Moon Dreams

I could not have been more than six years old at the time, an age when imagination is ripe and reality and fantasy freely interact, when the more real burdens of existence do not make themselves as evident to those of us (and I would be lying if I said I was not among them) blessed with, shall I say, a 'normal' upbringing, a childhood qualified by the usual joys and sorrows, no more or no less than most others. Perhaps fantasy starts to fade faster for the unfortunates of the world, for whom the paths of cold reality dictate shorter routes to the next meal or the next night when father comes home sober. But I digress, and I am no one to classify people as less or more fortunate. I am here, instead, as an amateur raconteur, to relate my story, a true recollection, a dream, a fantasy, make of it what you will. But I feel a need to tell it. Perhaps, that way, it shall be easier for me to understand the true nature of my tale. So, you see, it is a selfish endeavour (like almost everything that I have ever done, but I do believe that I am nowhere near unique in this regard) but I would still appreciate your attention, and your input, and a story is always “told”, even if it serves some purpose exclusively to the originator of the fable, and no one else. And if you derive some entertainment from the story, more so to the good. I hope you are not put off by the overlong introduction fraught with tautology and disclaimers. I had thought about leaving out the introduction altogether, but sometimes I think knowing the artist (I do not pretend to be one but the word is apt to describe all the manners of people who are relevant to my statement: songwriters, composers, movie-makers, authors, painters and their ilk) helps understand the work that much better, the inherent flaws, the magical passages, the denouement, the intent. So I write not in the third person, but in the first, because what I choose to narrate here over the next few pages did happen to me. Whether the occurrences took place in actuality or dream it is for the reader to decide. For after all these years, it is hard even for myself, whose story this is, to truly believe in any memory, because so much of it is blurred by the passing of time, fading at the edges, smudged like a well-thumbed Polaroid photograph. And for someone like me, who dreams often but rarely in fantastic reality defying Technicolor, with the inexorable flow of days, it gets harder and harder to accurately distinguish between what happened in front of my open eyes, and what took place after I closed them, under the influence of drowsy afternoons or necessary night. Geography,an actual pinpoint location on a world map, is largely irrelevant to the account that follows. If it helps, imagine an almost-village in rural Bengal in the throes of a winter no more harsh than usual, a pleasant chill in the December air, and a blanket of constant fog that hangs over the mornings, raises itself into oblivion as the Sun ascends and sneaks back to obscure visibility once more as the night drops gently down from the darkening sky. I would not like to be redundant with descriptions, one never knows when one will run out of words, so the rest will follow as I get into the (to use a grotesque adjective) meat of the tale yet to be told. And if you are unaware of where Bengal is, it does not matter. The story I am about to relate could have happened anywhere, for the Moon rises in every sky.

As I mentioned at the start, I must have been around six years old then, in the middle of a happy if reasonably predictable childhood. The story takes place in a December in our place in the country, where we would try and visit twice a year, spend a summer week and a winter one. The urban streets would become too noisy and frenetic for my parents, so we would all take a family break, and travel a hundred kilometres or so out of the very undefined city limits to visit my uncle living in the aforementioned place in the heart of the (to us at least) idyllic country. I always liked these trips, for there was almost an aura of nostalgia about the moments that I found myself living through. As if, in asense, I knew that those times would be looked back upon by my older self, and they would acquire a warm sepia glow, even if right then the stuff of memories was the stuff of the present. Of course, in a tale told in personal retrospect, more mature perspectives do, of necessity, creep in. All that I mention here as a thought might not have occurred to me when I was six, but I believe that qualifying everything with bracketed comments would interrupt the flow of the story even more so than they have thus far, so I leave that bit of judgment to the reader. I loved waking up to bird-calls, all we had in the city were crows and a few occasional chirping sparrows. There was a certain way the sunlight hit the trees in the morning, an arrow through the yet-to-lift blanket of cotton-wool fog that hung in the air till ten in the am or thereabouts. The crunching of fallen leaves underfoot is another sensation that I took away from those winters. But daylight is not what this story is about. And I, for once, shall restrict my ever-present desire to be needlessly loquacious. This tale takes place at night and it is night when we begin.

