Daydreams

The winter is leaving city in haste as a terribly disappointed tourist. The wind is cold as yet but the sun’s warm enough to let me emerge from the woolen tapestry I had cocooned myself in most tediously for the whole of last month. It’s a relief not to have to walk around like a bloated Santa in Delhi. The air is light outside, and smells almost fresh and young this morning. It’s another idyllic day. I feel too lazy to write or read and undecided of what else to do, perch myself on the rocking chair with a cup of coffee. Last week I read an article in the newspaper that said more than three cups of coffee a day can give you hallucinations. I must be hallucinating a lot these days, I think.

Not having anything to do is an unnerving experience. It feels like the world has stopped and everything that was a blur of colors around you comes into sharp focus with an alarming effect. If you have been on a roller coaster ride, you will know what I’m saying. You are scared by the ride, but you are disoriented by the stillness thereafter. When fear tries to force its way into your heart, you try to beat it. You take it on as a challenge, grit your teeth and push it back with all your strength. But disorientation leaves you helpless, like an imbecile, deprived of the pride a struggle could have given you.

I was not always disoriented by stillness. When I was younger, to be still was so much a part of being alive. Those were the moments scattered among the rush hours of life, like calm oases in a vast desert, that allowed the leisure of blissful daydreams to my young mind. I have lived a significant part of my childhood and adolescence by their side losing myself in fantasies not much less surreal and magical as the tales in ‘Arabian Nights.’ Yet, today, I am ill-at-ease in my moment of rest. I itch to do something to fill up the time. Anything. Not having anything to do makes me feel uncomfortable, even dejected. Is it true that we forget how to daydream as we grow older in time?

I don’t know why but I think of a sweaty, summer afternoon 17 years ago. The memory is faded like the sight was then by the thin veil of dust that rose from our college ground. A ferocious wind raged through the campus, rising and falling like violent waves in a stormy sea, pushing open closed doors and broken windows, filling classrooms with sheets of dry sand. I must have looked Quixotic standing in the open, outside the staircase that lead to the Physics lab on the first floor. She stood on the fourth or fifth step, books tightly held to her chest with her left hand and with her right, trying to gather her long golden brown hair that had fallen over her face.

She was going up to the lab maybe. I was going nowhere in particular. I had caught a glimpse of her before when she had come for admission with a middle-aged man who I assumed to be her father. As I laid my eyes up on her for the first time that day, two questions rose in my mind, not as bubbles rising to the surface from the depths of a still pond but as lightening crashing upon earth savagely – the first was, how can a girl have golden brown hair in this part of the world and the second, was I dreaming?

The next thing I became aware of, as strongly as the first two thoughts, was not a thought at all but an overwhelming feeling – of being insanely happy. I felt light and delirious. Benevolent and bright. The seemingly stupid world around me was no longer of any consequence and had no power to depress me. For a passing moment, I was free and strong without knowing what to do with either my independence or my strength. Today, when I look back, I can explain and reason out everything that happened in the course of next two years but then all I did stand in a daze and watch from a distance that was safe – my youthful illusions and faith remained untouched by whatever was that was called ‘reality.’

There are girls I have tried to be in love with, knowing full well that I was trying to be in love with them. It is a stupid feeling – to be completely conscious of your desire to be in love with someone. It only explains one thing – there was no love but only a desire for love. But the girl on the staircase was not the same. I did not want to love her, or want not to love her. I was not even aware what I wanted. I was just in awe. The moment I saw her, I was transported to another world, a world where I didn’t have to do anything except breathe. Breathe and look at her. Breathe and look at her. Just don’t forget to breathe in between. Breathe, I kept telling myself.

So on that summer afternoon, as the dust storm rose and fell in gigantic waves over the campus, I stood and watched her standing on the staircase. She was short, small, almost fragile and unusually fair. I would compare her to a Barbie doll except that Barbie dolls are so cliched in their good looks. They also have that oh-so-not-real quality which only man-made things can have. The girl on the staircase had large brown eyes covered by long eyelashes, sparkling with strange light, that looked at the world with wonderment. They invited you to share some secret joyfully like a child. Oh, she was very real but her presence had a surreal effect on me. In my mind, all her thoughts are in pink and white. Like a new born baby’s cheeks. Innocent, clean, pure and untouched by sorrow. That’s how I saw her, while I tried to keep my eyes open as the dust rose vengefully to obliterate visibility, punishing me for the audacity of standing there indifferent to its might. She had taken a step forward and stopped, turned to look at her friends following close behind, giggling at some girlish joke. She took a hurried look at me, in simple curiosity, and then was gone with her entourage.

I was in love with her yet I was not in love with her. I know that today. She represented the world as I wanted it to be – beautiful in its promise, inspiring in its beauty; a noble feeling that justified my faith in the goodness of Man and his benevolence. She stood before me as the spiritual sum of the joy and happiness I believed in but found lacking in the people and places around me.

In the two years that I had to complete my graduation, I never spoke to her more than once or twice, and that too, in passing. I had wanted to walk up to her and say, “I love you,” many a times. I didn’t because I didn’t know what I would have to do after that. I should have told her. It was the sincerest tribute I could offer her person – the radiant light that shined through the vast stretch of grey and lifeless beings. My acknowledgement of that which gave me those exalting and uplifting moments of my life. I didn’t know then that love can be and is an end in itself. I regret that now.

Daydreams make one unnecessarily sentimental. Maybe that’s why we avoid them as we age. Surface level emotions are easy to deal with. I need to clear my head. I am going for a walk now.