Dream

I was walking in the city of dreams, and I did not know if I was awake or dreaming. I had wanted to see this city all along in my dreams, and now here I was, not knowing if it was a dream. I was walking in a daze, only partially alive, only partially awake. Dimly I knew I was searching for something, and that I was being compelled to walk for reasons beyond my understanding. Some obscure, long forgotten desire had driven me to roam around inthe city in a stupor, even though I had no idea how I found myself to be there. And even though I was not directly connected to the city, I was intuitively aware of ties stronger and more inexplicable than conventional ones. Perhaps the answer to that also lay in dreams, in some long forgotten memories. So I walked and walked, lonely as an invisible outcast among the hordes thronging the streets. No one looked at me and I looked at no one. I found myself walking along the dark corridors of a university where I had never studied, and yet which was bound to my destiny in the form of those inexplicable ties, all the more inexplicable because those ties had severed themselves and I did not remember what they were. Was that what made me walk? The search for those ties? The emptiness and futility I felt as I walked along told me that the only connection now lay in the ties having been broken. Nothing else bound me to it now. It had all been ripped asunder from my destiny in a far away past, alive in some corners of my past existence, living on in my memory. What drove me to it? The ghost of this past association. And I was only half awake, or I would never have gone. There was nothing. The fuzzy light of the cloud obscured sun lit up an open doorway, but the rest of the place was in darkness. The sun did not exist in those regions. There was not a soul. There could not even have been a ghost. In vain I tried to call out for someone, to the people I had known once. Only a cat came along with tail upraised. I lured it into a corner where I started kicking and showering blows upon it. The cat shrieked like a demented spirit and drove me to near madness with its wails as it bit and scratched around in terror. My hands were covered my own blood as a result of its scratching. I wanted to kill it, but after a while I opened a door and let it go. I slowly followed it into a corridor, weak and spent, where I met a gardener tending to some plants. I asked him where everybody was. But he was dumb and I could not understand his gestures. I was too weary to spend any more time on him, and I walked into the streets once again, lonely as before, as drugged and stupefied as before, like an invisible outcast among the teeming hordes. Even mother Ganges could not offer me solace; she went along her way, indifferent.