. They moved to the desolate patch of land within the casuarina forest near the sea and started a settlement. He was born there and grown up along side the dunes, red crabs and casuarina trees. As the villagers were gathering their petty possessions, an occasional visitor showed up for help. The trouser worn man could convince almost half the village including the boy’s father for moving to tourist towns for better life. Dreams of education for children, clean environment, better living standards and most importantly earning money were put into the minds of the innocent villagers who never moved out of their village. Even the cost of travelling was borne by the man with promise of collecting them after confirmation of a job. The boy was excited for the travel as he had never before sat in a bus or seen a train. Two nights on couple of trains were over like two blinks of his eyes and he along with his parents landed in this busy tourist town in west coast. They settled into a shanty located at outskirts of the town sharing it with another family of four. His father started working as a security guard in some shop and his mother worked as a day labourer in a construction location under a local labour contractor. However, he was first to get the job in this beach shack as the tourist season had already picked up. Initially he didn’t like the job, but got used to it soon. Moreover, he never thought that he could earn money at such an early age. Things started changing with time and remained constant thereafter. Verbal abuses which he didn’t understand and sometimes a smack on his back. He worked sincerely and the cook started liking him. His father would usually come to pick him up late in the night or sometimes in the wee hours of the morning. He slept till late in the day and came to his place of work only by noon. He was generally a free lad for a couple of hours in the afternoons. This was his favourite place — a rock at one end of the beach which was not quite populated. He could sit here thinking about nothing for hours at a stretch.
A small nick broke the flow of his thoughts. He looked down his legs — the crab was trying to nudge to his soft skins. He moved his leg and it disappeared into the calm wave. He looked at the beach. Children of his age were playing on the sand under the watchful eyes of their parents. The whole beach looked so colourful with tiny shacks, balloons, cheap plastic toys and the western sky. He felt like running in to the panorama of jostle and catch a drifting balloon for the sulking child. No, he couldn’t . The sun was hurrying down. He needed to get back to work. He felt like an adult in his mid forties clamped down with responsibilities for life.
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Many of these visitors who visit these prominent tourist beaches are lost in the fun and frolic in the sand and sun becoming blind to the kind of exploitation and violations that happens in front of them to the young children working around them. Children in these tourist belts grow up with uncontrolled culture of earning quick money as it is for their existence. They have forgotten their past and are employed every where starting from selling tit bits like toys, peanuts, beer, handicrafts to rag-picking, in shops, in small hotels and restaurants, as shoe-shiners, as masseurs on the beach and as utensil washers at beach shacks like the boy in the story. They have to do these menial jobs in order to sustain themselves and their families who have travelled thousands of miles for a living. Next time you visit these tourist beaches, please be aware and conscious of what is happening around you, so that as responsible individuals we can do something for their little happiness.
