Nightmare

Short Story – Nightmare

This short story became SPIXer (Most popular story) on 15 Dec 2012 and won INR 500 (US$ 10)

“She is screaming…She is screaming…Her scream increasing in pitch with each passing moment…and suddenly, it goes out like the lull before a storm….just pitch-dark, depressing silence all around me…I started screaming. WHAAAT….”

I woke up. This was a recurring nightmare. For the past three weeks, it was disturbing my lovely sleep.

“A room with dull black walls at first…The white ball hanging in the middle of the roof, starts slowly swinging…then a mysterious voice from an unseen corner of the room…can’t make out what it is saying…but she is screaming…the panic in the voice pleading for help…I attempted walking towards the voice…but I never got anywhere…anywhere I went in that room, it looked the same…it was as if the room was walking or rotating with me…so I waited for the voice to come again.”

I was 13 then. Being in the company of some godforsaken people, I got introduced to one of the vices of life – smoking. Being the most educated of that lot, it wasn’t difficult to become their leader and we did some bashing up of other boy gangs in the locality. What a rush it was to be known as the ‘gang-leader’ of my place and see every boy pee in his pants on just one look from me. In the winter of 1989, the dream disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared.

Being the child of Indian central government employees, there was no permanence to my life. My parents got shifted periodically and we were in Baroda those days. My father’s next transfer took us to Mumbai and there some semblance of stability came to our family. My father used his political connections to get us to stay in that place. The curve of my life took a sharp upwards turn with the injection of cosmopolitan lifestyle.

Being passionate about India, I took a job in a PSU after completing my top-notch education. Working amongst our people and for our people, gave me happiness. My father, that ultra-sincere utter-loser had subjected us to middle-class status despite the professional power he had gained in his final years. I was not going to subject myself to that any more.

I never understood why the idea of corruption was deemed such a bad thing. I never had a problem with it. Thanks to this ‘demon’, I quickly ensured a comfortable life for myself. With one single 100 buck note, I could get those pathetic low-life traffic-men off my back. With one signature of mine, I could make lakhs flow between financial institutions. With one nod of my head, people across the chain would tap into the flow. Only the ones without balls don’t indulge in with corruption. In a couple of years, I made my name. Life went on perfectly well.

It was again in the winter of 2011 that the scream made a re-entry. This time it tortured me, shattering my life for three months.

People thought I went insane. My friends and colleagues actually got me enrolled under a psychiatrist. The doctor tried all the techniques that his school had taught him. But he couldn’t help me. How I had wished that the doctor for once tried thinking of a different type of cure instead of mechanically testing me! Well, schools have that effect on intelligent people. They snatch the ability of thinking from people.

And the nightmare persisted.

“…Someone is seated on the table in the middle of the room with her back to me…that dishevelled shoulder length hair….the slow oscillating white ball dimly lighting up the dull walled cabin…she is sobbing…maybe she is saying something…I take a few steps…but she remains as far as ever…then I remember, the room moves with me…so I begin noticing her from far…. her torn clothes on the backside showing marks of recent struggle…those bleeding cuts on her back…that oozing yellow blood…a creepy feeling growing within me for being trapped in some random cabin god-knows-where…that shadily lit room…”

In those torturous three months, I took a decision to escape from my reality of that time. I made a career switch. I leveraged my networking to get recruited into a reputed management consulting company. Probably it was the change in pace of life or environment that made the nightmare disappear.

And what a change it was! Working for Indians? What the hell! If you have interacted with other cultures and have been to other countries, then you know what I mean when I’d say “Despicable smelly Indians! Good for nothing, lazy, undeserving Indians.”

My job took me to Greece, U.S, Australia, Spain, England and so many more places. Being the enterprising person I was, it didn’t take me long to find the ‘good’ things in life. And the greatest of them all was cocaine, sweet mother of elixirs; cocaine, the energizer of the universe; cocaine, emperor of buzz; cocaine, the door to an electric existence.

I just never understood why the world was so concerned about banning cocaine? My friends started deserting me because of new this fancy of mine. Friendship seemed too trivial to leave the sweet enticing poisonous passion for cocaine. I didn’t regret bidding them goodbye. Money was never a problem. Corruption had helped me a lot. My current job paid me hills of money.

Despite increasing solitude, I discovered another world. My best friend, cocaine gently nudged me into a world that I believed existed only in the demented minds of character-less people.

Ah! The sleaze, that thrill of swinging. Ah! Those whores, that high of raping. Ah! Those masquerade parties of orgasmic orgies. I thanked my stars that I wasn’t trapped in some idiotic matrimonial chain!

Cocaine was slowly consuming me. But given my job and lifestyle, I remained healthy enough to tolerate the degradation that this addiction unleashed upon my body. Constant travelling, high-burn projects and some intense creative thinking, kept my pulse thumping.

