OMG, You Look Exactly Like Our Dad
by Subramani Mani

 

 

Long and wide stretches of white sand, for miles; bluish-green sea and blue skies with blurbs of white clouds forming various shapes, coalescing, dissipating, and then reassembling; the Sun peeping in and tuning out for lengths of time as though the Sun was a kid changing its moods based on its feelings. Throngs of people in various stages of undress—in recliners, in the water, inside gazebos and tents pitched on the shore, or just walking aimlessly on the wet sand at the edge of the waters. Miami beach was nature and humans waltzing in unison, with the Sun observing, appreciating, and illuminating the scenes being played out below under its golden watch with the clouds acting as curtains to soften the visuals when called for.

Men and women, old and young, couples, families, singles, boys and girls, little kids, people of all sizes and shapes - humans interacting with nature, with water, with sand, with the sea, with the waves, with the beach, with the shore, with the skies, with the Sun, and with each other. A few folks were getting a little more adventurous - riding water scooters, parasailing, and paragliding. Some people were reading, some were just sunning, lying face down or looking straight up, fully stretched out on the sand and dozing off. A few were meditating and many were talking on their phones, the universal gizmo of this era, with families, friends, or even the customer service reps of financial institutions.

I saw an elderly woman seated on a folding beach chair beside a large towel spread out on the sand. She appeared to be in her late eighties; her speckled skin was shriveled like parchment paper dipped in water and hung out to dry in sunlight. Her skin-tone was dark brown from her frequent visits to the beach to take dips in the water and letting the Sun dry her skin. She reminded me of Chelkash, a woman in Gorky’s story of the same name, experienced, matured, ripened, and pickled in life. She was reading a book of literary criticism with an intensity of focus which led me to think of her as a retired professor of English literature.

I was sitting on a beach recliner, second row, aisle; there are no window seats on the beach. There are of course front row seats which you can avail if you come in very early when the rentals start. You could also pitch your own tent, set up your own recliners or beach chairs, or just spread a beach towel in front facing the ocean. Sitting on the recliner with a beach umbrella in front protecting me from direct Sun, I was observing the beach folks gradually walk in. I hadn’t taken a dip yet; I waited for the Sun to warm the waters more before making the plunge. I saw couples young and old, teens and families with little kids playing with their scattered beach paraphernalia - colorful buckets, shovels, dump trucks, duckies.

And then the phone conversation coming from behind caught my attention. I briefly turned back and saw a corpulent man, mid-fifties, wearing swim shorts, which looked more like a pair of golf shorts than swimwear, a baseball cap, and fancy sunglasses. A middle-aged woman in a one-piece skirt-bottom swimsuit was fully reclined beside him, on his left, her face and body turned away from him.

The man was crowing into his large iPhone. I took an Uber from Miami airport with my family to the Loews hotel. My credit card issued from your bank was declined. I then paid by another bank’s card, and thankfully, it went through.

I couldn’t hear what the person at the other end, presumably the bank’s customer service representative, was saying. The gentleman raised the temperature of his voice by another notch and continued. I checked with your bank and they said everything is fine. It should have been a temporary glitch. You know what. It was again declined at Loews. I couldn’t believe it; it was so embarrassing. I then paid by a different card, one more time.

There was a long pause. His voice climbed up one more step. He had moved to the edge of his seat; his face and even his upper body seemed to take on a reddish hue. Has something like this personally happened to you? Pause. Loews is a high-end hotel. They charge close to one grand per night. I make five hundred bucks per hour in my job which makes this affordable. But the whole fun is gone when your card is declined. You see what I am saying?

Now he was almost yelling into his phone; his body had started shaking. Are you saying there is no record of the declines? I am telling you it did happen. But it shouldn’t be happening. You know what I mean. My money market account - it is a joint account with my wife - has a balance in seven figures. My wife earns more than three hundred grand, and I bring in north of half a mil. This shouldn’t be happening to us. Do you get it dumbo?

