Dream | Under the canopy of stars
“you don’t gaze into the microscope, you pierce into it as if it were a telescope”
“Where am I?” Swapna was the first to speak.
She was always intent on keeping up appearances, and Shobit never got tired of buying her new things. They were husband and wife; had been for seven years, and were trying to have a kid for the last three.
“That is exactly what I was going to ask,” Parnab said. He was not Shobit. And he was naked.
“Why are we in a dream?” Swapna asked.
She was totally befuddled. How could she voice it so easily? Was it a blatant guess? Or an intuitive realization that comes from reading too much about porcupines and dolphins and living with dead bodies dipped in formaldehyde for far too long?
The dream, if it was really one, was full of waters and lakes… and a not-so-familiar odor that hovers in the cages of goats and dogs and horses and pigs. Suddenly she felt like peeing. But the dream had posed questions in front of her- how come she was here… in a weird state, with a naked man, in an unknown dream? She had to have answers to these questions before giving her bladder another thought.
“How do you know it is a dream?” The man standing in front of her asked.
“I do not know how I know,” she replied. “It’s just… I know. And I want to know why it is that I am dreaming about a man whom I have never seen in my life.”
“What?” Parnab couldn’t grasp what she had said. And indeed, as he later came to terms with, she was one of those new-age-women who knew how to use words. She was like his wife. Both knew things, and both were good at playing with words. And he had a special word for them: intellectual.
His wife’s name was Padma. She was an aspiring writer of children’s fiction, and a geek; and she was always reading and writing and playing with quotes. For her, quotes were contextless chunks of essence; and every once in a while, she would push one towards him. “How do you like this one by Thoreau? He says: This world is nothing but a canvas to our imagination,” she would say and he would snore, and then they would start laughing like brothers and sisters.
Parnab was a clerk. He had been a clerk all his life. His mind could not go beyond things like typewritten notes, pamphlets, official letters and mails. Anything other than them he would label as intellectual, and laugh it away. But of course, he couldn’t deny… that it was sort of weirdly stimulating… being in touch with two women who knew how to use words.
Swapna indeed was an intelligent woman. If she had tried, she could have ended up as someone big, someone very important… someone capable of bringing about a change in the world, a big change… like Madame Curie, like Indira Gandhi. But she was not ambitious. She just wanted to enjoy the little things of the world, something on its own, not for any utilitarian reward she may reap. And she enjoyed teaching biology to high school kids.
And gazing into the eyepiece of microscopes, identifying, segregating bacteria and fungi and algae… “you don’t gaze into the microscope, you pierce into it as if it were a telescope” she was always saying.
She didn’t know what it really meant. But she had a feeling that if she continued explaining at least something to her students, one day she was going to get it, the meaning of that phrase. “You don’t gaze into the microscope; you pierce into it as if it were a telescope.”
“And my second question is: which of us is dreaming?” she asked.
She was sitting on a sturdy cold bench, and her befuddled mind was running and running… on an empty beach full of infinitely small pebbles, so small that they felt almost like sand.
If it was really a dream, there had to be a dreamer, and it had to be one of them, she thought. Dreams are not cities like New York and Chandigarh where two strangers can meet, have dinner together, fuck, talk about the so-called interesting things and go back… to their respective places, their homes. If dreams were cities, at least one of them had to be their permanent residence. It seemed… logical.
She looked around. “Can we dream a dream in which we are not ‘inside’ it?” The surroundings were dark… with yellow and white bulbs glinting here and there, looking like obtuse and fuzzy balls of ghosts hanging in mid-air, like lost protuberances of animal heads which have been made to glow from inside, a recurring dream she used to have many years ago.
She was a child then. And after each nightmare her body would be full of salty frothy sweat, sticky water, her entire body: her head, her toes, palms, feet, armpits… every scrap of her skin. And to keep herself away from them, those nightmares… she would hide behind the canisters of vegetables and condiments and pickles in the kitchen, in the middle of the night, and listen till dawn to the orchestra of roaches and mice hidden in the corners.
She wanted the fuzzy balls infested dreams to go away, far, far away… to leave her alone forever, dreams in which the world was new and alien, and quite scary… as scary as a bleak future.
“Who are you?” Parnab brought her back to the dream from her reverie.
The paperback of the novella is out. Check out here:
https://www.amazon.in/Under-Canopy-Stars-Nachi-Keta/dp/9388698584/
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