Skip to main content

No Regrets

It's been quite a journey together


Some nights are very didactic if not entertaining. Last night was one such series of dreams. I wake up from one dream only to glide into another as seamlessly as a train stopping at a station and then moving on. They are not nightmares. On the contrary, they are quite amusing.

Only two of last night’s dreams remained vividly in my conscious memory in the morning. In one, I was travelling by a bus with Maggie. Since the bus was overcrowded Maggie and I were in two different parts of the bus: the masculine and feminine halves of Kerala’s buses. Just before my stop arrived, which was near Maggie’s house, some passenger asked me a question. My answer started off a discussion which engaged me so much that I missed my stop and the next and the next. It’s only when Maggie’s call arrived on the mobile phone that I realised my mistake. Maggie awaited me at the right bus stop with her usual smile of amusement and sympathy.

The other dream had a totally unfamiliar and rather wild setting. Maggie and I were on a visit to some nondescript tourist place. While Maggie was getting ready in the hotel room I decided to take a look around and I wandered into some kind of wilderness with a polluted stream on its fringes where I lost my way. The place looked like some religious spot where all kinds of yogis and mystics and beggars and a whole lot of people were engaged in various activities most of which had some semblance of religious rituals. One ascetic with ashes all over his body showed me the way out of what appeared to me as a rugged labyrinth. But I lost my way again and by the time I reached back Maggie and I had missed our bus. Once again there was the same amusement and sympathy on Maggie’s face.

The motif of all the dreams last night was the same: loss due to my neglect and Maggie’s resigned understanding. I have often been amused by the fact that my dreams invariably form a series with a recurrent motif.

What was last night trying to tell me? That I am a big loser? I know that I am a loser but I don’t have regrets. I chose my ways and I blundered many times. That’s right. But I lived my life and learnt my truths. No regrets. Only lessons. And decisions. And we keep moving ahead. If one bus is missed, there will come another.



Featured post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers




Comments

  1. Pradeep NairDecember 12, 2018 at 11:29 AM

    Good one, Tomi. We all need to live the lives we are comfortable with. "No regrets. Only lessons. And decisions. And we keep moving ahead. If one bus is missed, there will come another." ... Good thoughts. :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

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
44 comments
Read more

The Circus called Politics

Illustration by ChatGPT I have/had many students whose parents are teachers in schools run or aided by the government. These teachers don’t send their own children to their own schools where education is free. They send their children to private schools like the one where I’ve been working. They pay huge fees to teach their children in schools where teachers are paid half of or less than their salaries. This is one of the many ironies about the Kerala society. An article in yesterday’s The Hindu [ A deeper meaning of declining school enrolment ] takes an insightful look at some of the glaring social issues in Kerala’s educational system. One such issue is the rapidly declining student enrolment in government and aided schools in the state. The private schools in the state, on the other hand, are getting more students. People don’t want to send their children to the schools run by the government systems. The chief reason is that the medium of instruction is Malayalam. The second ...
6 comments
Read more

The Harpist by the River

Preface One of the songs that has haunted me all along is By the Rivers of Babylon by Boney M [1978]. It is inspired by the biblical Psalm 137. The Psalm was written after the Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar II, conquered the kingdom of Judah and destroyed their most sacred temple in Jerusalem. The Jews were soon exiled to Babylon. Then some Babylonians asked the Jews to sing songs for them. Psalm 137 is a response to that: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?” There is profound sorrow in the psalm. Exile and longing for homeland, oppression by enemies, and loss of identity are dominant themes. Boney M succeeded in carrying all those deep emotions and pain in their verses too. As I was wondering what to write for today’s #WriteAPageADay challenge, Boney M’s version of Psalm 137 wafted into my consciousness from the darkness and silence outside my bedroom long before daybreak. How to make it make sense to a reader of today who may know nothing about the Jewish exile ...
4 comments
Read more