The Dream

I dream often these days. The nights are punctuated with sweat filled nightmares , not the sort that you dream in your childhood with a morbid terror , but more like viewing some tragedy from a bystander's view , detached , dry but filling your heart with slow seeping cold. Everytime I get up and sip water , tepid and laced with an iron taste . Most likely the strong dry iron taste of my distaste at having to go through something which has no basis except in some deep layers of my subconscious. The dreams don't tell me anything. They are small hazy images , blurring from virtual to real without any logic or reason. Like for instance , yesterday I dreamt of huge blood clots in funny irregular shapes all over , on the floor , on the walls , on the sofa chair . Sometimes during the day while dealing with routine mundane things of everyday living , they jumped up suudenly with a clear sharp focus . What was I aborting ? Something which had nestled deep within my heart , took shape , form and body but now was wanted no more. I never cried for it in my dream . It is now that when I am completely awake a keening wail rises silently , pushing all else towards the periphery. I laugh and talk and eat and do other thousand things which people do everyday , while the dream , the golden dream slowly aborts itself.

So love decays

I stand in all ugliness in the bottom of murakami's well . You draw a line , a brush stroke and the staircase opens up . The dream song marches ahead , climbs the stairs and vanishes into thin air. I had wanted to write sensuous love songs instead end up writing ugly stories which no one will read . The words will rot and spread their odour , sometimes , may be when they are still within my throat , in my mouth and have not yet traveled to the tip of my fingers , to come down sliding on the blue paper. They will rot , as must all things which are alive and then no more. So love decays.

Begin..one more time

Someone cleaves my head into two

and I remember the woman cutting grass with a sickle

such a whoosh all the time

I ask the old man to stop spinning the wheel

for a while

while I take a breath

take a long deep breath

and begin the day

Torn cloth memories

My mother says You cannot have a memory when you were two years old. My brother was born exactly two years after me and his birth sent me in a shock, a shock of stunned silence. My father after three days of witnessing my numbness took me away on a tour .

- It will distract her.

And all I remember is a pink purple bead bracelet that he bought for me. The cheap beads shone irridiscently , shimmering with rainbow hues , a little bit like the shiny patina of peacock blue and greens of dripped petrol from tired old buses and jeeps in small puddles winding through pot holed dusty roads .He had wound the bracelet along my tiny delicate wrists with love. A hexagonal bead bracelet held together with elastic threads bought from the tiny shop. We had stayed in a dak bungalow with green shutters and cool high ceiling roofs , an ancient fan hanging from the thick roof beam, the vast green lawns with tea rose bushes along the drive way . But I don't remember any of those details. All that I remember with a sharp clear eye is the bead bracelet. The hexagonal shape and the intense pleasure of owning somethig so out of this world . I also remember the feel of the beads and the pleasure driving all else away from my mind.

My mother says you can't have memories when that young. And I say maybe I can . Maybe it never happened really , maybe it happened only in some intricate layers of my mind , like a piece of cloth torn by being caught against the rusted fence , torn and sticking out and flutterig always in my mind. I don't know but maybe it really happened. My father always smiles mysteriously at this but never says a word.