A dream—though I must admit that I am not one to take a nightly trip to dreamland, and when and if I ever do, which is about once in a blue moon, I find it incredibly difficult to recall the experience when I awake, unless it is very intense.
The dream I am about to recount was just so and followed a traumatic experience.
It was the January of 2008.
My father-in-law had just passed on, and my mother-in-law was lying in a coma in India. My husband, an only child, had to make frequent trips to Kolkata. Between that and his international assignments, he was seldom home with me in England.
Worried, sad, and lonely, I had just my father to turn to, and though he was 5000 miles away, I called him all the time. He would always pick up and talk.
And then he died.
In the days following his death, I was not just lonely— my circumstances had not changed—but I felt a deep sense of remorse that I had not been there for him during his last moments. I cried myself to sleep every night begging him to appear in a dream and tell me where me he was.
Six weeks later he did—in an incredibly vivid dream
The Dream
I was with some complete strangers in a faceless crowd at a packed town hall event.
Apparently, they knew me, and they all said the same thing—my father had built a stunning villa, ‘White House’, and it was a shame that I had not visited him in his new home.
“But nobody has said a word to me about it,” I said. “Where is this house?”
They named a country and the next thing I knew I was at the house, in the kitchen-cum-breakfast room with my mother and sister who had already arrived.
I was exhausted from the journey and thirsty, and although there was a sink and a refrigerator in the room, I asked my mother for some water.
“Sure,” my father replied instead and led me indoors to a bright sunny room with gleaming walls and a spotless bed. They were all, like the gossamer curtains at the window—uncompromisingly white.
“This is your bedroom,” he said enthusiastically, tucking my suitcase into the closet.
Something about the starkness of the room reminded me of my thirst. “Baba, may I have a glass of water, please?” I asked.
In response, he threw open the window. Cool air rushed in with a sweet, smooth, mellifluous music. It could have been a gentle breeze flowing gently through the garden.
I caught the heady, exotic scent of flowers and inched my nose forward and inhaled. “M-mmm.”
“Jasmine,” he said, grinning with a twinkle in his eye.
I had missed that warm fatherly smile and his gentle presence. It had been several months since I had last seen him. “Lovely!” I beamed, following his line of vision out the bay window to a lush green lawn, bordered with bougainvillea hedges, creating cascades of color and framing the pearly sky.
“The sun never sets here,” he beamed. “Let me take you upstairs; everything looks prettier from there.”
As in a trance I climbed up the white enameled staircase with him, and not until we’d stepped out on to the wrap around balcony, did I yearn for that glass of water. “Baba, I asked you for something. Why won’t you—”
“I will, I will.” He shuffled toward the balustrade. “Look at the view.”
It was breathtaking—the perfect place for soaking in the afternoon bliss. And the dulcet melody washed over everything, leaving a sort of glow in its wake. I saw once more the bougainvillea in its sweet golden glory, clusters of bracts cascading down from a height down to the lawn below. “If only it was a cold drinking fountain!” The words tumbled out of my mouth involuntarily.
He looked away.
“I was genuinely thirsty, Baba.”
“Look,” he said, pointing with his chin. “Can see your mother’s house?”
I nodded.
“And look a little bit more to your left and you will see your sister’s too.” Baba sounded triumphant.
I, cast him a furtive glance, intrigued why he was behaving so strangely; he had been a doting father who seldom refused anything. “Baba, it’s not like I am demanding something impossible. It’s just a glass of water.”
His face fell. “Isn’t it enough that we can spend some time together after all these months—”
“But I am so thirsty—”
His face contorted. Perhaps I spoke a trifle impatiently. I hated the hurt look on his face as he leaned back against the balustrade and pointed to a room with a little balcony on the third floor. “Go up there—you will find what you want.”
“You wait here—I’ll be right back,” I said, without so much as a backward glance.
I bolted up the stairs. The music around me intensified with every step I took toward the room and consumed me entirely as I pushed its door open.
A small museum of antique musical instruments greeted my eyes, invisible hands playing on them. There was no sign of water anywhere.
A sense of betrayal flooded me. “Baba!” I ran out onto the little balcony and peered down. “Baba!” I did not see him.
I dashed toward the staircase.
Clouds scuddied their way across it—the treads and risers vanishing into it. The puffs of white magic moved low and fast, rippling, swirling, claiming every inch of the villa . . .
I awoke a happier person, convinced that my father was in heaven, happy and secure, where I did not wish to revisit him, considering that there was not drop of water in or around it quench my thirst.
With time I felt an inner peace. Death, after all, was an inevitable process, something that we all had to go through, and something from which there is no escape.
And it felt comforting to believe that what came after death was not a quiet, dark, welcoming nothingness, but a place where it was always afternoon.
I forgot about my dream.
I was in for a surprise when nearly four years later, on the first morning of our move to the US, the dream popped back into my head, seemingly out of the blue, as part of a story concept—No.7.
Nandita Author 