The Day in Dreams

“So you think this wine will be good with beef?”

“Yes sir. Of course.”

“Okay”, he said, checking his watch, “And can you suggest another one for the cheese course?”

“Let me see”, said the vendor cum suggester, as he ran his experienced eyes through the many pretty bottles of whine flaunted neatly on the wooden racks of this age old shop, “This one”, he picked up a Reisling, “Hand malted from Bordeaux, sir.”

“Very well”, he said, holding the beauty in his hands. There’s always something about the bottles of alcohol that made him feel so cool and soothed in his heart. But he tasted them only once, during his office party, and it tasted so harsh that he had to put it down after the first sip only. Only after a great deal of ajwain did his mouth felt okay again.

“Gracias”, he said, as he placed 9 euros and 30 cents on the counter and left.

“Adios. Asta pronto, senor.”

He got up from the bench in the park. It was already dark, he had to walk his tired legs all the way back to his apartment. It had rained all day. It was pouring down heavily in the morning. When he came to his office, he was totally drenched, and he had to stay in that wet clothes for the whole day. But his clothes had dried down by then, and the rain only existed in a slight drizzle. As he turned from the crowded main road into the nearly empty by-road, his stomach had started to ache. He experienced this ache quite frequently those days, after he sold one of his kidneys.

He unlocked the door of his one room flat. And his little daughter came running to him. He picked her up on his lap. He had named her Shreya after the girl he loved. He was just too tired to think of anything to talk to her, so he just listened to her talk.

He kept his bag on the chair. His flat was so organized. No one would say that he was a bachelor. Actually there was not much of a furniture in his apartment. A divan, on which he slept, were his pillows; a table, on which was no books except a few which were important for his work, and a few files in which he kept his important documents, but all very neat and clean; a chair, a wooden one; a gas cylinder and stove in his kitchen along with a few aluminum utensils; a bucket, a mug, a shampoo and a soap was all that he had in his washroom. Everything was where he had kept them, everything was so neat and clean. He never liked such neatness, he wished to turn everything upside down in a flash. But all he did was just change his clothes and go to the washroom.

He went into the kitchen, made himself some maggi. He hated maggi, but as it turned out to be, he had nothing else to dine at that moment. He kept his plate on the table, and sat down on the chair, “So, Mr. Edwards, tell me how can I help you?”

“First of all, thank you sir, for taking out time for us.”

“Mention not”, he faked a smile.

“So, let us come straight to the point. Our company is willing you to sponsor your trip across the Americas.”

“In return of?”, he asked, munching onto his maggi. The waiter came and poured some more wine in their glasses. Senora Bianca Castafiore continued to shriek at the mic. He didn’t understand a word she sang, but everyone seemed to applause her. He followed suit.

“We’ll have the rights to sell your travel books and videos.”

“And what do I gain from that?”

“$50,000 per month, sir.”

“See Mr. Edwards”, he said, wiping off the magi from the side of his lips, “I truly appreciate your offer, but I’ve been working with Mr. Ricky Steves for all my past ventures, and I refuse to split with him.”

“But sir, he pays you only 20K a month.”

“Can you take that up to 200K?”

“Well, that’s negotiable, sir.”

“I differ from your opinions, Mr. Edwards. Loyalty comes before fortune to me”, saying this, he took his plate and glass and got up.

He went straight to the kitchen. He washed the utensils. “Loyalty before fortune?”, he smiled at himself, “F##k your speeches, dude!”

He came back in his room to find his phone ringing. He enthusiastically picked up the phone. No, it was only the notification signalling that his phone was lacking charge. He went to the kitchen, there was the only plug point in that rented flat of his. He put his phone to charge and came back to his room. His wife, Shreya, was waiting for him there.

“How was your day today?”, she asked him.

“Bad”, he answered as he sat down on the bed next to her.

“Why?”, she asked, as she pulled herself closer to him.

“I meant”, he wheezed as he stretched himself to put the lights off, “That was a very bad topic to talk on.”

“Then suggest me a topic”, she ordered.

“Well”, he said, as he spread his tired legs in front of him, and blew his hands over them. His legs always ached after these long walks to his office and back.

“You could have asked me how many beautiful ladies flirted with me tonight?”, he smirked.

“Okay”, said Shreya as she made herself cozy on his shoulders, “How many girls did you flirt with?”

“No, no”, he said, “They flirted with me.”

“As if”, she shrugged his shoulders, “Who would hit on you?”

“You did.”

“No, you did. I agreed.”

“Well, thank you.”

For a moment he sat silently there on the bed. There was a very loud muteness all around him. He was still smiling, but his eyes were wet. He wished to say more, to feel more, but everything that he wanted to say or wanted to hear had already crossed his mind. Suddenly he remembered he had forgotten to take his pills. He got up and took his daily dose of pain killers, forgetting to consume which he screamed and shriveled on the floor one day, until his landlord came down broke open his door and took him to the hospital. It made him look so stupid. He made such a fuss for simply not buying the medicines beforehand. He made a fun of himself. From that day onward he made sure to buy medicines before maggi at the start of every month. That incident also made him wonder what if he had died that night, had the landlord not come down to attend him, or if his landlord was away, would the people of this big over-populated world cared that they were a number less the following morning?

He sat on the chair. He was sweating profusely. The fan circling around him did little to help him dry himself. His table had a drawer, just a one. He pulled it open. There were some unused pens, and pencils, and rubbers and malfunctioning earphones which he bought from the footpath for 150 bucks. He bought another one for 120 bucks after the first one stopped working. Within a span of three months, the second one failed him too. He couldn’t live without music at that time. But it didn’t bother him much as he had to sell his phone within a year and buy one of those old fashioned phones instead that had only the ‘snake’ game for entertainments.

