A pricking Dream.

Written by Ceida Uilyc.



The last client had been an annoying nincompoop. A huge waste of time but otherwise, the cleverest investment, for money.

Sunder Pillai had not found the slightest reason to continue or prefer an automatic change or transfer or any a variant in the setting someone dead and worm-eaten all right by no, a guy from the administration and dead patriotism held since, decades back. Ghost of the decade back rather, past into the deeper alleys of the township. He never actually wondered how gleeful the other side of reality was. He simply consumed, and impregnated the caveman’s logic of living and has since, withheld every reason or trigger to change. From his otherwise high position held in Nivarana Construction Company that took only National Tenders,
rigid, mundane and moribund, the days were never any different from the religiously synchronized string of sequenced and precisely sketched automatons filling in lifeless roles, plots and dialogues. They seemed on whole, like some cheap paint with a very skunky smell, instead of the burning-the-nostrils oxidising smell otherwise.

Sunder jumped onto the lavender smelling red city bus and staggered on the footboard while plucking off his raincoat buttons one after another, deliberately.

A really old man was trying to stab him in the back in an attempt to let his own ticket not stale off and get on the bus before the automated meter beeped on.

But Sunder, unwavered and unpeturbed, unbuttoned his raincoat in the finest of a panache and climbed to the upper deck akin to, a clever juvenile delinquent with the least bother to be bothered about and, bother for or about.


"You orphan piece of schmuck”


Sunder Pillai jolted open his eyes and creased his irregularly lush white eyebrows at and, to be stunned by that flimsy amorphous wrinkly old blob of human matter flamed up on his leg space and on the edges of his Black Corona shoes shining the sole reflection in the darker spaces of the bus.

"Oldies!!!'' he murmured faintly.

The conviction was far from far, that he was not just senile but also chivalrous, yet.
The conviction past a half of an otherwise prosperous 100 , about to.

But.

He shut his eyes and rested his head back on the prickly steel-hand-rail, of the seat ahead. He did not plug out his ear phones, volumed at the highest bass; nor did he move for the half an hour trip ahead.

It hadn't stopped, the heavy downpour past three whole hours now.
First the cats came, then the dogs, then the pigs, after that monkeys and later on after a very fine display of oblique obscure an ode, the elephants and the ostrich big piranhas, pouring down in pounds of cold water and the droplets continued to drown earth in it. It hadn’t ever been like this. He wondered how his dead parents might be gloating in the urn back home, listening to the thunder, lightning and the ostrich big piranhas pouncing on and biting on, and onto his flesh with vigour drained out of his own veins.
All he could worry was the choking cold, down his spines to keep himself distracted from the normalcy that he did not dare open his eyes or take one breath irregularly long or short in the ceremonious regularity of the seventy two inhalations p/m.


The rain was a sudden change in the weather. It’d been rather roasting since the February end. The change had been primarily due to the absent humidity, not that it would have been pleasant upon its presence. But, humidity would have regularised the otherwise barbaric race quench thirst, and just keep on quenching and draining and quenching and draining on and on and on.


And with the sudden rains had come the memory of his thunderous college rains and that woman.
The dusky tall Marwadi Girl who had publicly proposed to him. Of course, the course took no turns because it had been Sunder and not the girl having to decide the flimsy notion pumped in with overwhelming romance and smothering publicity. Sunder Pillai went on with his exams and other chores. But, deep down, he believed, he had to reject ‘her’, owing to his responsibilities and obligations to the poor Brahmin parents who had all daughters to be married off and none a son to keep the wealth undivided and , waited on as a legacy for.

The memories roughly a thirty years old.

Gunjan Agarwal was a thunder bolt all around the campus. She was smart, scored brilliant, was fun through and through and was stunningly gorgeous. Sundar Pillai had never been proposed by anyone in his life, before or after that incident. The emphasis is, nothing could ever divert the already engraved fate of Sunder Pillai.
Sundar had not a single friend, in school campus or office. Sundar had always been dutiful. Overtly dutiful to his education and, only his education. He had topped both the Boards, also topped the entrance exam for Engineering, and passed out of college with a gold Medal and a scholarship abroad, which he dutifully refused and opted for working in a disgustingly rich Nation’s First Grade Construction company.
He’d never been late, absent or amiable in the thirty years of his Work Profile at Nivarana Constructions Pvt. Ltd.

