6 pieces of silver

This is a story from long, long ago.
Ok its not that long ago. Maybe over a month or max a couple of months old. But it played almost like a fairy tale, hence the opening line of this blog.
There I was on a pleasant morning walking along with Alex on our regular perambulation, when I came across something shiny in the huge sand heap alongside a house under construction. I poked with the stick I carry along to check the source of shininess and along slid out a round silvery thing as the one in the pic. Initially I thought it was a 1 rupee coin but on closer inspection it turned out to be a plain, round, silvery disk. Out of curiosity I poked the stick in the sand and a couple of disks fell out. Now I was mildly intrigued. I kept on poking the sand and more and more disks slid out. By the end I had around 8-9 at hand.
Once the discs stopped appearing I was lost as what to do with them. So as a prank I thought of spreading them at a distance from each other on the roadside and to check the next morning as how many people have been fooled into thinking that it was a Re.1 coin.
In the evening I was musing at how they must have come around at that one particular spot, there purpose and the odds of my finding them.
The next morning I was curious to check the result of my prank/psychological experiment. I walked towards the sand mount and just out of curiousity I poked my stick again into it, and out rolled out another disc! This was almost like magic cause this one wasn't even visible and it was just by chance I had poked there. Once more 5 more discs magically appeared out of the sand.
And this time I kept the 6 pieces of silver.

P.S.: the other pieces of silver spread out the day before had been taken by some hapless souls who I am sure would have cursed their luck, or me.

Return to PG days

I had the most amazing dream last night 😀
I had joined MDS again and that to in Oral Pathology 😁
We were 4 Pgs in the new batch and there were 2 girls and a guy other than me. They of course were much much younger.
Our head was a South Indian and he had called us to his place that evening and had told us to get a bag (something similar to a large grocery bag) along. Maybe he had some notes or books to give, I don't know and he didn't specify why.
Now the interesting part is that before I could go there, the head of NHSRC, Rajni Ma'am met me on the way and told me to come along with her 😳 Rajni Ma'am is kind of a Dean or the director of the place where I have joined to do my Pg in so I am not that worried about being late to my HoD. Plus I don't have the bag either as I was stopped on my way to the market by Ma'am.
She took me to a classroom kind of place where there were 2 lady teachers already sitting. We sat across the table and she said
that Anil should have gotten a better rank in the exams and tells them to review the papers once again. They go through each paper one by one and Ma'am keeps on pointing places where I should've gotten more marks. 😄
In-between somewhere she turns and pats me on the head also and says "Anil is a good boy" 😅 Something similar to the way you would say to a dog 😋

Sequelae of a dream

I dreamt almost the same dream on two different nights. This has never happened before and made me wonder. There was nothing much about the dream except for the fact that it was very realistic.
In the first one we had bought a house somewhere else in Lucknow. It was a busy street and somewhere in old city. I am not sure about the city, but it was somewhere in the north. There was an ECG or ultrasound clinic next to the house which I realised on the way out. The clinic opens up on the road.
This was two nights back. Today in the morning I dreamt about it again and this time I had a daughter and a son. I had gone to the house and we had yet to shift in. It was a single storeyed house with a driveway. I was talking to my daughter about the house and was asking her how many bathrooms there were, she said I think one and I thought we need to make another one before we shift.
The dreams were ordinary and pretty mundane but the continuity and the realistic part made me wonder.
Past life regression was one thing that came to my mind but this was pretty recent. Maybe somewhere in the late 90s or maybe present day. So that was out of the picture.
Parallel universe was the only possibility that comes to my mind.

The girl had no name

She had bright, big, shiny eyes.
Maybe 2-3 months old.
We used to meet almost every morning when Alex and I went for our walk.
She was a bit weary of Alex in the beginning but got over her fear with time.
With me she was always in a mood for a chat and I talked her up, teased her whenever we met.
Her coat was a mix of black and brown with a white patch here and there. She was small, with cute drooping ears. Must have had a daschund somewhere in her ancestors.
I had contemplated adopting her a couple of weeks back but with the upcoming summer break I postponed it.
Met her today morning around 6:30 and she was in good spirits and walked behind us for a bit. I came back on the reverse loop of the walk after hardly 10-15 mins and I saw what seemed like a bundle of cloth in the middle of the road where we had met.
She was no more.
It broke my heart. Such is life and such is fate.
She might not have a name, but she will never be forgotten.

Path of the Grimreaper

 "The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living."

