the spot

The whole kampung was going to the sea for the day, and the relatives from across the water were coming too. I had decided I was going to get us the best spot on the whole beach.

There is a best spot. There is always a best spot. It is the patch of sand under the one tree, near the rocks where the little crabs live. Not too far from the water, but high enough that the tide does not come up and eat your things while you swim. Everybody wants it. And it goes to whoever gets there first. So I made my whole family get up while it was still dark. I dragged the mat down to the beach in the grey early light. I was the first person on the entire beach, and I planted myself on the best spot like an egg on a nest, before a single other family had arrived.

Then I had to hold it. That was the whole job. Hold the spot until my family arrives. Easy. It is not easy. An empty patch of good sand is the most wanted thing in the world, and everybody who comes onto that beach wants to put something down on it.

A dog wanted it. A dog trotted up and decided that my spot was its spot, and we had a long discussion about this, the dog and I, which I won, but only just, and not with dignity.

A kite seller wanted to set up his stand on it. Three different families came over the morning, all eyeing my big empty patch of sand.

"Is anyone sitting here," they asked, very politely.

"My whole family," I said. "All of them. Any minute now." I said it while sitting completely alone on a large empty patch of sand, looking like a small girl who had been left behind by everyone she had ever known.

Aiman had come down early too, and the moment his feet hit the sand he found a business. He could not sell the sand. Even Aiman cannot sell sand. But he could sell the shade. The one tree made shade, and Aiman appointed himself keeper of the shade, with a rate. The rate went up every time a cloud crossed the sun and the shade got worse. So the worse the shade got, the more he charged for it, which is a very silly way to sell shade. But Aiman never charges what a thing is worth. He charges what he thinks you will pay.

I held the spot through all of it. I sat on it. I lay on it, spread out, to make myself bigger than I am. When a family of strangers tried to edge their mat onto the corner of it, I told them my whole family was coming, all of them, any minute. I said it so fiercely that they took their mat and their cool box and their grandmother and moved off down the beach. Frightened away from an empty patch of sand by one small girl and a rolled-up tikar. By mid-morning I was the undefeated champion of a piece of ground nobody else was allowed to want.

Kavi was my lookout. Kavi is the loudest one on the whole beach, so I sent him up the sand to watch for my family and shout the moment they arrived. And Kavi shouted the moment families arrived. All families. Any family.

"THEY ARE HERE," shouted Kavi.

They were not. He announced the wrong family three separate times, sending me leaping up off my spot to wave both arms at total strangers. They did not know me. They did not want to know me. They edged away from the small waving girl as fast as they politely could.

And the family took their time. Of course they did. I had got everyone up in the dark, and a family you have got up in the dark does not then hurry, on principle. They had breakfast. Somebody could not find a slipper. The baby had to be changed, and then changed again, immediately. So I held my spot through the whole slow morning, alone, getting hotter and sandier, defending an empty square of the best sand on the beach against the entire world. The people I was holding it for ate their roti at their own speed, a whole kampung away.

Then the relatives came, with Syafiq.

Syafiq is my cousin, from the Singapore side, across the Causeway. They came down the beach in a neat little group, a bit late, a bit fancy, with proper beach things, a folding chair, an umbrella that twists into the sand, a cool bag with a zip and ice in it. And Syafiq stood at the edge of all of it, holding the cool bag, not quite knowing what to do with himself. Where he lives, you have to book a spot at the beach before you go. Here was a whole shouting kampung spilled across the sand, with a dog, and a shade economy, and a lookout warning the wrong families, and no plan at all. He watched the kampung kids run and shriek and fall over, and stayed where he was, at the edge, holding the bag.

And while I was busy guarding my perfect spot from dogs and kite sellers and strangers, the sea did a thing I had not planned for. I looked up, and the tide was in. It had crept all the way up the beach while my back was turned, and it had quietly changed where the best spot even was. My spot, the high one under the tree, was suddenly a long hot walk from the water. Down by the rocks where the crabs are, where the gang had drifted, the tide had opened up a whole new stretch of firm cool sand. A better spot than my best spot. The sea had made it while I sat guarding the old one like a crown.

So I let it go. I stood up off my perfect spot, the one I had got up in the dark for, the one I had fought a dog over. It was just a patch of sand now, too high and too far from the sea. And there was Syafiq, still at the edge of everything, holding his cool bag.

So I took the bag off him and dropped it on my old abandoned spot, where it could guard the sand all it liked, and I marched him down onto the new good ground with the gang.

"Come on," I said. "The crabs are down here. You have to be quick."

And he came. A wave got him almost at once, a proper soaking. He came up gasping, and then laughing. After that he was just another wet kampung kid in the sea, sandy and shouting and falling over, the cool bag forgotten up on the dry sand where I used to have the best spot in the world.

The gang took him over completely. Kavi taught him the kampung way to catch a small crab, which is to shout at it. It does not work. Syafiq did it anyway, shouting at a crab in the shallows in his good shirt. Ah Wei gave him half a bun out of a wet pocket. Divya told him, correctly, that he was holding his hands all wrong, and he held them wrong some more, delighted to be told. Nobody asked him where he was from.

I sat on the family mat in the end, the new spot, the good one the tide had made while I was not looking. I watched the gang in the water with Syafiq in the middle of them, soaked to the hair, shouting about a crab. The best spot on the whole beach was a patch of empty sand up the slope, with a cool bag sitting on it, guarding nothing. I did not want it back.