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Alu Basu Mercy of the Dream Collector

Chapter 1

Her husband never believed Leenie when she woke up frosty-eyed in the mornings and told him what she’d dreamt of at night.

She’d never forget the morning of the North Sea tragedy. The day she raised her husband’s head from the patch of drivel on his pillow, woke him with her trembling fingers in his hair and told him how the faces from those frozen bodies washed up in a cold grey sea were still staring at her and he asked for the newspapers, asked whether the tea was ready, and listened to her with politely distanced curiosity.

The newspapers arrived late that morning, stacked with news of the North Sea air disaster.

Leenie bit the corner of her lips till they were rumpled purple and stashed away the conviction in a far corner of her head that her sexual anorexia had been charmed into clairvoyance. She turned her welling eyes away from her husband when he was telling her that a little PFT or Alka Seltzer or just plain old-fashioned Eno’s fruit salt for a nightcap might give her a good night’s rest safe from these vicious devils that stalk her in her sleep.

She expected a little more sympathy from her son Sachin but got none at all when she woke him up in her stockinged feet and told him she’d just dreamt of coming home with a wicker basket full of new clothes. Dreaming of new clothes meant a death in the family, she’d learnt on her grandmother’s lap. She didn’t know who the clothes were for. She was shaking, because some of the shirts were small enough to be Sachin’s, who was only twelve years old, going to boarding school for the first time, in Darjeeling, four hundred miles away from home. In the blue mountain cold. So cold that her feet hurt through her thick stockings when she walked on the stone floors of the Planter’s Club where she was spending the first long weekend of the school semester with her son. And this was only August.

‘Play some rugby with me Mum-Mum, and you will never dream of new clothes,’ was all that Sachin said, turning in his sleep, and she wanted to smother him with her loneliness.

When the long-distance telephone lines whined and crackled into a conversation, she learnt from Calcutta in the febrile morning light that the dream was about her grandmother. Her fourth cerebral stroke had heaved her away.

Billowing back home in clouds of broad gauge loco smoke she decided that she would no more confide to the men in her life. She would commit herself to paper.

She was ankle-deep in the mist of a twenty-six year old memory on the lower bunk of the sleeper in Kanchenjunga Express when it screeched to a raucous late-night halt at Malda. Something in the air began to stifle her memory of the chestnut-skinned Ronodeb swimming further and further into the angry Teesta, without a stitch on him, and without the slightest suspicion that Leenie was out so early in the morning, watching him from her bird-house in the deodar trees. Leenie the funny girl. Leenie the twit. Leenie the so-and-so. Leenie the awkward idiot who punched him in the face when he tried to kiss her.

Leenie the nervous mother woke up to the evocative gutturals of the electrical gang-man under her window warning the loco driver that all the fucking fuses were blown and all the assholes in all the compartments from this one to the last in the train were going to get buggered in the heat if the driver didn’t shut his trap and let him get on with his work.

When the mists of Teesta faded out decisively in the gritty darkness of her railway compartment, the image of a royal-quarto-sized, morocco-bound, single-ruled writing book faded in. Along with the image of the fifteen-year-old Ronodeb standing in the tall glazed doorway of their tea-garden bungalow. Standing stiff-necked. Officially trying to say goodbye to her. Because he’d fought with his father and was leaving home. He gave her this strange leather-bound writing book and told her to write down in the book every dream she dreamt of him. When the book was full he would come to collect it. No matter where he was, he would know. Except for the clumsy botched-up kiss in the Planter’s Club parking lot, this was the only other attempt he had ever made at letting her know that his heart kindled special feelings for her. But he left without another word and she had never seen him since.

Yellowed to the spine, nesting squirmy silverfish, growing sleek green lines of mildew, every page of that book was still as blank as twenty-six years ago. Hiding in an unweeded corner of her wardrobe, tangled with her spoilt leotards, her outmodish Tibetan junk jewellery, her no-no halter-necked hot pants, and sinking under armloads of teeny tinsel memorabilia.

She was going to bring that book out of exile and fill it with her dreams. Mrinalini Gupta’s Book of Dreams. That’s what she’d call it. Or maybe just Leenie’s Dream Team. Anyway the title could wait.

On the 17th of August she wrote:

Last night I dreamt I was walking down a long narrow corridor of grass. At the end of the corridor were the steps that lead up to my house from the garden. As I took the first step I noticed that there was something very small made of raw flesh lying on the steps.

