Then they woke me...

Load-shedding in the middle of the day, a tardy monsoon, and riots in the streets outside: perfect ingredients for a mid-day nap. And the heat and lethargy makes for the perfect day-time lucid dreaming.

I was having an excellent dream this afternoon. It was something I would call awesome-o or super-bueno. Because it lead up to a pay-off of the kind I prefer: I was going to write a story at the end of it, to be read before an audience. What's more, I was being paid to write the story!

It was a fantasy more than a dream, but it came with the sensory reinforcement of a dream, you know, where the colors are extra saturated, where immediacy feels more immediate, where the surprises are bigger and where the satisfaction of being creative within the boundaries of the dream-world is greater.

I was in a truck, somewhere in the US, with a bunch of people who brought out their crack pipes. I am not kidding. I resisted: I don't do crystal Meth, I said. Who was selling the drugs? Mithun. Kinda funny, but Mithun had the rocks in a small brown-paper bag, and was selling them for twenty dollars each. I realized I needed to get off the truck, so I faked injury, said my leg was hurting a lot.

The truck stopped where a crowd was waiting for me. They put me in a wheelchair. These were Nepali people in the US, and I had been invited to read at one of their celebrations. They were going to put me up for two days, in a room where I had a writing desk. This room faced north, had white walls, a small bed with soft, white sheets. A window that looked out on a flat roof with rails, and a gray, broad river flowing from east to west. I remember thinking: not bad, not a bad room to write in.

One of the organizers gave me a contract, written in blue ball-point pen in a uniform, precise, small Devnagari. The text in Nepali listed questions about myself, instructions on how I was to write the story, the details they [the community that had invited me] wanted to see. I had two days to write. I was being paid 250 bucks, which I thought wasn't very much at all.

Because I would need to write some 12 pages for it to be a decent length reading, and it would take me about three hours to write one decent page, to edit it, etc. But I was going to do it for the 250 they were offering, because, after all, I was a writer. No matter how much a writer says he is not being paid enough to write [editing is a different matter], it is always more than he ever thought he would get paid, to do the work he desperately wants to keep doing forever, and the value of which is really nothing at all.

I was reading the details, surrounded by the people that were hosting me, when I was woken up, to go fetch Abhi from his school.

I just wish I had been able to dream just a minute more, perhaps five minutes more, get something on paper, a phrase, an idea. I have often felt that reality is the shadow of dreams, and not the other way around, and that is exists only for us to have to regret it, endlessly, for the things that we could have had and done and seen in our dreams... I would have written the story out, if only I could have put something on paper... a sound, a face, a fear...


Bonus: while I stood by the school gate waiting for Abhi, Hanshu, my niece, sneaked up on me. She is in grade 1. She offered me water from the tank the school has installed by the gate. I love her. She brings a smile to my face every time I think of her. Because she loves me, too.