His wife’s face was still turned away from him; all through this banter and badger on the air she was just lying still with her eyes closed. I had no way of knowing what she was thinking; whether she was comfortable with all that was being aired in an arrogant amplified tone and tenor.

I thought it was a good time to take a dip and cool down. The Sun’s rays had warmed the sea just enough, and it felt good when I waded in. The warm salt water with the gentle waves slapping my body felt like the tight warm impromptu embrace of a childhood friend appearing after a long gap. When I got back to my beach chair, after an hour, both the man on the air, and his silent wife had packed up and left.

An inter-racial family was walking in, I should say streaming and hopping in. It seemed like a slow-moving, agile, and noisy family procession. At the head was a white man, mid to late thirties, straight brown-black hair, carrying a well-covered baby which was fast asleep in his arms. He was in beach sandals, green swim shorts and a sleeveless pale-yellow crew top. A little girl, about three years old and wearing a two-piece pink swimsuit walked a few steps behind her dad. She carried a yellow beach bucket with some effort; a beach shovel with a long handle, and a few other beach toys were visible inside the bucket. A four-year-old boy in blue swim-shorts followed closely behind, helping his sister with the bucket when it sagged or scraped the sand. He was carrying a beach volleyball which he would throw up and catch.

Behind him, a few steps behind, horsing around were two five-plus-year-old boys, identical twins by birth. Their playful steps, the anticipated joys of the sea, sand, and open skies reflected on their faces, their waveform hair nicely cropped, and their tanned skinny shiny bodies made them the most handsome twins I had ever seen. An elegant African-American woman, who looked to be in her early thirties, was pulling a large wagon cart overflowing with all sorts of beach paraphernalia—tent, beach towels, water bottles, snacks—through the glimmering white sand. Wearing a two-piece swimsuit over which was a loose translucent gown, her hair curly, cut short, and partly braided, she trudged along through the sand with a confident look on her face for a mother managing five young kids.

She took in the beach scene, scouted the space, briefly talked with her husband, and quickly started setting up the tent at a safe distance from the water while ensuring an unobstructed view of the sea. The kids started running around and playing, chasing each other while the mom erected the tent. The bigger boys helped out some when specifically asked by the mom. The dad mostly sat on a beach chair coddling the little one. It felt strange to me; I never heard either the mom or dad shouting out any admonishments or warnings to the kids, like, do this, don’t do that, or anything even close to that. The parents simply let the kids have their day on the beach. I thought that was the secret behind their seamless light-touch parenting. Under half an hour she had set up the tent and the foyer, below which were positioned two beach chairs.

I went into the water to swim and also observe the interesting sweet-seven-strong family from a closer range. The little girl mostly played by herself on the sand. Spreading out her beach toys she started scooping sand attempting to build a sea castle. When the boys became exhausted playing tag, they got into the water to hustle with the waves. After a while they all sat on the sand near their little sister.

The boys started demoing some water tricks. One twin filled up a bucket with water. Then he pulled out a plastic tray and set it flat on the sand. He filled up a clear plastic glass with water from the bucket, and with a quick sleight of hand, inverted it and promptly dropped it mouth down on the flat tray as though he was performing a card trick. Some water spilled out, but amazingly, three-fourths stayed inside creating a water tower of sorts. The little girl couldn’t believe it. Next the younger boy tried it out. He could only get a half-filled glass of water standing up. Then it was the turn of the second twin. After a couple of attempts he managed to make a three-fourths column of water stand tall. The bewildered girl started trying her best to emulate her brothers. However much she tried, the girl couldn’t get any amount of water standing up inside the glass; all the water inside spilled out. She became quite frustrated. And the boys got bored watching her. Soon they were running on the shore chasing each other and kicking up sand.

After some attempts at swimming and splashing water amongst the waves my gaze turned towards the tent which was set up nicely. The white foyer was well-lighted with the Sun’s rays creeping in. The inside of the green and yellow main tent was a shade darker but quite translucent letting your eyes in and observing. The intensity of the sunlight reflected by the white sand, mellowed some by the blue skies and dark blue waters made you squint, but the beach scene, bared in different stages of undress and states of exposure, was spread out in the open like a large painted mural—in the waters, on the sand, atop beach chairs, inside cabanas, and even within tents.

