Mahler's Symphony No. 5

When I was four years old, I almost drowned. True story. I grew up in a little country off the Bay of Bengal. Every summer, we used to take weekend trips to the (in)famous Cox's Bazaar where the water was clear, the beaches were endless and the crustaceans left us plenty of souvenirs. It was just after monsoon season and we were basking in the sun which had reappeared after a three-week hiatus. My extended family (must have been at least forty of us) had commandeered an entire train (complete with engineers, cooks and ayahs) for the four-day adventure. When we got there, my cousin immediately scoped out the area and found an excellent sand bank a few hundred metres away, just past a hip-deep dip in the water. Of course, we all went out there. I remember it clearly: the sand was perfect for castle building; though the water kept eating up any of our progress, we just took it as a challenge to build faster. When that grew boring, I set about doing what I looked forward to doing every beach trip: collecting. This little bank was teeming with old conchs, tiny snails, sea shells, starfish and urchins. I filled my gunny sack to the brim.

Shortly after yet another cousin's castle tumbled into the water, a slight panic set in. The tide had risen around us without anyone really noticing, the sky getting darker and meaner. The hip-deep dip was now well over the head of my tallest uncle. The catch? Only two people in our entire party knew how to swim. Some background: the Bay of Bengal is known for its sudden storms and ferocious riptides. Hurricanes and tidal waves are a way of life for the coastal villagers that dot its shores. Its current easily swept away any but the strongest swimmers - and we had but two. My dad, thankfully, was (and is) a very capable swimmer. He made the decision to get the kids across first, then the adults. Being his only kid, I was the first to get hoisted to his shoulders, instructed to hold on - tightly now - to his still-long hair and told to not be scared. I wasn't scared. My papa was my hero.

I was wearing one of those bathing suits with a frivolous tutu around the waist. Wading through the water, I had thought it made me look like an underwater princess in a ballgown. Sitting on my dad's shoulders, with the waterline dancing about my knees, it suddenly looked much more like trailing seaweed. The silvery water, which had mere hours ago seemed like so much fun, was now dark and swirling, its clarity muddied by the sand my dad was kicking up in his wake. When we were about halfway, I felt my dad lose his footing - the dip was simply too deep for him to walk across. He told me we were going to play dolphin and that he would swim and I would ride him and wouldn't that be fun? and don't let go. I clutched his hair like a pair of reins. My dad began swimming.

There is no question that a riptide was in effect. I could feel it sucking at my legs and skirt, trying to separate me from my dolphin. I could see my dad swimming straight but moving diagonally. I could hear him using words he never used around me. Hold on, he kept saying, one arm grabbing at my leg, the other trying to pull us to shore. I was terrified of losing my grip but I was fascinated by this strange intense pull of water. It's a sensation I have striven to recapture ever since (the closest I've come is filling the bathtub with water and putting my fingers in the drain as it emptied - just enough to feel the pressure without blocking it entirely). I was giddy with excitement, fear and nerves - I think I may have been slipping into hysteria. It seemed like hours before my dad put his foot firmly on sand again - in reality, it was less than a minute. Within a few more minutes, my dad and my uncle had escorted everyone across and we went back to picnicking: we ate bhaji, biryani and chicken tandoori until we burst; I boiled my captured snails (gunny sack brought over courtesy of my cousin) in an empty cooking dish and later, we strung necklace after necklace as the sun set.

It was a day of great anticipation, of castles and hunting, of raucous screams. It was a night of campfire songs and full bellies, of stringing seashells by the seashore, of falling asleep safe in my mom's lap. But in between... in between was a murky, glittering interlude full of gravity and dark excitement, paralyzing fear and unexplainable yearning. In between was the tide which had threatened to sweep away all the happiness of the sand bank and the promise of the beach. In between I felt my father's strength and my mother's trepidation as though they were solid objects that willed me to keep a death grip on my dad's hair instead of giving into the temptation of drowning myself in the alluring world just beneath the surface. Just beneath.

Tonight, watching Benjamin Zander conduct the Toronto Symphony Orchestra through Mahler's heavily layered Symphony No. 5, it was as if I was reliving that day all over again. What a gift.