Logging out

He woke up to the loud and annoyed home system. It had started hurling abuses left and right, at an elevated voice. He had failed to wake up on its earlier wake up calls and pissed it off. It took him some time to calm him down and he asked for his mails, prioritized. He picked up the first. It was from Sarah, a pissed Sarah at that - even if he muted the mail, it would have been evident from the animated expressions she was making. It was her usual complaint - him not being able to give time to her, and a detailed tirade accompanying that. He disappointed her by giving no reply, no explanation. It wasn't that he didn't care about her. He had something else to take care of first.

He remembered the meme he had created to woo her. It wasn't a complicated one, but he was careful to leave no stone unturned and it took him two days to finally make it. He left it in her inbox and she traced it back to him. It was a game of memetic volley-ball made by the finest craftsman of memes and there was no looking back. He created more and soon, she was head over heels in love with him. He felt wonderful in thinking that he was able to make her feel wonderful. Until recently, when he started thinking what he did was manipulating her.

He opened his visuals and took a look at the charts. Some new kids on the block had hit high on the charts. Incredible speed and endurance. Some were able to hit the front pages in minutes and stay on there for months. It reminded him of himself in his heyday. He was responsible for creating one of the best in his time. That's how he had been employed at the G as early as when he was fourteen. He continued to make waves with his ideas and he enjoyed the adulation he garnered. Until he realized something was really wrong.

He realized it was wrong for people's fate to be decided by a bunch of algorithms. Wrong to disclose every idea, every thought that passed through one's mind. Wrong to be fed his next line of thought, something recommended for him depending on what his prior thoughts have been. He realized it was wrong to kill free will. And he did not want to be a part of such a crime anymore.

He had decided he had to stop it at any cost. But he could not do it alone. He needed people, an army. Thus, he began crafting feelers. It was a long, tedious process but he knew his patience would pay off. It did, and the few he found, he mentored them well. Slowly, but steadily, his army grew in size. It was gratifying, but he still had concerns. He was not getting any younger, and he needed someone else. Someone who could emulate and exceed him. Someone he could trust enough to pass the baton to.

The visuals beeped, snapping him out of his trance. He jumped in anticipation. He quickly sent a trace. His fingers tapped frantically trying to dissipate his excitement as he waited the seconds. Taiwan. More seconds as he ran the decryption, tested the signature. Positive. Rerun. Positive.

It was a kid, fourteen, just as he had been. And he had found him. It felt like discovering one's own son and finding out what a proud father he was.

Finally, he could log out.

A fishers' family

Nganthoi woke up, rubbed his eyes, and looked ahead into the day. It was dawn, and time to go collect fish from the net he and his father, Chaoba, had cast the previous afternoon. Nganthoi, like most children in his neighbourhood, had no particular liking for fish.

His neighbourhood comprised of a group of around ten floating islands on the lake. Each island was just big enough for a hut (for a family of five at most), and a garden.

In spite of the abundance of water in his surroundings, Nganthoi still did not know how to swim. His friends would smear his ego with taunts on his inability. But Chaoba was steadfast in not allowing him to learn how to swim. He wasn't allowed to stay away from his father's line of sight, and he felt cramped. He would be allowed to go on a boat only with his father, his mother or some of his friends that his father thought could be trusted. He was too old to be pampered thus, he thought.

Chaoba felt luck throbbing in his heart-beat. The previous day had been dismal; they had consumed the fish they caught themselves. As he pulled up the net with Nganthoi's help, he realized his premonitions had been right. It was a magnificent catch. Considering his job done, he sighed relief. It was now his wife's job to fetch a decent price for the fish, and from his experience, he knew she would.

As they docked into their island, the exuberant father and his indifferent son noticed the dhoti-clad sage standing in front of their house at almost the same instant. They had never seen a sage in their neighbourhood, and approached him with apparent surprise. The sage's eyes bore a blank expression.