Anyway, he searched more inside his drawer, and his fingers did feel what he had been looking for. A few pages of writing, sort of a manuscript. He pulled the bunch out, carefully so that the pages didn’t get torn off. In the dim light of the moon, he recognized the score of short stories that he had once written. He flipped through the pages. At the time he was writing these, he had thought of two situations that might come one day in his life. One was, that he would be sitting in a large mansion of his, on an armchair, in the veranda, maybe in some European country, as a famous writer, and reminiscing on the various moments of his childhood. And the other one was, that he would be sitting in front of a computer, in an air-conditioned room, unhappily earning and mourning for not being able to be a traveler and a writer that he had so aspired to be.

But as it turned out, that day, he was in neither of those positions, neither was he happy nor was he sad. Neither was he a renowned writer nor was he a high earner in the corporate world. He had lost out to both the races. He was defeated. Yes, he was sad. But was there any point of being sad. Who would be coming up to wipe his tears off? There was no one to pity him or calm him down. He always was worried because he never had faced any major upsets in his life. Pain, as they say, is the magic feeling that brings out the best from an artist, was missing from his life. He had ideas, but no pain in them. Now, he had pain, but no idea how to get over them. He could never find the conflict of his stories. At that time, they were all so happy and their sadness were so mere and fathomable, and now, he only had pain, and no way to get back to happiness.

He kept back his dreams in the drawer, and went to sleep. He couldn’t sleep easily. He had insomnia. He lied on his bed, closed his eyes, and stayed like that. Nothing happened. Neither did he fall asleep nor did his heart get any lighter. He wanted some food, something to drink too, but not maggi and water. He wanted to munch onto something crunchy, something spicy, and something sweet. His closed eyes could see his imaginations right there in front of him. The brain was a very evil organ, it always shows you stuff which you can never get, but it makes you jealous.

What else did he want? A softer bed, a cooler room, a person by his side who would hug him, whom he could hug. This reminded him of his mother, and of the night when he hugged his mother but she shoved him away because he had failed in an examination. He understood, love is also conditional, you give me happiness, I’ll give you happiness.

But why couldn’t he cry? Why were his eyes still dry? He had always felt this tremendous urge to break down crying, but never could he squeeze out more than one or two drops of tear.

When you are suffering from insomnia, you are never really awake, nor are you asleep. It’s like you are always in a trance. He didn’t know when he went to sleep. But he woke up, on time the next morning, like a machine, he brushed, had a glass of water for breakfast, wore the same shirt he wore the previous day and walked the whole way to his office. He was a mere clerk. He earned good, 30,000 bucks a month for a bachelor isn’t so bad.

It had been a regular routine for him then, sitting on that very particular bench, in the park, at that very time of the day, everyday. This was when he dreamed, this was when he relaxed, this was when he looked upon the day that could have passed, well, nothing really changed, everyday was the same, but still, he tried to find differences in this regular-ness, in this no-change season, he looked for little differences that might have been. Like, his boss was in a bad mood the whole day, and therefore he had to undergo a doze of insults from hos boss. He could have easily snapped back and threw his resignation letter on the face of his boss. But that would mean he had accepted defeat.

Anyway, he had no place to go, so all he could do was just sit with his head down and listen to the baseless yells of his boss. This was actually how he was still alive then. He was the remains of what remained after the loss of the war, the war of surviving, where dreams were shattered and hearts were broken, and he was still fighting on, with whom, or what, he didn’t know, but at least he had not yet lost to this unknown enemy.

It is amazing how with time, likes and apathies change, and they change an entire human being, it really amazed him, how this war inside him has changed the boy who he was to the man who he is. Earlier, he used to not like the dusk, how the day ended, and the night started. He liked the day and the night individually, but he never liked their transition. Now, as things stand, he had ended up in not liking the day and the night and loving the three quarters of their transition, these three quarters of his sleep, when he dreamed.

After this space of 45 minutes, his day would start again, he had to walk back to his one bedroom rented apartment, and he would have to start his daily chores of cooking himself something to eat, then sit with the calculation of the daily savings and expenditures, where expenditure is always the same, the eighty rupees he spent on lunch, and the savings was also the same, then sit with a bit of homework he needed to do for the next day’s work, then a four hour sleep, followed by going out to work dressed in the formal shirt that he had worn the day before, and the same pant, and take the same way to office, and sit at the same place where he had been sitting for the last one decade and a half, and do the same work sitting on the computer, then lunch, then again work at a much lower pace, and at five, he took his leave, and he went to sleep on that very particular bench in that very particular park, during dusk, and he tried to imagine the day in a all different way. He relived his dreams, he re-energize his dreams and will power to fight for yet another day, about to start in a span of 45 minutes.

He earned much, but not as much as his parents had wanted him to earn. They knew that he was earning more than 50K a month. So he had to send them 25K a month, which left him with only 5000 rupees a month. Therefore, his kidney came handy. No one knew, but silently he kept people happy. He suffered, but that was his only weakness. No friends, no family, he was as good as the top of mount Everest. All alone and erect, seldom talked to, he minded his own business. He wanted to fly, break down everything around him, this open air was roping him in slowly, his dreams were knocking on the door, but he didn’t know how much more time he had to wait for them.

He had always believed that his life story would be the best story ever. He was the best protagonist according to him, the conflict was also ideal, the million dollar conflict of what he wanted and what he needed. All that was missing was the setting. But he had it, the setting was there in his dreams, his dreams that were never to come true. But those day dreams pacified his turbulent heart. Day dreaming is not so bad after all!

“The wine tasted so very fine yesterday”, he told the man at the alcohol shop, “I’ll come to you very often now”, he smiled.

“Any day, senor”, the shop keeper smiled back.

–END–