The baby had woken up and the dad was cooing into her wandering eyes in the foyer. The baby started moving its arms and legs. It let out some unintelligible sounds swaying its head from side to side. The baby then started crying.

The woman’s gown had come off earlier. She quickly removed her swim top revealing her heavy breasts which suddenly started dripping milk like a leaky faucet. I had seen a few women topless on the beach. It was not a nudist beach but different states of undress and nakedness of the body were tolerated, even well-appreciated and celebrated silently. It all merged with nature and became part of it. I remembered someone saying - like in paintings, sculptures and photographs, art in general, there is no vulgarity in nature, not in a beautiful beach with beauty exposed and spread out in the open, and blending with the elements of nature, the sand, shore, water, sea, clouds and sky with the Sun, and even the moon looking over and playing hide and seek.

The mother took a few quick steps, stretched and extended her long arms, lovingly picked up the crying baby, and brought it close to her chest. Like a kingfisher catching fish from the river, with a quick jerk of its head, the baby latched on to her mom’s left nipple and started suckling with a vigor I hadn’t noticed in the baby earlier. The sight of an infant breast-feeding is an elegant and calming sight. It is also a basic tenet of nature bonding the mother and her child after the umbilical cord is cut. This natural act of feeding with the satisfied and contented looks on both their faces in the natural setting of the beach seemed to elevate the scene to a higher form of fine art. After a few minutes of sucking from each breast, the infant’s belly filled up with warm maternal milk. Now satiated, it lost interest in her mom’s gorgeous milk-filled tits. Making the baby burp, the woman bent down and put her child on a blanket in a corner of the tent facing the foyer and the sea.

The man was witnessing all this at close range. The sight of the woman bending her knees, arching her body, and putting the baby down churned him into an amorous state. Free of her child she turned towards him; she had a sense that his eyes were tracing her. Now it was his turn to drink from her milk fountain, her milky way, and drain it all moving from side to side. The breeze, the shivering of the tent, the lashing of the waves, the thumping of their hearts - everything spoke and amplified the same nature’s language and force of love in unison. Like kids exploring and experimenting with their newly gotten toy, they explored their bodies cushioned with yoga mat and soft sand on the tent floor, and discovered newer surfaces, shapes, contours, and textures to touch, feel, play with, and take in. Through all this the baby had gone to sleep. The breeze slowed, the waves quietened, the tent became still, the heart beats became slower, synchronized and a lot dampened; the cool-down mode had set in. Drenched in sweat as if the tent was fitted with a shower that had been turned on, water droplets were coalescing on their exposed bodies and running down like little rivulets along their body valleys and ravines into the mat and sand like stormwater winding its way down on a hilly terrain after a thunderstorm. The man and woman, now in a tight embrace and entwined, were still. The only sign of life was their slow breathing, matching the gentle breeze, and its rustle on the tent, and the now-subdued heartbeats tuned to the much quieter beating of the waves on the shore.

The little girl playing outside all by herself walked in abruptly to check in. She closed and opened her eyes a couple of times to see better inside the tent. Her eyes took in the scene. Her little sister was quietly sleeping in a corner and her parents were entwined oblivious of her presence. They reminded her of the sight of two snakes mating which she had loudly proclaimed as a two-headed snake in a snake park recently. She remembered that her parents had just laughed and said nothing. After surveying the scene, she went outside to continue playing with her beach toys on the sand.

 

 

I was standing waist-deep in the water amongst the waves which were starting to beat against me more vigorously. Alternately, I would jump up or dive in and scramble back up to avoid getting smacked and slammed on my face by the tall waves. The water was warm, which was nice. But the Sun was beginning to scorch my balding head. In between tall waves, when the sea was relatively calm, I felt as though a convex lens was concentrating and focusing the Sun’s rays on my shining scalp. Wiping the top of my head with my right palm I felt the burnn. I pulled out a soft cap from the hip pocket of my swim trunk, put it on my head, and tightened it in place. I felt better protected now. That is when I heard a hearty laugh, and a giggle.

