The Strange Dream One
The sky was clear; a brilliant blue, and the sun was high. My younger brother and I were in a posh-looking neighbourhood of tree-shaded bungalows, much like the average American suburb. Or, at any rate, how many foreigners might imagine the average American suburb. For antecedents unclear, the cast of Sarabhai v. Sarabhai was bidding us their goodbyes, piling into a car to whisk them away. The last goodbye was said by Sumeet Raghavan.
We entered a two-storeyed mansion that was to our left. We made way through the stairs. The stairway culminated into a wooden door, and through the door we entered the upper storey. Closing the door behind us, I was distracted by the sight of an unusually tall pedestal fan placed at the corner. It was made of plastic, pale gold in shade. So were its three restful blades. It was, most unusually, connected to a high-power socket — the kind that is usually used for air conditioners and refrigerators. And it was directly underneath a snow-white ceiling fan, four-bladed and small. A most unusual arrangement.
It was a spacious room; it looked like a spacious attic. Its walls were pale yellow, reminding one of uninspiring-looking old government buildings in India. But they were void of blemish. Bright sunlight streamed in through the unimaginatively square windows and their translucent panes. The roof had ten rows of thick concrete beams and many more slender beams, perpendicularly situate, forming a mesh. The ceiling was of transparent glass, and daylight filtered through the glass; but because my dreams have always warped reality, the light did not at all illuminate the room! The room was only lit by the sunlight streaming through the windows on two of the room’s four walls. There were several pillars, all light brown. But the wall directly opposite to the door that led to the stairway was wood-panelled. The shelves situate next to that wall had stored in them several bottles of champagne, Scotch, claret, and other rich libations. I distinctly remember that, even in that dream, I was aware that I was dreaming, and I resolved to myself to keenly eye all the interior to write an answer on Quora!
The floor was void. Imagine concentric rectangles, and the inner rectangle was a void. One could only walk on the slender footing between the two rectangles. We found another door, and we entered. It was an empty room, slightly smaller, as though a storage room. It was dark-grey, and it seemed as though even the walls were carpeted. Next to the door in that room was a white shelf with test-tubes, filled with unfamiliar-looking liquids.
We left that uninspiring room and found, to our surprise, that the floor of the previous room was void no longer! It was of brown wood. We decided to treat ourselves to a sample from the ornate bottles. Before we could do so, an attendant emerged from nowhere, wheeling in a large tray-table full of cutlery and canned drinks: Pepsi, Schweppe’s ginger ale, and Coca-Cola. A woman arrived, equally from nowhere, looking perfectly like Queen Elizabeth II, and in the voice and demeanour of Maya Sarabhai, told the attendant, “This assortment of cans is so lower middle class!”
Suddenly, there was a table in the middle of the room, as though it had always been there. Members of my family and my residential society were there assembled, as though always there, too. The parents prepared to present a Marathi play, and my father commenced the formal introductory address. Part of the play involved the parents bothering us by snapping our photographs with the sort of cameras that flashed a brilliant light in one’s very face!
And then I awoke to the sound of my grandmother’s preparations to boil the morning milk.
I had posted this on Quora two or three months ago.