Last night while dropping Indira mausi to her home, she was reminiscing about her youngest sister who died of breast cancer in her early 20s. This was around 5 decades ago. Vijay mausa was posted in Jammu then. She said that she never dreams, but the night Tunnu mausi passed away she got up with a start when she saw a sheet covered body lying on the floor in her dream. The next morning mausi got a call from Lucknow about the death of her sister the previous night. Till the time she hadn't seen Tunnu mausi in her dream she wasn't even aware that in Hindus they keep the dead on the floor, she said. My aunt had been sent back from Bombay to Lucknow after the doctors realised that the cancer had spread. Every 15 days she used to get medicines for her cancer from Tata Memorial Hospital. The time when she passed away the postal department had gone on strike and the medicines weren't delivered. There used to be no courier service in those days and Tunnu mausi passed away in KGMC as her medicine couldn't reach on time.
This news of yesteryears affected me  and made me think about all the other dramatic deaths and life events I had heard about from the maternal side of my family.
My maternal grandfather had a son from his first wife. She died during childbirth while delivering her second kid. A daughter. Her husband, my grandfather went into such a shock from her untimely death that he went straight to the cremation ground from the hospital, did her final rituals there and left the place. He never went back for the baby. All this he had told to my brother and I came to know this way after his death. He had always been a very upright officer and a gentleman, a self made man, an exemplary engineer,  a disciplinarian father (he had 3 sons and 4 daughters). The fact that I have an aunt, maybe first cousins, nieces and nephews around me who I have no clue of, haunts me to this day.
In my grandfathers defense all I could say is that death affects one in different ways. He had a rough, traumatic childhood and a close encounter with death. Once when he was very young he got high fever. It got worse over days and eventually he lost conscious. He had no clue for how long he had passed out. When he finally regained consciousness he realised that except for his father his whole family had been wiped away by the small pox epidemic. His mother, siblings, everyone. Everyone. One moment you have your whole family around you, you pass out, the next moment when you regain your senses,  they have gone forever. No final goodbyes, no closures.
The things we read about in textbooks of medicine and pathology, the images we see in movies of epidemics and disasters, the pathos which are described, he had been through them, and survived.
I had a bad night and woke up with a slight headache today. I even woke up at night, sat upright on my bed and was calling someone before going back to sleep. The dreams were emotive and impressionable, and there were two people in it, though I cant remember them in detail. If I am able to recollect I will describe them here.

B/721

Last night I was in the house of my birth. My maternal grandparents home in Lucknow.

It has been sold and demolished now and a new house had come in its place which also has been demolished. Something new might be coming up there.

In my dream the original house had been reconstructed in just as it was all those years back. My grandparents were not there but the house more or less stood as it had then. The walls now were cream instead of white. The few changes that I noticed were that there was a wall between the drawing  and dining room now with a door leading to it, the window facing the school in the last bedroom was not there and there was a passage from the gallery to my Nani's prayer room next to the front bedroom. There was a lush green grass on the front and the side of the house.

Some doctor was planning to buy it for 21 or 22 crores and turn it into a nursing home in my dream and I was wondering if I could occupy it and prevent the sale. Kirti was there and she was discussing what the size of the plot would be and how much it must cost. So in a way the dream was pretty much entrenched to my present life though with a bit of a twist.

This dream obviously wasn’t something related to my past life as I was still me as I am today but maybe it could have been something from a parallel universe where things were a bit different but still the same in the broader sense.

Khushila

I met a young girl, standing at the McDs takeaway selling bubble maker.
Started chatting with her after buying a bubble maker while waiting for our order.
She must have been around 6-7 years old but was not sure and said that she was 4. Very sharp and lively with bright eyes and beautiful teeth. I asked her about studies (she didn't), timings (9 to 1), family (her mom and sister also did the same thing and father was a bus driver, or so she said), residence (near Amity university) and how much she earns in a day (she had 5 bubble makers and had sold 2, in which she reminded that one was bought by me!).
What charmed me was not the conversation, which the way I have put it, sounds pretty mundane, but her spunk and joie-de-vivre were a sight to behold! I even went to the extent of asking Jai, my son, if we could adopt her :)
I regretted not ordering anything for her from the counter so gave her our pack of French fries when they were delivered at the take out.
She looked at them with suspicion and asked what is it? I said potato sabzi. She took a bite and totally approved of it. As we moved away I could see her running with the packet to the pavement outside the mall where her sister and mom were sitting. Mom was breast feeding a baby.
I was so touched by her gesture. She could have had the fries on her own without anyone knowing, she had been standing in the sun since morning and must have been hungry, but the minute she got something to share she ran towards her family.
Someone had very wisely named her Khushila - "the one who brings joy!"