26 Jan, 08

The night before last I dreamt a dream, a pure piece of fiction.

The place is a little way beyond Sanga bazaar across the stream. I am on the road walking slowly ahead. To my right is a terraced field that gradually goes sloping up. I can see Stevie sitting, up on a high terrace. She is in kurta suruwal. I happen to come across granny there. Her body a little bent forward, sari reaching to her ankles and girdle round her waist. Stevie is looking at us. I ask granny, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Just until there’, she laughs and gestures to a place ahead. I know Stevie doesn’t recognize her. I also get conscious about the fact that Stevie has read about her death. But granny is alive and walking here. I find myself in a strange situation. The episode just ends there.

The same place again after a while but this time in a small hut like house. Perhaps not across the stream. It is this side, the west bank. We - Stevie, Ama and I – are sitting on the portico of the house on the mud encrusted floor. I have no idea how Stevie got there. But she is there. Granny appears in front of us in the courtyard and laughs and says something. I am in an awkward position. Stevie knows that granny died in 2003. I hesitatingly mutter, ‘This is my granny.’ Stevie doesn’t speak. She just looks at granny all smiles. I catch granny’s left arm. It is just like as it used to be when she was alive, warm and soft. As soon as I hold her arm, her body turns into a dummy. Within seconds in my hand remains a half-size dummy of a man I had seen in the biology lab of the last school I taught. I do not know what to do with it now. I tell Ama, ‘It was granny actually. The same laughter and the same voice.’ Ama, as if she didn’t notice, says: ‘Was it?’ I have a strong desire to hand that dummy to someone and get rid of it. I struggle for a while. I shake it violently and hit against the floor. Then I wake up. It is three a.m.

I felt like writing it down then but my body was not willing to do it. I slipped into the cover. It was amazing to think how dreams connect far fetched things together. I wrote about my granny’s life, Stevie read it and commented on it and gave me several suggestions to improve it. I redrafted and completed. And now I wonder how the subconscious dramatized it in a situation where Stevie and granny came face to face. The place where the events in the dream occurred is a little hilly place in the outskirts of Kathmandu from where I started my teaching career and where I have set the novel I am writing. The dummy comes from the lab of school I taught some years before. The school is in eastern Nepal.