Skip to main content

Devika's Dreams

Fiction

Devika's dreams were filled with flying reptiles.  Crocodiles and serpents soared heavenward on diaphanous wings.  They disturbed her sleep night after night.

  "She wants the best of both worlds."  That was her father's interpretation of her dreams.  Seeing her swollen eyes in the morning, mother asked her what disturbed her sleep.  She told mother about the crocodiles and serpents with diaphanous wings that visited her night after night. Mother dutifully reported the matter to father.

  "Both worlds?"  Mother did not understand.

  "The reptiles belong to the earth.  Too much to the earth.  The wings belong to the heavens.  And diaphanous wings!"  He paused.  "Hmm... They belong to angels, I suppose."

  Devika was reading a poem by Sara Teasdale when mother was trying to decode the link between the terrestrial reptiles and the celestial angels.

  Stephen kissed me in the spring,
  Robin in the fall,
  But Colin only looked at me
  And never kissed at all.

  "ISIS attacks North of Baghdad, seven killed."  Father read aloud the newspaper headline.  He was silent for a while.  Then he said, "It's no wonder if she dreams of reptiles with wings."

  Stephen's kiss was lost in jest,
  Robin's lost in play,
  But the kiss in Colin's eyes
  Haunts me night and day.

  Devika continued to read Teasdale.  The aroma of fried eggs rose from the kitchen.  Mother was cooking breakfast.  Fried egg sunny side up was Devika's favourite item on the breakfast menu.  As long as there was fried egg sunny side up, the rest of the breakfast could be anything from plain dosa to humble upma with chutney.

  Did she inherit the flying reptiles from her mother?  Devika wondered.  When she was a little girl, Devika remembered now, mother had a peculiar headache.  Whenever an aeroplane flew over their place, mother would get a headache.  Since they lived in a village, the aeroplanes would be flying very high in the sky.  They were quite rare too.  They looked like tiny birds which hummed mechanically.  They gifted headaches to mother for a few years.  Then the headaches stopped miraculously.  "I have no more any desire to fly in them," mother said as if that was the explanation for her miraculous recovery.

  Will the reptiles stop flying in my dreams if I smother my desires?  Devika asked herself.  But what were her desires?  She wondered.  Maybe they lay somewhere beyond the horizon.

  Best of both worlds.  Father's phrase rang in her ears as Devika put aside Sara Teasdale and picked up her bath towel.  Soon she has to be ready to go the city where she worked for a software firm that specialised in creating apps for smartphones.

  As the shower water descended on her, a new app was emerging in her imagination.  A game with flying reptiles that could be manoeuvred by the player while bombs exploded beneath.  The successful player would be rewarded with a kiss from Colin or Colleen depending on the gender or sexual preferences of the player.  Virtual kiss, of course.



Comments

  1. And that made me remember the recent popularity of Pokemon Go, a smartphone game. dreams, desires and reptiles. Now that's a creative story :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Strange, how addictive a game can get that it leaves a mark unknowingly on the mind. Very interesting story. I too wonder if the inherited headache played a part in bringing the reptiles to life in her nightmares.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dreams too can be inherited, perhaps. :)

      And dreams have no horizons.

      Delete
  3. Nice way of combining gaming with rustic imagination

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dreams have no boundaries, Subha. The rustic horizons can't limit them. And the urban realities such as bombs infiltrate villages indirectly....

      Delete
  4. I liked the father's dream interpretation! If nothing, her dreams gave wings to some constructive ideas for work! Historically,the most improbable inventions sprouted from dreams. But the question in my mind is, did she inherit her mom's dreams....interesting!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dreams are contagious 😀
      There are people whose feet are on the earth and heart somewhere out there.

      Delete
  5. What a wonderful dream! Beautiful story.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Many layers in the story - desire, terrorism, possibility of having the best in both the worlds and the probability of that becoming a reality virtually....Just googled about Teasdale here and read about her suicide....So this was a deliberate choice....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. First of all, thanks Sunaina for being such a serious reader. Yes, the story is more complex than my usual ones. Many layers. And you're also right about my choice of Teasdale.

      Delete
  7. Very interesting....I do believe that dreams are our propellers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dreams can also indicate what's happening in the unconscious mind ☺

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some