Two teen girls were standing just twenty or thirty feet away from me, bubbling up and going under the water off and on. Even when I wasn’t directly looking at them and observing them, I was aware of them; they were in my field of vision. You easily have more than two-thirds of a full globular vision, upward of two hundred and forty degrees. And these two pretty teens were in a much narrower visual space. Wearing blue and yellow two-piece swimsuits, their busts well above the fuzzy, wavy water level, their hips and legs immersed and invisible in the churning waters, they seemed tuned into me. Their brown hair was cut short to the upper neckline. They looked to me like identical twins. I had observed them briefly and was aware of their presence in the vicinity as they horsed and danced around the waters and waves.

There is this unwritten rule of beach etiquette. As folks are in different states of undress you never want to fix your gaze on someone for long if they are in close proximity. You can ogle at people in long-shot ranges but not at close-up lengths. You can also shift your gaze, and bring in your imagination, fantasies, and memories. I fancied the teens as mermaids as I had seen only their tops, and my memories brought up and played before me scenes of fish in translucent and vibrant colors of the rainbow swimming in aquarium waters. My mind also wafted to my teen years, and my teen friends cavorting on the beach decades earlier.

You look just like our dad, came the abrupt pronouncement just above the beach ruckus, the beating of the waves, and the breeze shuffling across the waters, the waves, and the sandy shore. I initially thought folks were talking amongst themselves but I was also aware that only the two teen girls were in my vicinity. I looked directly at them; their gazes were planted straight on my face.

The teen who was closer waded towards me, took a dip and blobbed up. The Sun was getting hotter. You look exactly like our dad, she repeated, now her eyes directly tuned to mine. As if in chorus, the other teen who had also moved closer towards me, chimed in - OMG, you do look exactly like our dad. Nobody had said anything like that to me through my AARP years, or earlier. A shiver passed through my body, and in spite of the warmed-up waters and the hot Sun, I became aware of goose bumps forming all over my body.

The three of us were standing in close-up range in a triangular formation. If I moved one step forward and extended my arm, I would be able to reach and touch them. With her large wet light-brown eyes, lashes matted, pupils dilated, the blue swimsuit girl stared at me in disbelief. Her eyes felt like search beams illuminating and peering around my face. With a mischievous expression mixed with naughtiness and mock she commanded like children often do, you look-alike dad, take off your cap and do us both a favor. Instantly, I yanked off my cap and deposited it back in my swim trunk pocket. OMG, you look exactly like a 3-D printed copy of our dad. You sure should be his identical twin. Saying this she let out a nonchalant laugh. As if in a chorus the yellow swim-suited girl joined in, I can’t believe it, you do look exactly like our dad, for real.

The waves had nudged them closer. Now I would be able to touch them if I simply extended my arm. I was suddenly reminded of an episode from my earlier life. I was in my third year of medical school. Two of my cousins were visiting my family, and they had brought along their little sisters aged five and six. I had just showered and wrapped myself in a bright yellow towel. The six-year-old suddenly lounged towards me and yanked the towel off me with a naughty look in her eyes. Somehow, I managed to hold on to it. Laughing, they started running away from me. I chased after them but they ran away into the garden outside.

Are you twins? I asked the blue girl who was standing closer to me. I know we look like twins, clones of each other; but she is my younger sister, barely by a year. She said this with a glint of sarcasm in her eyes and a mock expression on her face. Yes, I am her littler sister, the yellow girl added, wading closer towards me. Looking at both of them at very close range I couldn’t really tell them apart but I noticed that the blue girl was probably an inch or two taller. But how could I assume that the seabed was flat and level? A giant wave crashed into us, and all three fell face down into the sand. Scrambling, we tried to get on our feet. The blue girl extended her hand. I grabbed it while she pulled me up. Scrambling up, my gaze moved from one belly button to the other, first blue and then yellow. The shapes looked different - the blue was almost a perfect circle with a swirl inside; the yellow tended towards an oval with a crossed-out pattern resembling the Greek letter theta or the number zero crossed out. The differential told me they weren’t identical twins.

