Behind her the Sri Lankan woman dragged what looked like a black plank nearly as long as herself and nearly as wide, but with a round cylinder seemingly strapped along about a quarter of its underside, scraping in the dark, wet sand. By the mark it was leaving it appeared to be very heavy, but it didn’t seem to bother the woman as she gently picked it up and started folding it up. Actually it was like it was folding itself in her hands. After a moment the woman, who was about the same height as Sowmya’s mother and older sisters, was left holding something that looked remarkably like the backpack her uncle carried when he went travelling, only black, as black as night, the girl thought, momentarily.

Turning, the Sri Lankan looked straight at Sowmya, who froze on the spot, utterly transfixed by the woman’s black eyes. The woman started walking slowly toward Sowmya until she stood over her, smiling gently, like Sowmya’s mother smiled at her.

“Hello,” said the woman whose name would be Preeti Parikh, “would you like to show me where the train station is?”

Sowmya did not compute that the woman’s hair was somehow already dry: in fact, so was the casual but exquisite sari Sowmya now saw the woman was wearing.

She merely said, “ok,” meekly, and climbed to her little feet.

* * *

“Mother! Mother! I saw one, I saw one!” shouted Sowmya, running back into the house an hour later.

“One what, puppy?” her mother asked patiently, not looking up from her needle and thread as she replaced a button on her second son’s school uniform.

Sowmya had walked in silence with the Sri Lankan all the way to the train station, where the lady had quietly requested and paid for a ticket all the way New Delhi.

“A Sri Lankan, Mumma! I saw a Sri Lankan. She swam over to India to go and live in New Delhi!”

Lifting her head with a patient smile as her daughter stood panting expectantly in front of her, Sowmya’s mother looked at her, and then down at the object in the girl’s hands.

Sowmya followed her mother’s stare down to the sari still clasped at her tummy, creased now with being carried in her scrunched up little hands for over an hour.

“Oh,” said Sowmya, crestfallen, “I found it.”

* * *

Though Sowmya would be one of only a handful of folks to see them walk ashore, there were, in fact, seven other strange people who made landfall that day in different places around the world.

People would have been unlikely, for example, to see the Chinese looking gentleman stepping out of the surf north of Jiaojiang at 5am, or the apparently Pakistani gentleman climbing up a wet, craggy rock shore and then walking to the deserted coastal road toward Karachi.