The dream child

He went through the first flush of his consciousness as a

one-year old infant in the cloth-cradle. Existence
baffled him .The snugness of all-around cloth was an
extension of his fetal existence. Did he really exist?
Was he a real physical self ? The physical world
smothered him. Did he not exist in Somebody’s dream ?
This Somebody, unphysical and dream-like, was enacting
a dream, of which he who was himself unreal and a
creature of an ethereal world, was a part .At the age
of ten he moved about in the physical world uncertain
of himself trying to blame his existence on the
Somebody who appeared to have made him the Chief
Protagonist of the dream-play he seemed to be enacting.
What if He stops dreaming bringing an end to this
unreal existence ?

He became acutely aware, at the age of ten, that he was not

the special entity he thought he was. By then he had
developed a world-view ,a fragmented one, based upon an
amorphous mixture of the half-logic of the workaday world
and a skewed intellectual grasp of the Reality. He had to
reconcile several irreconcilables .If there was a cause,
there had to be an effect but what was the cause of the
cause? If the universe existed, there had to be a Creator
But who or what constituted the genesis? The finite mind
grasped a scheme of things where a cause-and-effect
sequence seemed inherent. In that dream-state where he
existed as a chief protagonist of the dream-play of
Somebody, did these physical laws ,which make the cause-
and-effect phenomenon an inexorable reality, have any
sanctity? Could the human mind not grasp a reality beyond
the Cause? The human logic, itself a product of the finite
mind, seemed to suggest a beyond-logic which permitted a
scheme of things where there could be cause without effect
and effect without cause.
What bugged his puny mind much more was the existence of
dualities . His mind grappled with hundreds of dualities
like yes-no, good-bad, black-white possibilities. Did not a
beyond-logic suggest a third, a fourth possibility existing
in the cosmic scenario? His dream-like existence flowed
through the arid plains of intellectual speculation. He
continued to believe that this Somebody in whose dream he
existed was laughing at him for the absurdities of his own
small little dreams. Could there be dreams within dreams?
Once, at the age of 15,he dreamed of the Dreamer ,in a
state of delirium .It was an existence-erasing dream as
though the end of the world had arrived and nothing seemed
to matter. Engulfed in the swirling waters of dark soul-
death he cried out in oxygen-starved pain, an excruciating
pleasure-pain that stupefied his physical existence.

He dreamed of many things. Of venomous snakes, of criss-

crossing planes and of wingless flights. During recurrent
bouts of head-cold he went through hallucinations. He felt
he was in the midst of casuarina trees on the Kalingapatnam
beach with the wind buzzing through their needle-leaves.
His senses ached with exquisite pleasure. He started
actually looking forward to colds. At times he had violent
stomach upsets caused by eating raw mangoes brought down
from the trees with a pebble. The mango-smelling pukes
filled the air with malodorous disgust. Running eucalyptus-
smelling colds elevated the senses and brought an unearthly
sharpness to them. At night the cold winter air bit into
the fever-fresh skin filling the vapor-opened pores with
ecstasy. When the little typhoid germ struck him,at the age
of nineteen, he hoped for a miracle that there would be a
catharsis of his soul .Miracles never happened in his life.
For that matter nothing ever really happened in life.

At the age of ten, lying on a string-cot in a

claustrophobic room he experienced a fear-pain in the
belly, a paralyzing fear of the unknown as pale shadows
stretched across the closing walls and grotesque tail-
dropped lizards crawled on the wooden beams of the thatched
roof. The same fear gripped him when he passed through a
deserted street under a diabolic tamarind tree which housed
multitudes of suicide-ghosts who seemed to be calling out
in eerie silence .It was the same fear which gripped him
when the stomach-churning spirit-smell pervaded the
government hospital when he was waiting for his turn to see
the doctor. At night he had his gut-wrenching nightmares in
which he saw himself in strange diabolic blood-soaked pits
covered with foul-smelling excrescence.

He had his small redemptions . In the early hours he went

out ,bare-footed , into the morning-smelling bed of unkempt
grass to pluck fragrant flowers . Leaves covered with
droplets from the night’s dew touched his bare skin. In the
half-dried river-bed a tiny stream snaked through the brown
tingling sand. He squatted in the muddy waters to let the
warm-cool water flow over his body and as he looked at the
distant mist-covered Salihundam hills he conjured up
visions of the re-birth of the lost civilization which lay
buried under the scraggy hills. In the rain-moist coconut
plantations of Uddanam stately coconut trees danced against
the Bay of Bengal ocean-breeze as his bare feet squished
into the sea-washed beach.