I suggested we move to my set of beach chairs. My wife was supposed to have joined me, but she hadn’t that morning. I gave the girls the extra towels I had. They dried themselves up and now wrapped in towels sat down on the beach chair. I sat down on the adjacent one. Looking at them from close range - their dark brown hair, now loosened, diffuse and spread out, eyebrows plucked, their large light-brown eyes on me, their torsos wrapped in blue and white striped beach towels, bare wet feet with sand sticking on them - the only difference I noticed was their toenails; one set of feet had blue-coated nails and the other set was painted yellow. I could distinguish them only by their feet; otherwise, they looked identical.

Strangely, both of them hadn’t bothered to paint their fingernails. I could easily see why; there wasn’t simply a need for it. When I pointed out the folded beach towels set earlier on the recliner, they had first pressed their hands on the towels simultaneously before picking them up to dry their bodies. Four symmetrical hands, blemishless, with water droplets sticking on their skin like dewdrops on flower petals, their pink nail beds gave their translucent nails with smooth shiny surfaces a pink glow. With the tips gently clipped, the ten pairs of nails with convex surfaces set side by side seemed like an elegant finger-art piece. I couldn’t help glancing at my yellowish-brown nails, crescent-shaped due to my old habit of nail chewing which I had terminated in third year of medical school when we started learning about clubbing of fingers. Mine looked clubbed at that time with the top nail margin sunken into the fingertips due to my nail-chewing habit. The clubbing was now history but the ugly crescenting of my nails still persisted. The contrast with the girls’ nails was telling.

Like an elementary school teacher, first discovering, and then labeling some kids as mischief makers, I noticed a glint of naughtiness and prankishness in both pairs of eyes. Turning to the blue girl I asked, can you show me a picture of your dad? She asked for my phone and quickly pulled up a couple of images of her dad. I peered into the phone. He seemed a decade younger; but I knew that you cannot easily guess the age of a person from a picture. He was balding, front and top with gray streaks of hair on the sides. His eyes were large, light-brown with a stare that came from directly looking at the camera; he had a mix of Mediterranean and European features. I would have guessed Turkey, Greece, or any other neighboring European country.

I don’t see much resemblance other than hair loss and graying, I said. And don’t gather your parents and start interrogating and asking tough questions simply for sighting me, I added. No, we won’t, they said in unison and started laughing. They quickly stood up, and dropped the beach towels on the chair. Waving goodbye to me, still laughing, and with shuffling blue and yellow steps on the sand, their wet swimsuits sticking to their bodies, their brown hair wafting in the breeze, chatting and laughing animatedly, they soon became specks of blue and yellow, a pair of blue and yellow butterflies disappearing into the sand, water, and sky beach-horizon. I was left standing and thinking and wishing - how nice it would have been if they were really my daughters.

Memory is a fuzzy database of your life experiences in parallel conversation with history and happenings in the world, both local and global. It is a personal collection, like your personal library of books, song albums or other stuff you have collected over the years. You do have a vague or general idea of the material possessions gathered throughout the course of your life. But you will know for sure only when you start looking for it. You may or may not find it; there is a possibility that you could have misplaced it. Likewise, memories come to life and are resurrected, even multiple times by a search or a trigger, during a conversation, or some other happening.

The rekindling of memories can occur during visits to places from your earlier years or people you grew up with. Casual conversations, bumping into an old friend or acquaintance, meeting an extended family member, reading an article or a story - any of these chance happenings can lead to a replay of slices of your past and make you relive bits, bytes, and short stretches of your old life.

Memories can also lead to discoveries and interesting traits of familiarity and recognition. Pattern matching and similarity detection may also give you an eerie feeling that you are reliving a segment of your past, a deja vu feeling. Memory and mind can latch onto a scene, an object, or a face with a sense of recognition and recapitulation which can eventually turn out to be real, or imagined.