I bent down close and saw that it was a tiny bird. So tiny that it was like an embryo. It looked so horrible and helpless, its puny heart beating under its shiny pink translucent flesh.

Feeling frightened and eeky, but very sad for the little bird, I delicately picked it up, trying not to hurt it or break its fine thread-like bones that I could see through its flesh. It opened its beak, croaked and died in my hands.

There was a little urchin boy behind me, watching. When I turned around and asked him to bury the bird for me, he smiled and went away.

After Leenie wrote her dream down, penned a few corrections and looked out of the window at her garden, she remembered that long ago someone had left behind a book of dream symbols. It was still on the book shelf. It was called Dreams: Hidden Meanings and Secrets.

The book was alphabetically arranged. She turned to BIRDS:

It is a good omen to dream of birds with beautiful plumage. A rich husband and a happy marriage are predicted if a woman dreams thus. Moulting and songless birds signify crushing injustice to the unfortunate by people of wealth. To see a wounded bird foretells worry caused by wilful and disobedient children.

Then she turned to GRASS:

If you dream of green grass bordering a flower garden, you will make money at the same time that you are making love. Brown, sunburned grass, neglected and gone to seed, predicts that you will have to work very hard for what you get.

She found no entries under URCHIN, CORRIDOR or EMBRYO, and in fact didn’t remember that corridor of grass as very green. If anything it was sickly.

The book didn’t have a foreword or introduction; it didn’t even have an author’s name on it. The publishers, ‘Tophi Books’ of New North Road, London, didn’t bother to give you any explanations about how they arrived at these hidden meanings. Yet it rang so true. Something was very real. Something that was going to happen to her or her husband or her son had been signalled out to her from the kingdom of the unknown.

On the 18th of August she wrote:

Last night I dreamt I was trying to find an old electricity bill in the mess of papers in my writing cabinet. The file was overflowing. Many of the old bills had just been stuffed in loose. The tin clip in the file was rusted and I couldn’t find the old green punch machine.

From the sofa behind me Robert De Niro spoke to me in this friendly, informal fashion. He said, ‘So you still think Taxidriver is my best movie, do you?’ And he laughed very pleasantly.

‘Along with Dog Day Afternoon,’ I turned around and replied without thinking.

He was wearing a dark off-black shirt with off-black trousers and a tweed coat shot with black and light grey. His eyes lit up with that charismatic twinkle, ‘That wasn’t me,’ he grinned, ‘That was somebody else.’

And I realised what a fool I had made of myself. Robert De Niro drops by, behaves so sweetly and I go and mix him up with Al Pacino. I cursed myself and said, ‘Aren’t you feeling hot, in that tweed coat? In Calcutta we only wear our tweeds for Christmas and New Year. Give it to me. I’ll hang it up for you.’

‘Let me give you a back rub. Your back must be awful today,’ he says and gets up.

Glad to have been able to change the topic I willingly turn around and he begins massaging my back, digging his thumbs into the flesh under the shoulder blades, just where it aches so much. But he is doing it just as badly as my husband, and I have to politely tell him to shift the pressure from the heel of his palms to the tips of his thumbs. He is very patient, tries to do what I’m telling him, but is quite clumsy.

Malati my ancient maid comes and stands in the doorway, broom in hand, aghast. She gives me a withering look and says, ‘Ask this babu to move. Or how can I sweep the floor?’

This is what Leenie found under CELEBRITY:

If you dream of meeting a celebrity and he or she is stand-offish, you will suffer disillusionment of some kind. If the celebrity is gracious and agreeable, you have a pleasant surprise in store for you. This applies to such celebrities as movie actors and actresses, high government officials, novelists, painters and other artists; in fact, anyone who is in the public eye.

Her hand crept to the small folding picture frame on her bedside table. It opened like a centre-fold, with a picture of Sunny in his wedding finery on the left hand side, looking intently at Leenie’s shyness under her sheer bridal veil on the right hand side, the smoke from the nuptial pyre smarting her eyes, the Hindu priest mumbling his mantras in soft focus behind her.

Her mind crept to the day Sunny first saw that picture frame. It was the morning after those pictures had been taken. They wouldn’t be delivered to her till the day after. So the frame had some other pictures in them. That’s what had amused Sunny.