Without speaking a word, the sage opened the bag that was hanging from his shoulders. Seeing its contents, Chaoba sent Nganthoi to fetch half a miruk of rice. No one spoke, and Chaoba stood, awkwardly staring at the door. When Nganthoi returned with the rice, the sage put his palm on his head, as if blessing him. A smile appeared on his face. For some strange reason, Chaoba felt the air become a lot less humid.

As Nganthoi withdrew his hand after emptying the contents of the miruk, the sage caught his wrist. The sage's face had assumed a look of consternation now. as he stared at the palm.

The sage uttered to no one in particular, "The next time the sun gets swallowed by Rahu, the shadow over this house will be darker. Be careful."

With this prophecy, the sage turned away and left the island on his boat - a boat that Nganthoi and his father had not noticed before.

Chaoba could not sleep for a subsequent three nights. He lay with his eyes closed on his bed, but knew he was awake. He continued his daily rut and told no one about his bout of insomnia.

Three days later, as he was having his lunch of rice and eromba, Nganthoi showed him a butterfly origami. Before Chaoba could finish praising his son on the excellent work those nimble hands had done, the origami started flapping its wings, and spending a bewildered minute or two inside the room, flew out of the window. That night, Chaoba slept like a log.

Days flew by, and the sage became but no more than a forgotten passage in the book of Chaoba's life.

Nganthoi, meanwhile had learnt how to swim with the help of his friends, in spite of the strict opposition of his father. He swam naked and made sure that he had completely dried himself before he wore his clothes. The day when he learnt how to do the backstroke, he could not hide the exuberance on his face. When his father enquired him of the reason for his exuberance, he lied, and attributed it to a game of marble that he had played exceedingly well.

The monsoons arrived, and the lake swelled with pride in the abundance of water it had. As fishing became more difficult, Chaoba worked harder.

Nganthoi 's concern was something else. It was breeding season, and the bulge in the abdomen implied, according to Nganthoi, that the fish was carrying millions of eggs. When he asked his father about the mechanics of eggs turning to small fish, Chaoba kept silent. Not because he felt it awkward to touch upon such a subject, but because he was ignorant of the piscine mechanics of giving birth. When one his friends told him that each egg would become a fish each, Nganthoi was so upset that he lost his appetite, and could not eat a morsel of his dinner.

His mood changed the next day, when his mother told him he could accompany her to the market where she went to sell the fish. While his mother sat in her allotted place selling fish, he would roam around. His favorite place was the toy shop, where he spent most of his time revelling at the numerous contraptions. He would then spend the next two or three days trying to make his own replica of something that endeared to him. Today, he saw a rifle that was a little longer than both his arms stretched out.

His mother was waiting for him when he went back. She bought him a kabok, and they headed back home. Midway in the journey, when they were in the middle of the lake, the place suddenly seemed to grow darker. Initially, they thought it was the clouds getting in the way of the sun. It turned out to be something else that was blocking the sun.

It was not a full solar eclipse, and Nganthoi, for whom this was the first ever, threw a slew of questions at his mother for some explanation on the spectacle. They continued to row.

In the distance, they saw Chaoba on the shore of their island waving his hand frantically. As they wondered why he was behaving so weirdly, their boat slowly steered itself to the left. The mother and the son stared at each other in complete bewilderment. Nganthoi felt a dampness in his shorts and when he looked down, saw water entering the boat from the side.

In the distance, they saw Chaoba diving into the lake.

Waking Life

A metallic cold seeped through my skin as the muzzle pressed close to my chest, almost touching my ribs. That instant, fear gave me a strength – an infinite strength – that was adequate to displace the gun and make my escape. I ran for my life.

Passages, alleys, boulevards blurred past me as I ran, ran and ran. Perhaps, I would have run more had I not hit a dead end. The edge of a cliff, to be more precise. There was no way I could run back. I just could not do that. I had to decide, fast. Then it hit me – I could jump.