He carried on through life’s journey ,half -aware and half-

knowing .Awareness stifled him .Knowledge suffocated him.
In that knowing-futile moment he died a thousand delicious
deaths .Each time he died he ceased to exist as himself ,
the dream-protagonist of the dream-play in Somebody's cruel
dream . Each time a different he sprang up from out of the
miserable putrefying corpse of his earlier oxygen-drained
dream-existence .Once at the age of ten he lay on the soft
under-bed of a bullock-cart as it it slowly wended its way
up the dirt track and imagined the excruciating pain that
certainly awaited him at the end of the journey. There ,in
Ampolu village,the women were waiting to poke wicked fun at
ten-year old boys in half-pants during the marriage
celebrations .Women in moth-ball-smelling kanjivarams would
be singing funny songs mocking at your pedigree
(What great people
These nilamraju family are!
They go on beating their drums
Announcing that they demand attention)

He thought of the younger sister of the bride who would

come so dangerously close to him entreating him to sing the
latest film song. Silly girl , she would sit on the edge
of the string cot deliciously arching over him, while he
ceased to exist. He remembered with a blush how he had sat
very close to the bride and the bridegroom in the palanquin
carried by four turban-wearing bearers who shouted into the
still air rhythmic' koho kohokko' as if complaining to the
gods.

He still remembered the kohl-eyed daughter of the

neighborhood patriarchal farmer in Vanitamandalam who
thought he was a stylish city-boy who had a thing or two in
him. When he showed off his wisps of broken film music he
always had a plateful of roasted cashews placed before him.
Another time this termagant of a woman,who had broken off
with her husband, seemed to have a crush on him . Her eyes
were pools of defiant sadness and as the pigeons roosting
in the coop outside moaned silently he thought he felt a
deathly chill in her attitude towards him, a slowly
creeping shadow on her smooth exterior. She suffocated him
and made him weep. She enjoyed every bit of it. The earthen
pots were piled one upon the other on the cow-dung-smeared
floor and behind them, unknown to the residents, lurked
dangerous eight-legged spiders one of which killed his
cousin, Roopa.Yes.It was this very species of the spider
which injected deadly venom into the victim. There she lay
on the hot river-bed of the Vamshadhara with her eyes
closed and unmindful of the low plaintive wail of her
grief-stricken mother who had hoped that her daughter would
somehow come back to life if they delayed the lighting of
the pyre. It was her fondest hope that the same spider
which had bitten her daughter on the stomach would come
from somewhere and breath life back into her.

It was in the narrow bamboo-walled kitchen of this house

that this lady, sister of his mother, who had spent a major
part of her life. She knew nothing except pure crystals of
love. When she lit the three-stone stove, smoke filled the
the thatched house mixed with delicious fry-smells and long
conversations ensued over sizzling pakodas.The afternoons
became hot as the day lengthened over the Vamshadhara
sands. The lone boat brought stray villagers, returning
from the Gara marketplace ,whose bare feet burned on the
hot sands as they climbed the sand banks. Her smoke-
reddened eyes had shadows of insanity harking back to her
initial years of married life when she filled the walls of
her in-laws' house with bloody scrawls. Her eyes flashed as
she sang, hysterically, satirical lyrics on her mother-in-
law set to taut music. It was the same sweet voice which
had earlier sung

(There is no comfort
Without tranquility
O Lotus-eyed one )

When she sang the sound came from her deep throat like the
sad caw of a one-legged crow perched on the tamala tree.
She had experienced the heart of darkness. The dark rings
around her eyes betrayed the barrenness of her soul which
had silently suffered the excruciating pain of having to
watch her youngest daughter Shanta walk out on her .Her own
tranquility vanished when Shanta struck up a lustful
,defiant relationship with a peasant's son with absolutely
no chance of the relationship fructifying into marriage.
Shanta had suffered the banality of her existence silently
till the peasant's son came along. This man-boy aroused her
deeply making her forget her brahminical superiority. His
touch exploded on her shattering her girl-woman body which
submitted itself willingly to his unbrahmin maleness. Soon
enough his touch had lost its magic and in a month's time
both of them tired of each other. It was by then too late
and Shanta had to walk out of the bastion of her
brahminical home into an unknown future.