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. 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 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

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Childhood

They say that childhood is the best phase of one’s life. I sigh. And then I laugh. I wish I could laugh raucously. But my voice was snuffed out long ago. By the conservatism of the family. By the ignorance of the religious people who controlled the family. By educators who were puppets of the system fabricated by religion mostly and ignorant but self-important politicians for the rest. I laugh even if you can’t hear the sound of my laughter. You can’t hear the raucousness of my laughter because I have been civilised by the same system that smothered my childhood with soft tales about heaven and hell, about gods and devils, about the non sequiturs of life which were projected as great. I lost my childhood in the 1960s. My childhood belonged to a period of profound social, cultural and political change. All over the world. But global changes took time to reach my village in Kerala, India. India was going through severe crises when I was struggling to grow up in a country where

Diwali, Gifts, and Promises

Diwali gifts for me! This is the first time in my 52 years of existence that I received so many gifts in the name of Diwali.  In Kerala, where I was born and brought up, Diwali was not celebrated at all in those days, the days of my childhood.  Even now the festival is not celebrated in the villages of Kerala as I found out from my friends there.  It is celebrated in the cities (and some villages) where people from North Indian states live.  When I settled down in Delhi in 2001 Diwali was a shock to me.  I was sitting in the balcony of a relative of mine who resided in Sadiq Nagar.  I was amazed to see the fireworks that lit up the city sky and polluted the entire atmosphere in the city.  There was a medical store nearby from which I could buy Otrivin nasal drops to open up those little holes in my nose (which have been examined by many physicians and given up as, perhaps, a hopeless case) which were blocked because of the Diwali smoke.  The festivals of North India

The Blindness of Superficiality

An Essay on Anees Salim’s novel The Blind Lady’s Descendants Superficiality is a deadly human vice though most people seldom realise it. It is easy to live on the surface of everything from one’s profession to religion. Anees Salim’s novel, The Blind Lady’s Descendants , tells us a story of superficiality as lived by quite many people. Amar, the protagonist of the novel, is 26 when he thinks that life is not worth living. He became an atheist at the age of 13. He had become a half-Muslim at the age of 5 when his little penis was circumcised partly since he ran away in pain during the process. Amar’s atheism, however, is as superficial as most believers’ religion is. What initiated little Amar to atheism is “Dr Ibrahim’s farting fit.” Islamic prayer has to follow many a rule. “If you break wind during namaaz, you break a big rule, and you are to discontinue the prayer then and there, with no second thoughts.” Little Amar was unable to control his giggles as Dr Ibrahim struggled to