BluE Scrubs

One minute was not enough.

Three minutes, was just as the same as the former.

I just felt compelled to keep the silence for as long as possible. I decided not to write anything to begin with. So I didn't for a few days. I however, got myself into a perpetual urges of wanting to write so that I don't feel abandoned half way across the globe.

I typed, deleted and retyped but then deleted again. I couldn't begin to put in words how heavy, drugged and inflated it felt being flashed those devastating pictures of bodies, families in hysteria, man splinting a body of another man, another body to safety.

In just a day, civilization was swept away, into nothingness. Loved ones leached away. Neither ostentatious not understated. Just demise and debris prevailed. I felt a pressing tamponade of remorse. I wanted to be there, to work when it really matters, to help.


That boxing day, the very day tsunami ran amok, I was having fun. We had fun. Baldie, Linda and Raj came to visit me in the humble land of Grim. I didn't know how I did it, but somehow my lack of enthusiasm at inviting them over must have fuelled them to see what this place had to offer.

Yes, of course I mentioned the new cinema by the seaside. Cleethorpe seaside.

It was a gorgeous, most lovely day for a walk along the beach. All the four of us started walking in a row akin to that ceremonious intro of the TV series Young Riders, could just hear the theme song and us being cut and pasted, pantomimed in a slow motion.

Exploring the sandy beach in our thick coats, wooly hats , gloves and scarves, we forked into 2 different conversations; very understandably. Boys being boys, girls alike.

Raj didn't believe in wearing gloves, after that day he's probably in a possession of a pair by now. The bitter cold had no mercy.

Baldie and Raj went ahead leaving us girls catch up on our girl talk. We talked about relationships and such, future, if it is sooner rather than later, how grown up we have become, cars, apartments, possessions, heart and soul matters.


We stopped and looked at the sky. A thick pregnant cloud shrouding the coast. The horizon looked fuzzy, an impending heavy pour approaching very fast. The air was still.

"I love the moment just before a storm and the after rain smell".

Linda disintergrated the statuesque posture, molded from the troposphere we found ourselves in.

A glimpse of light pierced through the badly soiled cumulus nimbus, flirtingly hitting our faces. I winced and laughed at her. She does have this fixation with storms and drizzly weather. She does.

We used to go for a run after the rain back in med school. That's the time we found that we could best let our hair down, stop and smell daffodils, and run and run away and leave the worries behind as well. If that didn't work we got home and had Haagen Daaz. Buy one get one free from Iceland.

I looked down and saw a head, a carcass. I tugged Linda's sleeve and her gaze reciprocated and almost instantaneously she shouted and frantically backed herself off the oscillating demarcation between the sand and the sea. I calmed her.


I poked the carcass and I was relieved to learn that it was a fish head. At least what remained of once a big fish with goggled eyes. I laughed at her again. Silly girl I thought.

We met up with the boys just underneath the Pier amongst the many moulding stilts. All of a sudden a lightning jarred into the circle we partially formed and like the synchronized swimming rehearsal, we ducked down and Linda shrieked.

A loud fierce, sully and revengeful thunder overtook and altogether swallowed her shriek and mine by then at the same time. It had a rather mournful, tenor and remorse composition to it. Almost sorry that it had taken us by surprised. We ran towards the car.

We found a café called "Blue Wave Café" and decided to stop there for a bite to eat. The café had a good ambient to it. The light was low, and the heat greeted us, most idyllic.


We gathered around a table for four and had our scones, teas and coffees. Amidst the never ending stories, everybody trying to talk over each other, one trying to win the audience with a funnier story than the other in between laughable laughter, I was, in silent thankful that they decided to visit.

A bizarre SMS from Dear Friend reached my Samsung E800 inbox.

"8.9 earthquake tsunami in Asia hit indon, Thai, msia, india, s.lanka,maldives. thousnds died, 21 in penang, 7 in kedah. Phuket ruind, maldives submergd"

Hhmmmm strange joke I thought. I dismissed it and kept aloof.

I went to bed that night ignorant, like Oedipus before he wandered blind away from Thebes, ignorant that the woman he slept with was his mother.

I too did not know the sea I had enjoyed earlier in the day, tragicomically was part of the conspiracy. Connected to the many miles away from the epicenter of the earthquake off Indonesian coast.

It had without hesitation, consumed lives of models, actresses, fishermen, fishermen's wives, daughters, hawkers, and backpackers.

It toppled buildings, swamped shacks and huts, washed away cars, trucks and pushbikes. It wrecked boats, yachts and many many coastal resorts.

114,000 lives on the death counter, and still going. I didn't know, I am sorry.