It is mid-august in the ever drenched city of Bombay and the night is cold and windy. Dark clouds envelope the horizon as they have been for a majority of this month. The rain had only just relented, a rare breather on a day of unrestrained downpour, although the spray off the sea more than makes up for it.

I am Joel, 24 years old and have chosen an increasingly wet night to walk the beach. The sun has long since set and all the colors that remain ranges from shades of black to dull grey, notwithstanding an intermittent blur of red and yellow dots from motorists on the road nearby. 

A few speckles of light down the coast are all the White Sand, a luxury resort has to show for its existence, peeping its way in the darkness as stars would on a night as clouded as this. Normally, a prime destination for tourists and other weekend traffic, it had been running low on guests in this dismal weather.

Now, while I myself don’t frequent the place, the resort’s happenings are common knowledge to me, as my office is located just a few blocks down the road from it. 

During the summers, scores of tourists would rush by my window streaming down to the beach in excited droves as would befit cackling geese. 

They would hop and play in the sand, frolic amongst the gentle waves and bask in the sun. Yet, not one would chance a glance towards me, nor see me observing them as they skip by ready to jump into their vibrant pieces of swimwear, eager to feel the sea. 

They wouldn’t really notice a lone man by the window innocuous to their heady spree now, would they?

The office itself is a colorful building with huge sliders to let the sun in and is completed by an underground warehouse and I suppose it’s only the daily morning prayers, our boss, a devout Believer, religiously performs that keeps it from flooding. 

The work is, well, exhaustive. We are the Western arm of a leading clothing manufacturer and our office is a focal point in its distribution network all the way down to the southern coast of the country. 

I deal with the logistics part which is nothing more than an amalgamation of tedious and highly unimaginative tasks, coupled with a great deal of shouting at people.

The summer though, is a distant dream as I am soon soaked even though the rain has stopped. It’s a sudden rush of madness that made me walk the beach on a night as this. 

Normally, for the entirety of this month, I had been avoiding it completely, hitching up auto rickshaw rides to the nearby local station. But the smell of the sea and the freshness in the air was too alluring as I ignored the chill and the late hour and made straight for the waves.

There is a certain effect the waves have on the feet that is magical, the way fresh air calms the mind. 

I reached in my bag and found the last few rumpled up cigarettes for the day. The match, already damp, took a few tries before lighting up and then blew off almost immediately as the wind took hold of it. 

Another match went the same way before I somehow managed to light a third up enough to get the cigarette going. A few puffs in and the familiar feeling of warmth began to seep through me. 

The sea had calmed down by now and the waves that had been crashing not a little while ago had dropped to a gentler rush. 

Onwards I continued along the length of the beach. I still had a couple of hours’ time left until the last train went by. The fog had cleared and I could see a few stars twinkling aimlessly in the night. Soon others began to pop out though the moon remained hidden.

The beach seemed completely deserted save for the occasional gull, screeching its presence, hunting for food as the tide began to recede. 

The sound of motorists were by now left far behind and all that remained was the constant noise of the waves crashing on the beach. 

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

I had reached a point of the beach isolated from the road, where tourists rarely ventured, and no hawkers shared their coop, a stretch undisturbed and raw. 

A dense forest lined its landward side and lumps of coral were scattered around in the sand. The tide had retreated leaving the stretch pale and cold, the wet sand sloughing beneath my feet.

I walked on towards a spot I frequented in the summer, brilliantly lit in the summer night, when the full range of stars would shine at its brightest and the moon be a luminous beacon; dark and hazy in this weather, the meagre stars just not enough. 

A large chunk of coral lay right ahead at a point where the forest stretched almost onto the sand. Water gently lapped at its base forming shallow depressions where it lay in the sand.

I reached over and climbed onto its top. It had a reddish rough texture and slightly abraded at my trousers though I had achieved a position of lounging comfortably over it on the back of months of regular visits. 

The view provided from this place was pristine. All around me the sea gently lapped, the waters dark and endless , melting into the horizon.

A light breeze emerged from the forest behind leaving a trail of rustling leaves. It whispered gently over me, colder in its bearing, sending a sudden chill through me. 

I reached back into my bag and took the now almost empty pack of cigarettes out. There rolling in the vacant space was a solitary cigarette three quarters in length and flattened out by the day’s exertions. Its upper portion had been rolled closed to prevent its contents from spilling out.

