Death in the Sea

At the sea beach a green flag was hoisted to welcome the bathers, as it was full tide.

On the notice board it was written in chalk that tide would continue from 9 to 2 in the afternoon.

The beach was glittering with a brilliant sunshine. The water of the sea was soft and cool to the touch. The waves were breaking at a regular length of time; the dominant waves were body-length high, and when they soaked the bodies of the bathers what remained on their backs and chests was the indefinite terracotta of the salt line.

It was a huge crowd there on the beach, most of whom had come from Chittagong and outside Chittagong, to date with the sea on the Eid holidays.

The beach chairs were laid out on the beach and the colourful beach umbrellas were planted on the ground, giving a real tourist-resort look to Cox's Bazar beach life.

There were some busy bathers who rested in the chairs, while there were many more lazy onlookers just feasting their eyes on the dazzling sight of the sea.

And then death came, in the most unexpected fashion. About ten meters or so from where I, my wife and our 10-year old boy were bathing on the same day, at the same time, and in the same spot, there was a group of young bathers, all agile males, dipping and swimming in the sea. One of them suddenly raised a hue and cry saying that something like a human body had tried to trap his legs under the water.

The man clearly was unacquainted with the sea. Therefore, he was scared so much by that experience that he seemed to have lost all courage to continue his bath, but was pleading to everybody to go into that spot to check, where he thought he was touched by a human body.

The sea was behaving so marvelously that day that everybody around was deeply engrossed in negotiating the challenges of the rising waves denying any attention to his pleading.

But the wretched fellow was unmoved in his resolution and waded out of the water to inform the Yaseer Life Guard about what he experienced, who soon sailed two rescue boats onto the sea and in fact found out the body of the drowned young man, called Sagar (a Bangla word for 'sea'). The name, Sagar, now proved most ironic, as the sea had claimed his life that day leaving his parents, relatives and friends in a sea of unquenchable tears.

As soon as the incident of somebody being drowned spread on the beach the bathers at once started withdrawing themselves. Fear of death had gripped them. We also withdrew. As we were tracing back on the sand to the road, we had a glimpse of the drowned body being carried away to safety by the security guards. Sagar was bleeding in his mouth.

On the following morning, while still in Cox's Bazar, we read in a local vernacular about the sad death of Sagar. But the thing that surprised me was that the report falsely stated that Sagar died in the ebbing time. No, he died in full tide. He might have choked, he might have had a heart attack, or he might have simply lost his nerves seeing himself amidst the raging waves, but surely he didn't die because of the pull of the receding water back into the sea.