It was again in the winter of 2011 that the nightmare made a comeback. This time the nightmare was far more persistent. It was as if the nightmare grew in strength and gloominess over the years, growing along with me. This time there was marked amount of static in it, a far creepier silence. The images kept shaking, like my eyes couldn’t focus.

“…a room with dull black walls at first…the white ball hanging in the middle of the roof, starts slowly swinging…then a mysterious voice from an unseen corner of the room…can’t make out what it is saying…she starts screaming…the panic in the voice suggesting that help was needed and that too as soon as possible…I couldn’t get to it…So I waited for it to come again…I turned to the white ball…I realize that it is actually a bulb of low wattage…In a flash, my attention is drawn to the person now on the table in the middle of the room…I remember…I had seen a bleeding lady there, who was seated…but this person is lying on the table…face down…I wait a few moments to check if the person moves…moments pass…there is no motion…everything is as still as the starlit sky…and then I notice that yellow blood…oozing from the cuts on her back and trickling down the table…I begin walking towards it…I keep walking…to my relief…I see the table closing in…the creepy silence…only that bulb moving filling in sound…note-silence-note-silence-note-silence…and then I hear a train…I look straight ahead at the walls…the siren increases with each passing moment…my legs freeze…was I on a train track?…the cabin starts quivering…everything starts quivering…the table…the body…the bulb…the ground…the walls…and as suddenly as it came…it stops, the train noise vanishes…and then I hear that scream again…her screaming in wild agony….”

I woke up wiping my face. My sheets were wet. For close to three years, this was the only dream that I dreamt. Day in, day out; night in, night out – this was the only thing that I seemed to be living for.

I tried several things. I met several doctors. Even cocaine didn’t touch upon this scar of mine. Then one day, one of old friends bumped into me. He looked aghast to see only a ghost of me, alive. He took me to a sadhu. At first I laughed. I even mocked his intellect. However having exhausted all my leads, I decided to check this avenue out as well.

That was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I expected that dubious sadhu person to smear ashes on my forehead and perform antics spiced with unknown Sanskrit mantras, to conjure the bad spirits out of me.

But what he did, threw me off-track. As I sat in front of him, he had said, “Welcome son. We have been waiting for you.” That he knew of my travails and was awaiting my arrival, was not what shocked me. The fact that he spoke in clear English with a flawless accent is what put me off. In that meeting, he handed me a book.

“…her screaming in wild agony…and then suddenly silence hits the dream again…the small white bulb goes out…and when it comes back on, the creeps crawl through my spine…the bulb lay immobile in its position lost in cobwebs…as if it hadn’t moved in centuries….I look back down again…the body lay there…but even that sight psyches me…there was no more yellow blood…there was the normal human blood, red blood….scarlet red blood…I hear the train again…”

I woke up and had a glass of water. Then I glanced at the book that the baba idiot had given me, a couple months back. Not willing to go to sleep again and not having anything better to do, I started reading it. As I read that book, my mind expanded. Far more than it ever did with cocaine. A quarter of that book I understood, a quarter I didn’t, and a quarter was complete Greek and Latin to me. But that quarter which I not only understood but also could comprehend is what expanded my mind. Man might have advanced technologically, politically and socially, over the millennia. But the answers to his spiritual quests still the same as they were ages ago when these Vedas were scripted.

As I began reading the book, the nightmare got a bit more colourful and fortunately detailed.

“…I hear the train again…but it goes out as suddenly as it comes…the bulb flickers out…a white light hits my eyes…as I open them…I see some girl far away…running amongst the meadows…playfully, in all the innocence of childhood…the lights go out again…a while later, white light assaults my eyes again…blinking in the glare, I struggle to witness what’s happening…I see some teen at a distance…crouching in the corner…surrounded by goons…she is weeping…she is pleading…but then she is….the light goes out again…in the darkness I hear the train…trains come and go…then the light is back again…I see some lady on one of the railway platforms, further away from me…almost only bones and skeleton covered with a sheet of skin…I squint my eyes to focus on her…I can’t make out who she is…the light goes out again…”

Towards the end of the third year of living that dreaded nightmare, I found my peace. As the wisdom of the Vedas sedimented into my mind, I fathomed more about the world and importantly, more about myself. Armed with the empowerment of Vedas, I was finally able to see who she was…

“…I am back in that cabin again…the bulb moving slowly…I see the body lying on the table face down…I hear the train again…I know it is approaching my cabin…I start walking hurriedly…the room quivers violently…I get to the table…the train’s siren is unbearable…I know the train will hit the cabin any moment now…with anxiety I reach out to the body…I turn it around…it was…it was….me.”

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