A Dream by Trisha Ghoshal

I saw myself in someplace i can only call an oasis. i knew i had landed there marooned from sort of a mishap.. this place though was funny..i found myself in a shack.. with an emaciated old man and a boy. i tried to get out of the shack but they wouldn't let me.. they kept fearing that a storm was on its way...

the wind outside would pick up momentarily and then die down.. i began to get claustrophobic and my head began to spin and swim.. at a distance i saw this lone tree in full bloom.. lush green swaying in the wind.. even when i couldn't feel the wind picking up.

then there was a blank and i found myself walking bare feet outside of the shack.. the old man stood guard with a stick guarding what looked like an old car long out of use.. abandoned there in the middle of nowhere.

I was walking barefoot  and the ground beneath my feet was clayey but coarse. In the distance the lone tree quivered and lashed every now and then. The air I felt was heavy, heavy enough to make its laden presence felt on my body as I walked past it. Yes, the air was heavy. The old old man guarding the abandoned car cried out behind me. I was expecting  the car engines to creak and echo. It was highly unnatural that it should sit there and brood and not creak. The absence of the creak echoed like drumbeats and my heart started to pound like drumbeats in my chest to make up.

The old man of course had spoken. Was it a stentorian prophetic call? Given how far away he was, it must have been. But in memories distances don’t count. And in dreams they do not even exist. So his voice comes back to me now feeble,rusty, full of false starts and sputtering.  Of the whole of the desert, he said,  this is where it rained. It rained and the tree yonder was born. It was born and it stands there swaying in living testimony. The rain wet the earth here, but she had no use for it. She retained no water and now in apology is nearly almost clay but coarse of no use. Nothing new is born here. The nothing of the old cannot be remade, how do you remodel nothing, there are not enough precedents.This place lies in indecision and we live with her, dying more, losing more, fading in indecision.