“Gunjan Agarwal”

He whispered to amuse the young li’l puppet living under his chin.
He’d always stared at her from faraway places. Stunning, she’d always been.
He was, now, analysing with an irreplaceable annoyance what he’d gained by being dutiful all these years, not just to Noormuyi or Amma or Appa, but just, to everyone.

To do precisely as is expected of you.
To never be vulnerable to, emotional turmoil or depression or neurosis that all his colleagues ranted about.

He’d always felt that psychiatry was the biggest hoax of the century. That it required a brutal death compared to all the rest of the evils people fret around too much about.
But, that was thirty years ago. Fifty years of his life had been very laconic to state.

Sunder precisely fulfilled all his duties. He neither failed, nor under scored in his obligations.


The cold was causing these delirious thoughts to pop up in his head. He concluded, and opened his eyes.


Sunder tried to cough and rub and scream the shivers and the chilly cold wind to pause an ittiest bit, so that he could deconstruct these random neurotic discharges which was completely anew and afresh to handle, to him.

He put his raincoat on, and descended the steps and walked faster, trying to be louder than his clattering teeth , and faster with ‘one’ strong conviction, that is, to reach home.

He creased his brows in agony at the conclusion of the previous thought.
He’d never actually wanted, or desired anything, and that is, ‘any-damned-thing’ in his life.
He finished his education, relocated his family to New Delhi and had married himself to the illiterate cousin of his, whom his parents had chosen when he was born.

They were married for a twenty-eight years now.

He’d never touched her or even smiled or laughed with her.

He’d simply obeyed what he was told to.


Sunder Pillai ran, madly through the rains in order to keep his delusions away and his body to reset to his normalcy.
He reached his home before he could pause and breathe to realise the very asthmatic absence of it.

The door locked , from inside.

He knocked repeatedly on the teak one-piece door, noticing the power cut.
So, he knocked harder.
And again. And again.

Sunder was tremblingly irated.

And, he asserted a loud biased rage, with an overwhelming empathy for his wife, Noormuyi.

For pleasuring anything she wills, she'd completely perhaps forgotten his degenerating body earning to sustain her ugly blob, unworried about his own vital a role in her life.
Wasn’t he, her only world?

That illiterate cunt. I’ll show her what I am.
Such barbaric ruthlessness.

He felt the flares burning with a vengeance to beat her ungratefulness to a death however long it permitted, his trembling body .
He simply wanted to assert the respect he deserved.

Or rather required.
And, needed, as Sanders recited it.

His incessant knocks remained unanswered, till another ten minutes later he realised the cold had numbed him down to a level of paralysis and Sunder started calling her name out.

"Neelu''

'NEELU"

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!

He could hear vaguely, the hurrying footsteps now, a ray of light through the door’s crack and the bolt screaming open of the rusted old lock.

In something less than a minute, the door opened and a girl who was barely in her teens stood in front of him.
He was seeing her the first time in his life.


“Chinthu, where the hell is she ?”

Sundar could only hear an echo of his own voice, he felt someone was using his mouth and voice box to talk through him, as him. And. Moreover,he was speaking in Tamil ,his mother tongue. He did not understand who the girl was and he somehow could not articulate ‘that’ question, to her innocent fragile existance. For the first time, he was trying to dig into his mental data any and every thing about modern definitions of paranormal activities.

He suddenly realised he’d been staring at the girl all this while, while she stood silent in front of him, looking down onto the wooden floor with her shoulders slightly crouched and mumbling more in Tamil.

He realised he’d been shivering all this while.


Suddenly he felt a thud in his ears and the power came back.
He smiled. And walked towards the bathroom.

“Turn on the geyser, Chinthu”

“Aama, Saar”

His thoughts, confusions and palpitations were his only possessions, he recognised. The body that he’d lived in for fifty long years and the voice and face that had for so long confirmed he was Sunder Pillai was all, just not Sunder Pillai anymore.
A farce , perhaps.
But, to Sunder Pillai, a farce couldn’t be. By far, a fallacy is all that he could digest that too with none a comprehending crease on his lips.