It has to be a prank, a fun prank nonetheless, I thought. Even though I read it as what it really was - a teen prank - it left a delicious, and delectable feeling in me. The teen girls had likely come to the beach hoping to meet and interact with teen boys, party, and even get laid. Instead, they had chanced upon a balding graying man who probably reminded them of their dad in some strange way. The open sea, the measured turbulence of the waves, the blue canopy sky, the ever-present Sun occasionally playing hide and seek, and miles and miles of white sand had conspired with the bubbly teen girls to pull off this prank. Everything was calm, quiet, and fun with the measured churning of the blue sea waters.

It is not at all surprising that there is road rage and flight rage, but no beach rage. Also, there are plenty of bar brawls, but practically no beach brawls. The sea, sky, sand, waves, and the wind seemed to quieten agitated minds. It could change if the earth warms, the sea starts rising, and begins to gobble up the beaches like a giant tsunami with no plans to retreat.

The beach was full of life. Children of all ages played with sea water and sand. Men and women of different sizes, shapes, heights, and ages, with a spectrum of beach wear revealing more about their bodies than keeping them hidden, and caressed by the white sand, and warming blue waters with the Sun shining above them, seemed to be in no hurry for anything. They were engrossed in all sorts of activities - playing, swimming, sunning, meditating, reading, writing, chatting, eating, drinking, and even making love, or maybe getting pranked too. If there was a relaxed, and carefree paradise on earth it must be the beach, I thought.

 

 

On my way back home, I was sitting at the airport gate, my wife beside me, waiting for our flight to Nashville. A middle-aged man, with a French beard and closely cropped hair was sitting across from me staring into his laptop screen. A younger man, with a backpack, and holding a cup of coffee, walked in and sat near the older guy. My wife turned towards me and said, they look like brothers, sitting there together. I turned towards them, looked over one, and then the other. But I wasn’t convinced their resemblance crossed a certain threshold to label them siblings. A few minutes later a woman walked in, rolling a suitcase, and sat near the young guy. Pulling out a book from her handbag she started to read. Looking at her and again at the two men, I thought she could pass off as the sister of either of them. Maybe, it is just the design and layout of the human face with a pair of eyes and ears, symmetrically placed, with a central nose and mouth thrown in the mix which makes strangers appear related. The human face is indeed a mystery—a special, and magical fine art. Like beauty, resemblance and relatedness could just be in the eyes, and by extension, in the mind, brain, and life experiences of the observer, or simply even a prank, or a hoax of nature. I was just fine with that sweet prank possibility.

As the plane was taking off from the Miami airport runway, I looked outside from my window seat for one last, and hopefully lasting image of the beach below. The Sun was setting, spreading and scattering its golden rays from the far side illuminating the confluence of the blue sea, white sand, and bluish-white sky with streaks and blurbs of red, orange and pink. Pressing my forehead to the glass I squinted my eyes for a glimpse of the parting beach scene.

A throng of people - men, women, and children frolicking along the land-sea border - with the waves teasing, tempting, encroaching, caressing, kissing, and even occasionally thrashing the white sand. Some folks were collecting their belongings, and packing up, while sorting and storing the memories of the day for a possible future recall. The plane rose higher and higher and my subjects became smaller and smaller, eventually becoming dots and dashes, and merging with the sea and sand. Soon the plane reached cruising altitude, and only blurbs of white clouds were visible below. One cloud in particular looked like a big bag of cotton candy I saw a boy holding and admiring earlier on the beach. I closed my eyes and suddenly I saw a girl of seven or eight years running on the beach holding a bunch of large pink balloons flying high, their strings straight and taut like long thin pencils, as though they were trying to get away from her. For a moment I thought the balloons were going to pull the little girl up over the waters for a joy balloon glide. And then I saw the balloons fly away from the little hand holding them, with a sudden jerk. Distraught, the girl stretched out her hand and jumped up and down trying to reach the receding, braided and knotted string tail without success. Soon the balloons were little pink specks in the white cloud. It wasn’t clear to me whether I was still on the beach, on a plane, or some strange magical space in between.

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