The tobacco in the cigarette had been long gone and I had stuffed it in weed. The match, damp as before, took a few turns before lighting up but held a steady flame as I blew on the joint and got it up. A few more drags and it began to burn steadily, the red glow on each drag throbbing in my lungs. 

The result was instantaneous. The clogs in my senses suddenly seemed to pop out. I could feel the breeze brushing through my hair, tantalizing each strand as it made its way, as if a sea of grass would sway. 

I could smell the sea and its million little minions, laced in a struggle of existence, so primitive that men would shame, and no evolution could seek to conquer. 

I could see the shimmer of a million stars hidden in a haze of clouded skies, concealed as if to mask their sparkling splendeur. 

I could sense them all, from every crab that walked this bay, to every gull that lost its way. They were now all a part of my being. I was like a giant tree and my roots touched them all.

The joint had smoked out by now and I flicked it away. The burnt stub in perfect harmony with my mind, free-wheeled in the air before it hit the sand, ready to be washed away in the next wave that came, naive to the force that lay ahead, unaware of its final repose. 

It’s peculiar how we give ourselves so much importance, when there’s so little to choose between us and that tiny stub. The sea consumes us all. The land consumes us all. There is little our relative differences in size or innateness could change.

The wind had picked up again and the chill had suddenly become more pronounced. I could have stayed on in that place for an eternity, stretched in comfort on Nature’s lap, her musicians at the peak of their prowess, banishing away the screeches of discordant human strings.

But I had to get back. It was fortunate that tomorrow was a Saturday. The office was a couple of miles down the beach, but to me, it couldn’t have been farther away from my mind.

There is an endless monstrous monotony about work which no one in my childhood had warned me about. It was all about studying and getting a good job.

But I will not dwell on this. Precious moments of being high on a serene evening by the sea are not to be wasted. And I had to get back.

I quickly gathered my bag, swept off the coral and threw my shoes on. There was a momentary pause as my head spun, the power of weed was still on, and I had to remember to get more; but I gathered my senses and started the long walk back.

The breeze was a pleasure to walk into. A faint moon emerged from behind the clouds, and for the first time that night a trace of a shadow was formed, complimenting my every step as I hurried along the coast.

Soon the main beach emerged and a little while later I reached the road, poorer in my mind to what I was leaving behind. 

An autorickshaw dropped me to the station, and I hurried along past the police check gates, not wanting to miss the last train.

The rain had started again, and it was with an otherworldly swagger that the train came steaming into the platform, rain billowing off its sides, swathed in garish maroon coats of paint. 

The Mumbai local train is a one of its kind beast, ugly to the core, a monster crude and unforgiving, fit it seems to journey you down to the depths of hell. It’s the wheels that drive Bombay on, an ersatz of an earthworm, snaking its way through an urban jungle, long and continuous, feeding off the soil of this great city.

And here I was, settled snugly in the belly of this earthworm, glad to be out of the rain. There was a lone man who had got in with me, and save for us, the compartment seemed empty. 

The train quickly picked up speed, rain streaming down its windows and blowing in through the open doors. I plugged in my earphones and turned the music on.

An explosion of trance greeted my ears as I tucked the player back in my pocket, the beats in unison with the rocking of the train.

The ride back from suburban Bombay to New Bombay takes about an hour and a half. I have made the journey stoned on a number of occasions, many of them in worse conditions; but this was special, positively groovy with the luxury of an empty compartment.

The rain, the train and the trance in my head, had struck a beat and they were jamming to my senses. I felt alive. The world around me felt alive, and it was kicking.

The earthworm gave out a long roar as it slowed down to a halt. It was hungry, rolling along on an almost empty stomach. It had an insatiable desire that reached its crescendo when the morning hours came and men of all castes arrived in numbers to be fed as fodder until it belched in its greed and its innards burst.

But it still resumed its feeding, moving on to the evenings when it practically has a feast before slowing down through the late hours, heading towards bed.

Yet I knew it was hungry still, as only a worm can be on its final round before bed and I liked to tickle its belly and feel it writhe in hunger, roaring in disapproval.

An hour later I reached my destination and the worm dropped me off, heading on its way, not before playfully snapping at me as it passed by me beyond the sides of the platform. I think it was beginning to like me as the guy who tickled its belly.