I jumped. I floated down like a feather, the winds carrying me tenderly in its arms. I experienced a holy moment – one that seemed to last for eternity. I was placed gently on the laps of a pool of water. Then, the moment came to an abrupt end as it dawned on me that I knew not how to swim.

But I just knew what to do. I decided to wake up.

*****

“And as one realized that one is a dream figure in someone else’s dream, that is self-realization.”
-Federico García Lorca

Lucid dreams are dreams where you are aware of the fact that you are dreaming. The movie “Waking life” (8.3/10) explains the phenomenon of lucid dreams pretty intelligibly. This guy gets trapped in a dream where he dreams and awakens in the dream itself, going on in an endless loop. It’s a case of false awakening, where one dreams of being awakened.

You can test if you are having a lucid dream by a few simple methods. Read some text, look away, and read it again, or look at your watch, and remember the time, look away and look back. In most dreams, the text or the time would have changed. Also, light switched don’t generally work and reflections on mirrors are blurred or distorted.

Lucid dreaming can be induced too. The knowing and thinking about it itself is a precursor to lucid dreaming. A concerted effort to experience it will certainly result in one, though the ability to control the dream may vary from individual to individual.

More often than not, I’m aware of the fact that I am dreaming while still dreaming. It seems to give me a chance to do stuff which I cannot do normally, in my real life. For instance, I can swim in my dreams, or take some steps in thin air which I am otherwise not capable of doing. And sometimes, when you are in trouble in a dream, or on the verge of having a nightmare, you can ask yourself if u are in a dream and snap out of it. I haven’t really explored the possibilities, but plan to whenever I have such dreams. One problem I have, though, is my inability to recall my dreams.

One aspect of this is having a déjà vu in dreams. A sequence of events which u know has happened before in a previous dream, but never in ur real life. There are even some people u have never met in real life, but keep bumping to in ur dreams. This is freaky.

Dreaming is something I have always loved to indulge in, perhaps concurrent with my desire to sleep. Maybe, it is time to take it a bit seriously. This line from the movie ‘Waking Life’ sums up my feelings fairly accurately.

"They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It’s not dead. It’s just that it’s being forgotten. I am trying to change all that. By dreaming everyday."

The last meeting

He heard his name being called in the distance. He recognized the voice; it was Jenny’s.

He had wanted to ask her why she was absent today, but before he could say anything, she had started to speak. She never stopped talking once she started talking.

“Your van has not come yet”, she observed.

His van was late again. These days, the driver was being very careless. He didn’t care much, but his mom was worried.

She continued, “We’re going home. Dad says it’s not safe here anymore. I don’t know if we’ll come back again.”

Jenny and Deep studied in the 5^th standard and were in the same section. While Deep stayed a few kilometers away, Jenny stayed along with her aunt in a flat in the teachers’ quarters.

He looked at her keenly, expecting her to continue talking, as she always did. But she unusually fell silent, and had stopped smiling. He hardly saw her without a smile. It was getting awkward for him.

“Why didn’t you come for class today?” he broke the silence.

“Aunt and I had to do some packing. Hey, do you think we are good people?”

The question took him by surprise, and it was not just the way she asked it. There had been some talk in the class about Jenny’s people being bad and all. But he hardly understood what it meant. Jenny always wore a smile and was nice to him. He didn’t understand why her people won’t be nice.

He saw his van arriving, and heard Jenny’s aunt call her.

“I have to go now. We can’t afford to get late”, Jenny said.

He wanted to ask her when she was getting back. But before he could open his mouth, she was already talking.

“We may or may not come back. I can’t say anything. Even my dad doesn’t know. My aunt is calling; I have to go now. You take care of yourself.”

“You too”, he managed to say.

She smiled. It was good to see her smile again.

He got in his van, and she walked away. She stopped as his van started moving, and waved. He waved back as his van started to pick up speed. She was still waving as the van went into the curve and before she went out of sight.

He hardly knew he was never going to see her again.