Tempest

Monday, 1 October 2007

Predator

She got up screaming. Her body was covered in cold sweat and she was still shaking. Vision hazy, she tried to edge herself into the centre of the bed curving her body into a ball, clutching at the sheets; trying to peek into the dark and discern the lucid images. Gradually she managed to convince herself that it wasn't there, that she was okay, that it was okay to move, it was okay to breathe. Slowly she willed herself back to reality and got up cautiously to turn the lights on. Her body tense, her every nerve ending on alert to run at the first hint of danger.

The flash of the blinding light seemed to pierce through her very consciousness and the nightmare was gone as easily as it had come. Trembling she sat down on the bed again and drank thirstily from her night flask. It was not fear at its sharpest most vibrant intensity, but it was still fear. She had thought it had been dealt with but the nightmare still came on odd nights uninvited like a sudden tornado and then the vision of that horrific experience would come to her so stark, so clear that it would almost be real. It would bring with it a choking, numbing terror and a flood of memories that she had always fought so hard to control.

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She’d always been fascinated by sharks. The sheer power and thirst for blood that the animal displayed would have her hooked to the TV for hours together watching Discovery. She was terrified of the creatures but would still for some incomprehensible reason watch from behind a pillow the circling fin, the cold evil eye that freezes you over, the leap that the gigantic fish would make in the air for those 20 odd seconds to bite into a piece of bait that deep sea divers place so they can study its instincts, its behaviour. She would gasp in horror at the blood dripping from those teeth and watch the muscle play of that gray body in awe. She would grudgingly admire these divers for their pluck and madness to be doing this and secretly wish she was there among them.

Surprisingly in spite of this tremendous and compulsive fear of sharks, she loved swimming and had always been a water baby. She would swim for hours together in pools and even when she visited beaches not once would the thought of the creature cross her mind while in the water.

Human psychology is a weird thing. In the year 2001, she finally understood why so many doctors, physicians, academicians and psychologists were so interested in the human psyche, in what the person perceived and thought rather than what really was. In 2001 she turned 17; she passed out of high school, finished the most pressurising exams of the past 12 years of her life and went for the first time to Goa with her cousins. Her’s was a very sporty family. For all of them, going to Goa meant five days of sun, sand, snorkeling, scuba diving, water skiing, water polo and intense tanning.

They had the time of their lives pulling each others legs underwater, playing tag, going water skiing in pairs and racing. All of them were decent swimmers. The five of them hadn’t met in the last few years but this sporting seemed to bind them together within a few hours.
Snorkeling was exceptionally beautiful and all the reefs, fishes and corals that they had seen left them talking and thinking of nothing else. They did it two days in a row and couldn’t seem to get enough of it. Highly charged and eager for more, the eldest Sam suggested they try scuba diving as well. “I mean how often does one come to Goa like this without parents?” he reasoned in a matter of fact way. They all agreed and the enthusiasm caught on. And so Barracuda diving it was. All listened tenaciously to the guide’s instructions on how to handle the equipment, on how to work the oxygen masks taking slow deep breaths at all times and also to keep away from any dark spots or anything that looked suspiciously white or translucent; to swim as fast as possible towards the boat if one noticed such a thing, to not try to help each other and always stay within a 500 metres radius from the boat.

They took the first few attempts to get a hang of the breathing. In the first few initial spots they didn’t swim more than a few yards away from the boat, venturing hesitantly and looking around furtively before doing so. Gradually the sights and the pure exhilaration of swimming as one among the sea life took over and they began to swim fearlessly, admiring the glorious colours and textures under the sea.

It was mid afternoon and the guide was rounding them up. She and Sam broke surface together about 100 yards from the boat and took off their oxygen masks. They were so excited and thrilled, they almost began to talk at the same time and burst out laughing in the awe of the beauty they had seen together, not knowing how best to express it. She was still bobbing lazily. Ron was already in the boat grinning and waving at Sam and Ross. Sam gave Ross a friendly shove and started swimming back. A few feet to Ross’s right Dee had broken surface. Ross smiled at Dee and both girls made to move towards each other. Nobody knows when exactly it happened. Nobody saw it coming. Ron later claims to have seen a white translucent stiff wire rise from the water next to Ross but he wasn’t convinced. It happened in a split second and in that instant Ross felt like she had died. It was excruciating pain radiating from her foot to the very nerve endings of her every pore. It was pain that screams through you and tears you apart. She lost consciousness for a few moments but it felt like an eternity.

When she opened her eyes everything around her was red. There were terrified screams coming from all directions and all of them seemed to have her name in them. It felt like it was coming from far away. The red had spread in a radius around her forming a full circle with her in the center. It was then that she realised that the red was blood. It was her blood. The fear rushed in and immobilised her. Suddenly she was acutely aware of where she was, suddenly she could hear every word in the screams clearly, she was petrified to move, to breathe. She just floated there unaware of the tears seeping down her cheeks. Alex had surfaced right next to Dee the minute this had happened. Neither of them had realised until the blood had started forming the perimeter of the circle. Although only a few seconds had passed from the moment that they saw the shock and muted scream on Ross’s face to the moment that the blood began merging with the water around her, for her it was a lifetime’s worth of nightmares ahead.