It was after their first night on their very own jasmine showered nuptial bed, made of the finest pine her mother could afford, which Sunny almost reduced to splinters, the way he made it shake, when Leenie shook in his arms, as she gave him her rose of honour - four times, in four corners of the bed, leaving an indelible imprint on the six inch Dunlopillo mattress.

‘One for the east, one for the west, one for the north and one for the south,’ Sunny jumped with joy in the morning, ‘This means, that for the rest of our lives to come, we will make love every night, no matter which way we face.’

That’s when he saw the picture frame, and Leenie felt like a fool for not having removed it or hidden it.

‘Aha, but we haven’t been here alone, have we?’ He picked up the frame, ‘Someone’s been watching over you. Is it alright with him?’

That picture frame had been there for so long that she had actually stopped noticing it, like pieces of furniture you are blind to. It had a picture of Robert De Niro on the left hand side and a picture of a teeny Leenie on the other. She was jubilant on the victory stand of a tea garden sharp-shooting competition, with her father’s BSA magnum in her hand.

‘Hey, hey, hey, this is a real photograph. Not a print,’ Sunny had pulled the De Niro picture out of the frame and was turning it around, visibly impressed, ‘And it’s signed. Wow Leenie! You’re celebrity stuff, moving around with Hollywood royalty. What oomph!’

‘Shut up,’ Leenie snatched the picture out his hand, and put it she couldn’t remember where, ‘Don’t talk rubbish. It’s something Sheila got at a London De Niro premiere or something and she sent it to me because she knew I was a huge fan those days.’

‘Sheila who? But don’t throw it away. Keep it. I like it, and you’re looking good with that gun in your hand.’

‘Rono’s cousin Sheila. Doctor in England. We used to be friends long ago.’

Sunny sucked all of Leenie up in his mouth from lips to lungs, to say that he really didn’t mind.

But Leenie had changed her opinion, she told him, when she got out of his rib-smashing love-clasp.

‘He used to be my number one man in the world,’ she said, hiding from Sunny’s amused stare, ‘Now he isn’t any more. Those pictures will change.’

But that was in the spring time of their marriage. These were the autumn tides.

On the 19th of August, three thirty in the morning Leenie clutched at the weight of an intolerable grief sitting on her throat, just above the right collar bone. She woke up to the knowledge that she was tearing away her coverlet, heavy with the sweat of a terrifying dream that had loosened her teeth in her prematurely receding gums. Then she felt the imprint of Sunny’s toenails on the softness of the crook of her knee and stole away guiltily, hoping that he wouldn’t wake up, wise to the sudden change of air in the bed.

She stood in front of her writing desk and prayed to the God of bracket hinges, asking him not to make them creak as she pulled it open. Her prayer wasn’t granted, they creaked magnificently, but Sunny still didn’t wake up, and she started writing.

Jeet Chaudhuri, that disgusting chap, was standing in front of the Planters’ Club parking lot.

Then his men brought Sunny in a cardboard carton and kept it in front of him. It was a carton the size of a tea chest. The computer printed label on the carton said it carried ninety-eight kilogrammes of compacted cotton fibre for onward despatch to the yarn spinning centre. Sunny was in a tight foetal crouch inside the carton, compacted with the fibre.

I asked Jeet Chaudhuri’s men to remove the carton to a place where I could talk to my husband in some privacy.

They left me with the carton in the middle of a desolate field. I opened the box, cutting the brown adhesive tape on the flaps. Sunny told me from inside the box without moving his lips that I should immediately seal the flaps again, not let anybody see the cotton inside. It was really precious fibre. Extremely coveted. Something he would have to guard with his life. That’s why he was inside the box.

Actually he couldn’t move his lips or even so much as a muscle in his body because he was hydraulically compacted with the cotton. His larynx wasn’t working either. But he didn’t need his vocal chords to talk to me.

Then he began walking with me to the swimming pool gym down the road. But he wasn’t Sunny any more. I can’t say who he was. Though we talked a lot. And he said he could walk in the air again. Like he used to. When he was young. And he showed me how. He slowly rose to a height of maybe ten feet in the air. Above the branches, above the green water of the pool that caught the whites of the soles of his feet and my throat started getting compacted like the cotton in Sunny’s carton. I had to tear the cotton away.

Leenie shut the creaking bureau cover and crept back to the sleep Sunny hadn’t yet risen from.

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