The one good thing about a week-long lousy bout of
viral fever is that one can look forward to getting better and hale if not ‘hearty’.
This was the worst flu/fever I’ve ever had with intense body aches. I’d been
navigating the roads and public transport with great caution, I didn’t get wet
in the rains but the health gods still curled their lips and said, ‘trying to
be a little too careful, aren’t we?’ and so I guess I got a viral-whatever. I
had visions of hundreds of angry ghosts hitting me on the head, on my eyeballs
and insides with miniature hammers and tongs. I merely felt like an in-pain
vegetable and I was utterly hopeless, yet again, at reaching out to God through
the clamp of physical pain. I couldn’t even hear fimh. I certainly had nothing intelligent
to say. I hope I burnt off a little more of bad karma, if nothing else. The only
thing I was glad of for the first time in a year and a half was that nobody
gave me prompt appointments over the last week.
I did have rather interesting dreams every now and
then though. Not at the beginning. At the beginning it was mottled grey and
splotchy. And even the very hopeful dreams coloured in soft rose and grayish tinges
became black and puffed and all wrong as I dreamchased and with grim determination
feeling that I was on the right route. I was sure I was right. I didn’t turn
out to be right at all. I was all wrong. I made every possible blunder in the
dream and I woke up with a blooming headache and horrible bodyaches. But what
made me miserable was not the physical ache – it was my failure. It was my
abysmal failure in the dream when I was so sure I was right that made me feel
even more in pain and utterly dejected. But after three nights of nastiness –
the good dreams swung in. One dream came in when I reached the first bout of
‘getting better’ in almost exactly a week. I was half-napping in the late
afternoon and there was a surreal light dappling through the bed-room windows
and I was dreaming of mountains and hills with a smile on my face and in the
dream I was thinking that the best of British, German, French and Bengali men
were luminescent-ly intelligent, furiously cantankerous, strangely humourous while
being great eternal romancers. Having the thought in the dream – I imagined I
had chanced upon a glorious nugget of knowing and felt bathed in a precious
laughing light. I could then see a hillside with a gathering of such gentlemen.
I was thinking then that it would be such a thrill to be invited to such a
gathering for afternoon tea and there I was! I had actually been invited. I
could see one gentleman very clearly – he looked very young and rather from an
old photo. It was up on the hills. I was smiling in my sleep by then but had
most surely woken up from the dream. Yet another dream harkened back to ghosts
and gods from monsoons and springs past. There was Meera and Krishna and Meera
writing a poem of how others could go find knowledge, intellect and look for learning;
of how others could go be very wise and wizened; of how others could go count
the number of ways they had done good works and deeds in life – all she would keep
count of was the number of times Krishna stole glances from her on the sly,
laughed his laugh with her, did tease her, joust with her and make merry with
her – that’s all she’d keep count of. I surfaced from that dream and was
reluctantly smiling over it. I couldn’t argue with Meera. I was reminded of
fimh who had once carefully rattled off a ditty about a ‘bichchu meye’ (‘imp of
a girl’) while I had listened in wide-eyed wonder but had forgotten to hastily
scribble out the ditty for later times. The ditty got lost in the vast space of
mahakaal – the memory however did not.
The sleep dreams that I sometimes like the best in their
relation to living life that is are ones that somehow seem to tweak or influence the
future or somehow give me some reason to be mystified without clearing too much
of the air but somehow let me make some quantum jump into the future. It hasn’t
happened all that often obviously through the course of one human life…but maybe
a couple of more times wouldn’t be too much to ask for before the boat sets off
for the last time around the bend. I have done things and even a few fun things
too…but I and the things done have not overlapped like a perfect snowflake as
yet.
I had more to write about for this one but I’ll
let this one be.
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