There was no sign of it. No great gray body, no evil eyes, no circling fin. But all of them could feel the fear it generates permeating from and towards them in waves. But they couldn’t see the creature. Alex broke through the shock first. He was brave. In fact according to Ross he had been the bravest among them all that day. ‘It’s not here now! Ross, ROSS swim. Swim Ross,’ he yelled suddenly. Stupefied, in the sharpest haze of her life Ross just kept looking at him. ‘C’mon Ross swim!’ he yelled again. He started swimming towards her. He hit the edge of her blood circle and hesitated. He circled her and kept urging her to swim but was still afraid to break through the blood perimeter. The guide who was next to Sam slowly started swimming towards her as well. But they all stopped at the edge of the circle. For some reason she couldn’t think. They were all saying it now. ‘Swim Ross swim. You can do it. Just swim towards the boat. SWIM!’ It seemed to move thru her haze but she was still afraid to move a limb for fear of instigating the animal again. But the pain had gone, or rather dulled to almost a non-existent level. She slowly tired to move her legs and it was then that she realised that she was literally paralysed, that she wasn’t able to move her limbs. Assuming she had lost them she suddenly mentally gave up, she stopped struggling and became passive…only the vest holding her up.

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In an desperate, yet almost fatal attempt to shock her into movement, Ron threw a mask at her hoping that it would land next to her and shock her into action. It hit her in the face and she went down gasping and gulping mouthfuls of her own bloodied water. The survival instinct took over and she pushed herself up and flayed her arms in an attempt to move. It had shocked everyone into action. All of them moved through her circle and Sam and the guide held each arm of hers and swam towards the boat. This time they reached un-attacked. They don’t remember much about the boat trip back to the shore. It passed in between shocked, glazed gazes and body wracking sobs. Her foot was in a mess. It was split open from ankle to toe and the flesh was hanging out. She doesn’t remember if she had been in pain because the mental shock seemed to have numbed any other sensation. They got to the hospital and she was operated upon and the chief surgeon told them that she was lucky it had been a light graze and not a full fledged sting. ‘Sting?’ asked Dee, confused. ‘Yes, the sting ray seemed to have grazed past her, the current therefore not being too strong seemed to have only cut through her foot instead of giving her a proper fatal shock’, replied the surgeon. ‘Phew! We thought it was shark!’ whispered Alex. ‘This could have been worse and more dangerous than a nurse shark bite,’ said Dr Nanavati before walking away.

That first evening was fine. Ross and the others talked among themselves easily. They discussed the incident and laughed over how they had all assumed it had been a shark. They were relieved and tired and slept only in the way exhausted children can for a full 14 hours. The trauma began the next day when Ross refused to go to the bathroom alone. She refused to get off her bed and put her foot down. She refused to drink water and she refused to have a bath. Her fear was so acute that she could virtually conjure up the murky sea and then a shark rising through the water with blood dripping down its jaws and she would shake and cry and vomit, but the vision would persist. She refused to close her eyes and sleep, for no sooner would her eyelids drop would she see the evil cold eye and feel the waves of chill creeping up her body.

Each time in pure exhaustion that she would begin to nod off, Ron would come and shake her awake and ask her if she was okay. He was going through his own guilt trip and nightmare and could not get the vision of her spluttering and flaying her arms about in the bloody water when he had thrown the mask at her. He kept feeling like he had killed her. Insomnia combined with Ron’s persistent ‘are you okay shakes’ ensured that Ross hadn’t slept a wink for a week. It culminated into a high fever leaving her delirious and shouting in her sleep. Gradually she recovered. Over the period of a few months the trauma of the experience was slowly dispelled.

One day she ventured into the shallow end of the swimming pool and even though she came out almost crying and shaking just moments after, it was definitely a start. Her father persevered and finally made her jump off a three metre board in order to get her over her fear. Standing there, on the board, she could see them circling in the water below as clearly as if they were there, waiting for their bait, waiting for her jump. She stood there and cried and begged and sat bent sobbing and vomited in the small chlorine box beside her, pleading with him that she couldn’t do it. They were there with blood dripping down their jaws and her father said jump. An hour or so passed and the man disappointed, slowly turned and started walking away. And then she jumped.

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Its been years since that day. She is still a decent swimmer and loves the sport. But even today while swimming in the deep if one of her friends jokingly mention the word shark, she freezes over and her heartbeat accelerates and it takes immense self control for her to tell herself that the edge of the pool is just 5 strokes away. ‘C’mon Ross swim. You can make it’.

Its funny how in spite of knowing that it was a sting ray that had caused her such pain and almost killed her that day, she to this date fears sharks. In that one instant that she felt her foot rip apart in the water, she had associated it with a shark bite. She had feared it all her life and her mind refused to grasp the simple logic that the fish had nothing to do with what had happened to her. She knew it.

Yet…even today, she can smell the fear sometimes when early in the morning she walks over to the washbasin to wash her face. ‘Its just a washbasin Ross, its just a washbasin’.

Labels: fear, fiction, predator, Shark

Posted by Pavitra :: 13:32 :: 27 comments