It was still a year or so, if memory serves, till the power-lines dragged themselves to our retreat in the country. The year of which I write, we were still living by quaint lantern light, and the darkness seemed so much more relevant back then. My grandmother back home had suddenly been taken ill, a phone call in the morning to the nearest neighbour possessed of a telephone had informed. My parents had rushed off to the city, with the assurance that my father would return the next morning to take me back with him. This year's trip was almost over anyway, but it was an unsettling end. My parents left early morning and I spent the rest of the day roaming around the vicinity of the yellow walls of the house where I was staying, occasionally returning to the back-facade to watch the ants move endlessly in and out of their hole in the leaf-strewn ground. I would occasionally pick berries from the 'karonda' tree out back, but they were mostly too sour. There was never much to do, but I was one of those children who would not get bored very easily. I would read, I was picking up the magical habit back then, starting with Enid Blyton (I thought her name was Gnid till I was nine or so, because of the cursive way her name was spelt on her book covers) and then moving on to heavier things with time. Or I would draw, nameless, endless, pointless doodles in my notebook. That day was nothing different, and after my parents boarded their train in the morning, I thought about them, and how it never felt nice when they left ,then after a while I lost myself in my world. Lunch followed, a walk to the nearby pond with my uncle, and biscuits and tea in the evening, when the last orange beams of the setting sun still clung to the darkening sky. Soon it was night, and one of the primary differences that I always noticed with respect to the city was the altered soundtrack of the nocturne. Amidst a sea of progressing eternally busy humanity I would hear car horns, street vendors hawking merchandise, and television soap operas wailing their prime-time sorrows come evening, but here, here the silence spoke louder than I would have ever thought possible. I wondered sometimes how big the crickets must be to chirp as loudly as they did. Dinner by hurricane lantern, and afterwards I went out on the lawn for a walk. It was chilly, and looking up, I noticed the Moon for the first time that night, against a cloudless backdrop of the deepest blue that is not quite black. I could not quite tell if it was full, but I could see that it was pretty close to being its full scarred mesmeric shape, vicariously scuplting my winter night. There was a light cover of fog, but not dense enough for my six year old imagination to conjure ghost stories out of, to scare myself with. The dismembered hands, and skulls with eye-sockets of burning flame would emerge slowly only out of the thick fog that obscures everything, when the man wrapped in the white shawl walking next to you keeps his face and his hands well-hidden. This was not a scary night. I went back to my room, with its wooden bedpost (from which ants would rain down on sweltering June afternoons, but that is for another distinct recollection of events and dreams past) and little window with the iron net across it, just outside which there was a Neem tree. From the window I could see the bamboo grove across the street from my uncle's house. The Moon shone brightly through the silver- silhouetted bamboo plants and through my window, casting corrugated iron patterns in relief on mypillow. I did not feel like reading any more that day so I turned the lamp to a low setting (I would never blow it out completely, even if the night was one of the more friendly ones) and wrapped myself in the blankets of my childhood winter that, in retrospect, represent almost everything that happiness has come to mean to me. I was asleep soon after.

