Everyone was sitting in the drawing room that day, waiting for me to come. I think at some point they just got tired of waiting for me and cut by birthday cake, at which point I landed and joined in the singing of ‘Happy Birthday’ for myself. That was what I dreamt about… My birthday. My parents were there, a few of my friends, my uncle and aunt, they were all there. I remember that at some point in the dream I exclaimed,”Ah! This is the perfect birthday… with your family”.
I don’t know how it would have been if I had just dreamt about the lot of us sitting in the drawing room and celebrating my birthday – singing songs, chatting, laughing, eating – but inside the blessed drawing room.
After cutting the cake we got up to leave, stepped out of the house and were suddenly walking on a muddy path, some kind of kachha rasta. The terrain had drastically changed, from the mechanical way of roads and cars to a small path winding through a valley surrounded by hills and greenery. The landscape looked like it was painted a fresh green of the trees right after the first rain, with patches of brown in the hills. In the middle of all this was a dull brown muddy path that rain through this valley. We kept walking down the path, talking to each other. The conversations went as they did, but we kept shifting our spaces – sometimes sitting in the drawing room, sometimes walking down that path in the valley. Only the spaces changed. The people, the conversations, they all remained the same. One of the conversations was quite amusing. A friend of mine, in order to ‘gift’ me on my birthday, actually decided to shave off his beard and get a haircut! His moustache was trimmed to look like that of Chaplin. He was obviously looking a lot cleaner – and that was the crux of conversation for about 15 mins (or so the time span then felt)! But, he was carrying, for some strange reason, a wig and a fake beard and moustache that he put on later because of reasons unknown to me.
Once all of this finished, we had reached the end of the path. Throughout this walk, my eye looked around as a camera would pan right to left. The valley overflowed with the freshness of the green and the smell of the mud just wet from the rain. And in the distance, the mountains stood out boldly adding beautiful character to the landscape. If I were to put it in the language of a film, this what it was like… We were walking down the path and talking about something. The audio remains the same, but the visual changes to the same people sitting in the drawing room. The two are intercut to complete the conversation. The scene returns to the people walking in the valley, cut with a shot of the hills and the valley as the camera pans from right to left on either side of the subject, giving a point of view of the subject… :) And now I think I’ll pass my film paper.
But to get back to the dream, at the end of the path there was a stone structure. There were no walls to this structure. Just a small setup with pillars. The base of this structure was rather complex. There were 4 or 5 steps leading up to this structure from the path. Then a climb down of another 4-5 steps. These steps led to a small stone panel that was at the centre of the base. The panel was surrounded by shallow, cold water that ran through. The water came from a river named Kailash… So you could just sit there and wet your feet in the water. And if you were to look around, you’d see the landscape as it was. This structure was made of a peculiar dull red colour that stood out against the green of the valley. It was beautiful beyond what the senses could register.
Slowly I found out that this was where India and Pakistan met. The only marker of spaces was this stone structure that stood in the middle of everything. There was no other line of separation – no barbed wires, or walls or any kind of boundary. The two seemed to merge in that valley. I turned around to my mother and said, “Amma, if there’s no border here, we can go into Pakistan, right? Let’s go!”, to which she immediately replied, “No, no. We mustn’t go. Somebody will catch us because we are not from Pakistan”. Straight down from this structure the path went along to an uphill climb, and at some point met one of the hills, behind which there was another hill. From where I sat, it seemed like the path and the two hills met at one point. Suddenly, I saw an old man climb up the path. He was wearing a white shirt, black pants and had hair that was white as snow. I felt that he was someone I knew, but he looked like nobody I knew. I never got to see his face, he wasn’t with us when we were walking, but I still felt I knew him.
Suddenly I had a thought that, for some reason I can never understand, made me feel at peace. I thought to myself, that this man is going to the heavens. He was walking up the path and he seemed to go up the mountains where there was a feeling of happiness and completion. It felt like heaven, but I know it wasn’t. I thought to myself that that’s where I have to go and that’s where I can be most happy. I got up and started walking towards those hills. But my mind suddenly wandered, and I walked about instead feeling happier looking at the green of the trees around me. I came back pretty soon because my mother had told me that I was not supposed to go there. But when I came back, I felt a sudden surge of happiness, as though I’d gone the closest possible to the old man who had walked up the path.
There was suddenly a building on my right when I came back. I spotted it much later because it was covered with creepers and plants that grew all around it. I went into the building. It had only one floor that could be reached after climbing a little upward slope on a hill. I went inside and there was a series of damp and creaky half open doors in a labyrinthine manner. Each half open door let to the other, and finally to the last one. Which overlooked an open air theater in the middle of the valley, covered with moss and trees. The open air theater reminded me of a place on the campus where I lived. It’s a place I’ve not visited in very long. It’s the place where met a lot of musicians, where I discovered a lot of new music. But this place, that I saw now, was very different from what it was. It reeked of decadence, and felt abandoned. I did want to stay longer, but a feeling of closure seemed to be coming over me. Suddenly I heard someone’s voice and I ran back and saw a bunch of young girls run out as they were giggling. The place made me feel very uncomfortable, so I quickly got out of the building.
This is the story of my dream last night. As I remember it.
