Muriel has a cabana at the beach. She rents it from the city of Elsewhere at $20 a month for the summer. She invites me to go with her one breezy Wednesday in June, along with her six-year-old grandson, Mikey.

We get there at 11.30am. Her annual payment of the cabana fee includes a parking spot, which is a good thing because the place is filling up with summer vacationers.

The cabanas have been built onto a long wooden platform, one flight up from the sandy floor of the arrival area. Five hundred of them are available on hire. Each space is perhaps four-foot wide, six-foot deep, with a bench inside. There are hooks to hang towels from and a couple of shelves. The wood is unpainted and weathered, but sturdy. At one end of the platform, there are showers and toilets.

The little space has been shut for a whole year and spiders have made full use of the facilities. Muriel doesn’t allow Mikey or me to enter until she has swept out the dust and cobwebs with the broom she has brought for just this purpose. I’ve brought a small bag with my towel, a change of dry clothes and sandwiches. She’s brought everything else: three folding chairs, a beach umbrella, a hamper of sand toys for Mikey and a deep basket of food.

Mikey strips down to his trunks, while the two of us older ladies wear loose shifts over our bathing costumes. No way we’re going to compete with the curvaceous beauties cavorting in the sun wearing tiny triangles of cloth and string! Despite the bright sun, the water is co-o-o-old. All three of us chirp loudly as we wet our feet in the foaming surf. Meanwhile, all around us, there are children and adults leaping about in the chilly sea, shrieking and exhilarated.

There are dozens of tight young bodies on show, but very many more mature physiques, lumpy, dangling in thick folds and covered in freckles. It’s oddly comforting to see so much ungainly flesh. Most are still ivory-pale from the winter, while Muriel, Mikey and I are amongst the few brown sugars in the crowd. The little boy begins work on a sandcastle but gets only as far as one turret before it’s time for us to eat Muriel’s enormous picnic lunch. We go back up to the cabanas for sandwiches, chips, two kinds of salad and fruit. I’ve made cookies for dessert. We eat our fill before returning to the beach for a long, leisurely stroll.

Up and down we go, walking gingerly on the shell-strewn beach alongside hundreds of others. Seagulls wheel overhead, swooping down amongst the brightly clad strollers, swimmers and sun-bathers, looking for food. By late afternoon the clouds move in once more. The wind scrapes goosebumps our skins. “I’m cold!” complains Mikey. We buy ourselves pink puff-balls of cotton candy before locking the beach equipment into the cabana. We head home with the sun and salt air in our hair and fine grey sand between our toes.

( Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, tells us tales of her parallel life in Elsewhere, US, in this fortnightly series; marginalien.blogspot.in )

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