She is slowly losing her consciousness. Tired and numb, she is about to give up. As the water gradually gets darker, she begins to see some arbitrary experiences from her life in the form of randomly changing images in her mind.
The first time she tried to ride a cycle. She had fallen so badly on the side path. All the kids nearby were laughing. Had she given up then? Or had she ignored the laughter and instead focused on what she needed to do? She remembers her regular early morning practices and the untiring effort she had put in before she won the inter-school championship for cycling. She had not stopped then and went on to become the first woman cyclist from her state to participate in the National Championship.
And now, she is just letting it all go - gradually drowning in this overwhelming ocean, many miles away from the Eastern coast of South India in the Bay of Bengal. She regains her consciousness.
“No, I have to fight for my life. I need to fight!”
Her legs and hands spring into action in the form of a couple of quick strokes before she again feels shadowed by the gargantuan task ahead of her.
“It feels so much easier to just let go.”
She stops the strokes. And the drowning begins again. The images in her mind come back haunting her.
She remembers the scary experiences when she was lost while trekking in Northern Sweden on that cold winter night. She was without food and wild animals seemed to howl all around her. Had she given up then and stopped fighting to get back to the city? Or had she fought hard for 3 days trying to find her way back to the city?
She remembers the loving look on the face of her friends back at their hostel who had lost hope of her coming back alive. And how can she forget the amazing party they all had that night. It was the same party where she had found the love of her life.
She remembers him and again her consciousness brings her back to reality. It is complete darkness now. And she understands that the she is facing the biggest challenge of her life right now. A million thoughts jam her mind but she knows that only her courage and perseverance can save her and take her back to that comfortable familiarity of her home. They are waiting for her to come back home. Her 2 years old daughter is waiting for her lullabies.
“I have to get back. To my home. There is no other way.”
All that she holds dear in this world seem to transform into an invisible force and starts building inside her. The last 2 minutes, in which she had slipped on the ship deck with her head hitting hard on the iron rails and consequently had fallen down deep into the ocean, seem like an eternity to her.
And then she starts to fight back. Just like so many of us have done an uncountable number of times. She fights for her life and make hard desperate strokes in that dark water. Her hands and legs doing everything they can to get her back to the surface. In those fighting moments, she represents the entire humanity and its never-ending undying spirit of moving, forward. A part of her knows she will be back to her innocent daughter before it gets too late with a brave life experience to tell. An experience which would seem like a courageous story to her daughter, and which would be told ever after in future in so many different forms.