Dreaming

It is difficult to dream nowadays. Either you are tired—so it is easy to sleep or you are too busy with no time for yourself—specially if your professional practice is linked to your mobile. Dreaming requires time and space and it is difficult to get that specially if you are a husband, father, uncle, brother,honorary president or vice president etc. Dreaming requires a mood, and an ambience(how hackneyed has this word become!!). More important, it requires a blend, a cocktail of sudden silences and a wandering mind.

That suddenly happened this evening. Ranjana. and I had suddenly decided to go for a walk downstairs. Pluto cavorted in circles. The lawn was curiously empty. The traffic sounds wafted in from afar. A distance away, sounds of an exciting badminton game could just be heard. A lonely jet blinked its way across the dark Kolkata sky. Pluto had become strangely reticent and sat quietly on a chair. The green grass of the lawn was split by swathes of light from the street lamps. My mind began to wander in jagged lines across the day’s events.

I was the 8 year old boy walking along Puri beach. The warm moist sand was clinging to my toes. The foam of a receding wave percolated through my toe clefts. The evening sea breeze ruffled through my hair.My cousin stood looking at the restless sea surface. My sedate sister looked up at the sky catching the last rays of a sinking sun. My Father and Mother had paused for a moment to look back at us. My Mashi and Meshomasai stood silhouetted with a returning fisherman. Here in the heart of Kolkata , this scene from four decades back, etched in a strange receptacle of my memory box suddenly floated up.

Both my parents have passed on as have Mashi and Meshomoshai. My cousin has changed irrevocably and my sister is here but not here. But the salt spray tasted the same now as ever before.

The mobile phone rang. Pluto barked. A particularly loud horn blast from an irate lorry driver shattered the silence. NOW had returned with a vengeance. But at least, even if for a short while , I felt the power of a returning memory caught irrevocably in the cobwebs of time.

This link below will give the appropriate song by Kumar Shanu for the occasion.

http://www.box.net/shared/odoj1b6qdx