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Member
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: NJ
Posts: 11
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dream
This was a dream that I had that I wrote sometime back, and then filed away altogether. Is it story-worthy?
So it was at that time that Mani felt a strange compulsion to leave the house. He felt like he was being extraneous somehow, as he looked at the few pictures on the wall that looked back at him. How long had it been since he started staying at home? Yet, for the first time, he felt an almost tangible urge to leave the house and to leave the very chair he sat on. Taking the keys with him, he locked the heavy door behind him and caught the elevator downstairs. The thing about these elevators was that they constantly stuck themselves between floors. The mechanism itself sounded sticky and gummy, weighted with passengers and its repetitive work of carrying them. Aloft and down again, it carried Mani to the bottom. It was there when he realized that getting out of the elevator would be another matter entirely. A pile of scooters barred his exit.
It was five minutes, but the old doorman came and tried his hardest to remove the scooters from the front of the elevator in the meanwhile, until the man that Mani nicknamed “The Hitman” after the WWE champion wrestler because of his obvious resemblance, lifted the scooters as if they were weightless. Were these two men of the same mold? Mani wondered. What makes some of us able to do things and others keep trying and not able to finish something?
It was easy after that; the wide wet road stretched in front of him semi-lighted and empty of everything but the sticky mud that comes with rain. The vendors were closed, for the most part even the most adventurous ones had packed away their brilliant packages of paan that advertised everlasting life even though the packet perhaps contained some of the foulest ingredients known to man. There were, however, the adventure rickshaws. Mani looked ahead of him. Of course. There would be the rickshaws. It was the Skyline Theater.
It was strange how daily habit could be erased so completely, how routine could dissolve in mere seconds. He was here but he had never been here. Deciding there was something profoundly strange about the whole experience, he went along. He hailed a rickshaw.
He made another breach of habit; he never said anything to the rickshaw driver, but he kept driving along the sloping roads, through the bright city of Hyderabad, whose crooked alleys were traversed at a breathtaking speed. Mani watched his reflection in all the oil rich puddles they drove by, watched the stars begin to wake up from a Hyderabadi slumber. At this time, his mother would have been on the way to the Mathur Sree (Saint Mother) hospital in her small Maruthi. His friend, Seshu was elsewhere, perhaps outside Mathur Sree. The name of the hospital was a talisman or a jinx, and Mani wondered which. He wondered where in the cosmic battle between life in death he figured. What could he prevent, what had he caused, and how dare he have to watch?
This rickshaw might have been made out of air by now. Mani could not feel the difference. He felt himself sleep … sleep … his body was made out of air …
Some village, Andhra Pradesh that morning: (Many kms from Hyderabad)
The water starved region of C---- stretched out for as long as Mani could see in the daylight. He found himself next to a bucket of water whose contents included a few pieces of stray straw and a fair amount of sediment. Unperturbed, he sat up as well as he could, and took the bucket of water with him to where there was no water. The tops of huts were visible above the gently sloping land, but Mani could hear the village before he could see it. The sound was joyous, something beautiful, sacred, a thread of the divine on earth. The sun felt like nothing to him, he realized, although it was incredibly hot. He felt that there was a bit of pain in his legs, but he was able to stand. Somehow, nothing looked more welcome than those thatched roofs, those rows and rows of them.
There were mirages, he saw the images in the desert that one knew to be false. One simply didn’t believe in them. Mirages … they were made out of the air … perhaps waiting to be seen, only to allure. But never had a concept been so severely misunderstood. Mirages perhaps did not wait to be understood by people. Mani ran toward the village, as far away as he could.
He saw the flash of the tiranga on the roof of the still faraway hut.
Thank God, Mani thought, and his knees seemed to drag him down toward the center of gravity; the colors in his mind were a painful fluorescent green.
From somewhere in his head he felt the shade of a tree. There was the wondrous smell of just-ripe mangoes, and he felt anchored to a cool piece of sheetrock. Water, cold water, was poured over his face, the ultimate refreshment in what had been blistering heat.
