Dating : Platform | Under the canopy of stars

“Are you sure it is your dream?” Parnab asked.

He started feeling cold all of a sudden. As if his body had been transported from a warm quilt to an open chilly space; which actually was the case… and his body’s heat was frittering away with every passing second. Like the pollen grains of a flower leave it for distant lands, when they get a whiff of a sudden welcome wind.

“Whose dream can it be?” she queried, as if he had asked a stupid question.

“Umm… it can be mine.”

“Yes, it can be yours. But I want to pee and you don’t… but who are you?”

She wanted to suggest that since she had something of a physical pressure building up inside her, she must be the dreamer. It was logical. You do not usually feel the need to micturate in dreams unless you happen to have a full bladder in reality. But she stopped herself. She forced herself to stop. She had never discussed her bladder with a complete stranger before, and did not want to do so now.

“First tell me who you are!?” he insisted.

“Let us wake up and go back to our waking state,” she said. She did not reply to his question.

“Yes, let’s do that. But how?”

“Let us dream that we are waking up,” she said. It seemed like a good idea. The line had also come out right. Let us dream that we are waking up.

‘Let us dream that we are waking up. It is a good line,’ he said to himself, thinking… I bet Padma would love it. Maybe she will include it in one of her stories. But what does it mean? “What?” He asked.

“I mean let us sleep in our dream so that when we wake up, we are awake. It might work.”

“Okay.”

They closed their eyes in their common dream. They forced themselves to sleep. They put pressure on their eyelids and pretended to be asleep. But moments passed and nothing happened… and they realized that they would never be able to sleep even if they continued feigning sleep for all eternity.

It was impossible. Swapna wanted to pee and Parnab wanted to go back to his bed where, in the warmth of his room, he could at least lie on his back and close his eyes.

He was still standing. And trying to sleep on his feet was getting on his nerves. Plus, he really wanted to wake up and count the number of coins in his box.

Now that he was technically awake to the reality of his dream, the itch had begun to overpower his mind. It had begun to colonize it… the itch of counting his coins. It was one obsession which he never could harness, which he never even tried to control. It was a mania which ruled him, and he was okay with it.

The ‘itch’ never really left him. And we know how we all have an itch… an invisible psoriasis in a region of our brain which makes us prone to the exigencies of madness and extreme departures from man-made norms. In other words, which makes us normal… like everyone else.

His most precious possession was a box. It was full of coins. Of all kinds of shapes and sizes, and made from every type of metal. It did not matter if they had some monetary value, but they had to be round, and metal. He liked them round and metal. He would collect coins from everywhere and anywhere. He preyed on them like a hawk. He gathered coins like bees gather honey.

Once he happened upon a coin lying on a railway platform. He was inside the train and had just finished arranging his luggage under his berth. He was looking out into the humdrum humanity on the platform, busying itself in its monotonous busyness.

The train was about to start. The pressure had been released and the engine had hooted twice. But the ‘itch’ was too much to ignore! He couldn’t do anything against it. Not that he wanted to. He had wholeheartedly accepted his slavery to that itch, like most of us do… and he rushed out.

He picked up the coin. It was a 1947 one-rupee coin signed by King George… a beautiful coin: new and glossy. It shone like a bright star on a cloudy August night. And now, he was running with it behind the accelerating train, struggling through the throng of people and coolies and luggage… and the train had gained a significant speed.

He ended up missing the train. Padma was furious. She was at her father’s home for her sister’s son’s Mundan ceremony. In fact, it was there that Parnab was going by train… to bring her back. She stayed there for an entire, extra week to make her anger duly noticed and came back only when he acquired loose motions from his meals at Prajapati Vaishno Bhojnalaya.

He counted his coins every day. It was a daily task, a sort of ritual now… which Padma had also grown very fond of. Whenever she felt a wave of love striking her heart, she would sit with him and listen to his chatter about the coins. “This coin was minted in the year when Indira Gandhi…” “This coin is not in circulation now but people buy it for five thousand rupees in the market.” “This coin, that coin”…

When she told him that his passion had a very specific name, he was intrigued. Before that he had no idea that his itch could be designated as passion and that it even had a name. He couldn’t pronounce it properly. Numismatics, say nyoo-muhz-ma-tuhks Padma would work hard on him. “You should at least be able to pronounce the name of your passion correctly.” He was still at his learning phase.

Every night before going to sleep, he would open the box: a cuboidal case with a plate-thin rectangular slot on its top and a little lock on its lid.

It was a beautifully carved metallic container, sapphire body with golden vines and leaves… a legacy from his father handed down through generations. He was very attached to it. According to his father, it had been gifted to his great, great, great, great, grandfather by none other than King Bhoj, the famous scholarly Hindu king.

In their tender matrimonial moments, he would begin babbling about his coins. He would say that she was so lucky to have married into a royal family, and Padma would roll on the bed, laughing like a queen, ‘Royal! Hahahahaha. With your matka and egg fart!’

Half an hour before going to sleep, he had a total of seventy-seven coins. But he was not entirely sure.

Yes, it made him happy that the number had increased. But he also knew that happiness about untruth eventually leads to unhappiness, and truth almost always comes out. And he was sure… that he hadn’t added any new coin in the recent past. He distinctly remembered that on the previous day, he had only seventy-six coins in his beloved box.

Now that he was free, even though it was only a dream he was wading through, he started thinking about his box. And the itch… to open the box and count the coins began to play on his mind. Now, he wanted to come out of the dream.

They opened their eyes, and then without discussing further about why they were where they were, they began talking about their lives.

“It shall pass some time,” Swapna said.

“Yes, it will. May I sit on the bench?” he asked. By now his legs had begun to ache.

“Yeah sure.” And she shifted a little to her right.

The mildly cold wind blowing softly across them had taken on a chillier mood. She found it pleasantly enticing. ‘Dreams are cold,’ she told herself, ‘or perhaps this particular one is’.