A jackal howl woke me up, keening, crying, somewhere deep in the night. I woke with a start, the first impression being one of panic. Everything seemed dark, and the dark always held terrors. The moonlight was not criss-crossing my pillow anymore, and the lantern was nearly out. I scrambled off the bed and turned the hurricane lamp up a little brighter, and the creeping shadows seemed to fade away, along with my momentary sense of panic. The jackal howled again, a wail, a tenor to the solemn baritone of the crickets, in the orchestra that the night had assembled to serenade itself. I looked out of the window, but it was dark outside, I suppose that is what they call pitch-black. The Moon must have been obscured by clouds, and it must have been late enough for all the neighbours' lamps to have been extinguished (I did not have a wristwatch but it had already been nearing on ten when I had gone to bed). The only light on the outside of my room was the faint glow emanating from the lantern inside, which cast a ghostly yellow glow upon the streets. I could barely make out the bamboo grove, they might as well have been really thin giants swaying in a soma trance in the late-December breeze. I could hear the leaves of the Neem tree outside swaying and rustling to the same impulses as the bamboo giants in the grove beyond. A firefly drifted by the window, a momentary spark of light. It was then that I heard the noises, which seemed to be coming from the far end of the road, which sloped downward, before bifurcating into two tracks, one of which met the pond towards which my uncle and I had walked in the afternoon, while the other led to another area of the almost-village. I saw the lights momentarily afterward, as the sounds grew steadily louder, men shouting, running with lanterns in hand, thirty golden eyes in the dark, and some were carrying sticks as well, 'lathis' we call them. They had to be chasing something, but I could not see what. I had been watching the road for a good five minutes before I saw the pursuers, but I had seen no one come running before them, the pursuee if you will, had evaded my eyes, as it seems, he (It? She? My imagination had begun to go its own way again) had evaded the men who were pursuing him. Now the chasers were nearing our house, and I could see them as clearly as was possible in that suddenly moonless night. In the light of the lanterns which marched in time to their irregular steps, their faces appeared different, and they certainly did not look like anybody I knew from the area (Over time, as I have thought about it, I have formed some impressions of who they might have been, or what they did actually look like, but I feel it would not be fair to impose such restrictions on the readers' imaginations, so I shall leave the description as incomplete as it would have been had I written this when the events written of here were occurring). But one thing I certainly recall noticing was the complete lack of emotion in any of the pursuers' countenances, even when they shouted (in what language? It didn't sound like Bengali or Hindi, but I suppose it must have been), the lamps they held cast a strange pall on their faces. But you have to consider my age, and the fact that this was by far the most exciting thing I had ever seen, so all the memories here described are best taken with a pinch of salt, even if they were not elements of a layered childhood dream. Thinking back, I also find it strange that none of the other adults in the house seemed to stir at all this commotion, nor my cousins, who were just a few years older than me, and hence probably not prone to the deep sleep that adults use to escape from the trials and travails of grown-up reality-burdened existence. But at that moment I was transfixed at the window, devoid of all rational thought, for to lose a second of the happenings outside would be a lifetime of regret. The men scoured both sides of the road, pointing their lanterns at the bushes, and the trees, and beating their sticks on the ground, as if to scare off snakes, but it was winter, and the snakes were sleeping. Not finding anything,they moved onward, till I saw their lamp lights disappearing on the horizon, and their voices died down soon after. I was seized by one of those impulses which the protagonists of horror stories are often seized by. But I did not come to a sticky end and there was no real element of horror to this story. At least, I was not scared then, when I slipped on my jacket, took my lantern, turned up the wick on the flame some more and stepped outside my room, into the absolute dark permeated only by the artifical yellow glow of my lamp. It was cold, and I had no plan in mind. I decided, for reasons unbeknownst to myself, to walk around to the back of the house, shining my light on the nameless bushes there. Another firefly, drawn to my light this time, weaving a neon path through the black. It was then that I saw him. Crouching beneath the Carissa carandas, he was wrapped in a shawl so dark (black as night, as cliché as it is, would be the appropriate expression in this case I imagine) that I would have never seen him had it not been for his unusually pale face and hands. I must have startled him for he rose abruptly, hugging his shawl close to himself, his only protection from the winter breeze. I noticed that he had no shoes, and his bare feet, though caked with mud and grass from his flight, still betrayed the same abnormally pale shade. Try as I might, I simply cannot recall what his face looked like. The cut of his jaw, the shape of his nose, nothing remains. The only prominent memory from that encounter is of the man's face being pockmarked, like someone who had scratched his acne as a child. I do not know what would have transpired then but he ran, the man with the cloak of night, for his pursuers' voices could be heard again, coming back the way they had gone. I saw his feet gleam momentarily white as he ran back towards the downward bend in the road before melting once more into the dark, the men with the lanterns following after. I think another search party was out by now, for I thought I heard a different set of shouts, this time from the opposite side. I did not fancy the man's chances. I waited awhile, a lost lantern in the cold night, before deciding that the action was too far away for me to observe any longer. I went back in, and with a mind unnaturally devoid of thought, I took off my jacket, kept the lamp once more (after having reduced the flame) on the bedside table and fell back effortlessly into sleep.

I woke up one more time, before the night was through. The moonlight had made criss-cross patterns on my pillow while I slept. I looked out of my window to see the bamboo plants, sharp silhouettes by claire de lune, while the source of eternal silver, the Moon, shone like it had been polished, through the well-defined space between two swaying bamboo shoots. The sky was as cloudless as it had been all day. A sharp wind stirred the fallen leaves outside, lifting them up and swirling them round and round in a mithril tarantella, and I heard a jackal howl again, deep (deeper than before it seemed to me) within the recesses of the soon-to-be fading night. I looked away from the mesmeric sights that the world had to offer, and I laid my head on my Argentum pillow. Drawing my blanket up to my chin, I momentarily thought of the shawl covered man beneath the 'Karonda' tree before my senses grew dull once again with sleep. I closed my eyes and drifted off while the silver leaves outside the window continued to dance gently in the late-December breeze.