“Ey,” said a soft, feminine voice in his ear, “Get up. Get up.”
His eyelids shocked into snapping open, he found himself staring into the largest pair of tremendously dark eyes he had ever seen. It was a girl, perhaps his own age, who fanned him with a large palm leaf. She had the darkest skin he’d ever seen; it was something that seemed to come from stone, not from human pigmentation. All of what he learned in his biology came back to slap him in the face. How could any human being be created that was so perfect?
“Don’t stand, ya.” The girl said, “Something’s wrong with your leg.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re somewhere,” the girl answered, “How does it matter where you are?”
“It matters,” Mani said, “Because I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.”
“What kind of stupid answer is that?” his companion asked, pouring some water into his mouth from a shining copper jug, “Who is supposed to be anywhere?”
Using his position as an excuse, Mani remained silent and stared at the mango fruit above his head. He then turned his head toward the girl and asked, “Is there any way you can get me home?”
“A car should get here in a few minutes,” the girl said, “then I will be driving you back home.”
“You can drive?” Mani asked, “I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t,” she said, “But we all have to get the water truck to the river somehow.”
Mani asked her, “Is there a drought here?”
“Even if there was,” the girl reminded him, “we have no running water.”
“No pumps?”
“I’m sure that the fellows who built this village did not think about that. I mean, we were supposed to be an outpost. Not a farming community. Do you know how much it takes to plan when people move? Nobody really thinks about what’s going to happen so far ahead, so they don’t build these things.”
“Oh,” Mani said, and his heart leapt with an inexplicable joy. “My name is Mani.”
“My name is Menaka.”
*
“This is your water truck?” Mani asked with undisguised admiration as he watched it canter down the road from the shade of the small thatched roof hut where he and Menaka sat. From within the dark Ashram, Menaka expertly cooked some hot vegetable and chapatti over the old kerosene fire which she shared with Mani, until the advent of the old truck. It was a thing of sheer beauty; lotuses were painted all over the cylindrical tank which was attatched to the long flatbed of the vehicle. A tiger bared its stunning stripes on the one side of the vehicle that faced him. Mani watched as a young man descended from the truck, wiping his forehead from the intense heat.
“Ajju,” Menaka called, “Can you give up the truck? I’ll do the water route.”
Ajju walked over to where Mani sat; a deep scowl was set on his hard, young face. “Who’s he? Bringing strangers from city places now, are you? I tell you, Menaka, there is no good woman on the face of this earth anymore--”
“He was dumped here by one of those idle drunks,” Menaka said, lightly, “Right?”
“Sure,” Mani said, looking up, “Sure I was.”
The man grunted as he sat down next to Menaka, who gave him a tall tumbler of cool water. “Sometimes, you know, there’s just too much traffic. I nearly collided with three bicycles and God knows what else--”
“Ajju,” Menaka silenced him, “Some other time.” Taking Mani up by the hand, she got him to stand; she gave him support by keeping her arm across his back, rough and damp from the heat and the sweat. “Do you have the keys?”
It took a full fifteen minutes to load Mani onto the front seat; Menaka finished the whole task all by herself as Ajju watched from a distance stoically, refusing to help. Mani clutched the door handle as he hoisted himself inside. “You are in... are you all right? Does your leg hurt?”
“Oh, no.”
It was a few more minutes before they started; the road stretched in front of them, in its parched glory. The smell of mangoes was so fragrant—it was the very smell of divinity. Menaka’s blossoms began to slide down her hair … Mani put his hands forward to pick up the flowers.
So then they drove off. Her confident hands gripped the steering wheel and the gears clanked painfully as they sped down the dirt road. And so, thought Mani as the dirt came into his eyes, this is what it feels like. His leg made itself painfully aware, and that was all that was said for the next hour and half, whereupon he was so tired that he fell asleep—and asleep—and asleep—
__________________
My beard grows to my toes --
I never wears no clothes
I just wrap my hair
around my bare,
and down the road I goes.
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