Sunder kept his office bag on the dining table and walked into the bathroom. He ripped off his raincoat and his shirt.
Two buttons popped off his shirt and suddenly, he realised he’d been dripping wet.
Raincoat away, Sunder realised it was all his sweat that was dripping and soaking the clothes inside the coat.

Sunder pressed his palm against his belly and realised that his two decade old pot belly was no longer there. His body possessed abs. And scars, few, big and small.

He switched on the shower and let the burning hot water roll down his icy numb body.
Every drop settled with a steam popping up akin to a cigarette stubbed into water. For three-fours seconds the boiling hot water settled on every ice clogged pore of his dermis, with a fizz. The burning heat pricked open the iced pores.

Sunder screamed aloud.

It was not simply pain, it was more like someone slowly drilling a million nails into your body after giving you anaesthesia. The prick into a paralysed body when it can sense the emotions and still have no outflow of the felt emotions. The original repression of the whole of an emotion.
This being one the few, plausible realistic 100% favourable cases.

He walked out of the shower and ran into his bedroom. He jumped into his bed and covered his body with his quilt.
He breathed in and out trying to connect a woollen route from every ice-clogged pore of his body. He knew he’d have to have patience. Only then could it work, at all. He’d have to wait, breathe and let the seconds pass, for the umbilical warm connection to acclimatise the utopian comfort of the warm quilt.

Sunder could see her silhouette, lying on the next bed in a foetal curl.

What was odd was that, she was wearing executive pants and had formal shoes on.
Now, Neelu changed the channels when anything close to a modern woman came onscreen. Only if the serial was directed by Chandanahamsan Pujari, did she watch it. But then, Noormuyi, or as I preferred to call her, owing to the ease, Neelu, never could buy the concept of a ‘working woman’ at all !

“NEELU”

Now warm, and remembering his forgotten wrath, he screamed with enlightenment.

He jumped onto the floor and pulled her by her hand, out of the bed.

Alas.



With the same power that he’d pulled her up, he shook off her and screamed, shutting his eyes with his palm too tight into the cavities.

Her body landed on the bed with a thud and she screamed.

A soft, low, scream.


“The Hell!!”


Sunder opened his eyes and found himself looking at an old woman in her 50s and bore into her trying to trace the familiar tinch that he’d been feeling.

“Gunjan”

He murmered in a whisper when he felt the thud again.

This time, somewhere else.

Somewhere in the belly.

Yes, he was in his belly and he could hear his own muffled voice intonated in a proper Bengali and something that he could not comprehend.

“Tumi amar matha kharaab koro na ajey”

“Teekhache”


Sunder got up, removed her shoes, and tucked her under the quilt.


“Must be my last periods”
“You’ve been telling me precisely that every month for the last five years Gun(not pronounced as ‘Gun’, but as in Punto.)”

Gun lifted her head off the pillow and smiled at him.

Her wrinkled smile was no longer gorgeous , it was plainly obnoxious.
Yes, in college she was three years older than Sunder. But, in the tenties, as it’d show !
Sunder remembered, his Neelu was eleven years younger than him. Fresh and nubile when she came as his wife at the age of twelve, she was ripe till he could remember.

Sunder was no longer perspiring.

“Would you keep me warm sweetheart”

Gun was now looking at him with her half dazed eyes.

“Sure Gun”



He sneaked under her quilt and felt her warm body against his cold one.

She jerked away the moment their skin touched. She rolled a little lower on the pillow.

“You are nearly dead, Sweetheart”

Gun’s dove like eyes had the same glow he’d been magnetised to sacrifice all for, thirty years ago.

Thirty Years.


“Drain my warmth, Ajay” She smiled and cuddled to move on top of him.


The same moment he looked into the bedside mirror.






Sunder Pillai did not look like that.

He remembered a wedding invitation he’d gotten long ago, of Gunjan’s marriage with Ajay Shukla.

Sunder was calm.


Sunder felt a strange heat in his groin. He wrapped Gun’s petit torso in his big arms.
He’d never done any of the same or felt anything like this ever in his life. The only reality, that he could ever want was his, and only his, now.

“Ami Tomako bhishon bhalo bhashi”

He hugged her and felt a smile on his lips.

A smile on ‘his’ lips.






END