Sunday, May 6, 2001		Article

THERE is no ache as sweet as the one involved in chasing elusive dreams. It is unmatched by any other pleasurable self-inflicted pain that a masochist can dream up. It suddenly occurred to me this Valentine’s Day that for many years now I have not chased an impossible dream. No wonder, life has lost its magic.

Wondering that it took me so long to find out what was amiss in my life for so long, I solemnly drew out my old, dusty "friendship diaries" from my teens, that I had dutifully maintained, and sat down cross-legged — the pile in front of me on the floor.

It took me 20 long minutes to push away all thoughts of a present throbbing with its seemingly insoluble problems out of my overworked mind...give it a further cleansing by forgetting all people who surrounded me, bent double under the respective burdens of their "seemingly insoluble problems"...all seemingly eyeing me to share their burdens!

In this vacuum, achieved in an almost meditative state of mind, I implanted "cobwebs", rainbow-coloured cobwebs from the "finished" past. The names from my diaries leapt at me with the familiarity of today’s problems, only to swish, swirl around and disappear in the coloured cobwebs of the mind. Like the wisps of half-forgotten melodies. Sometimes I remembered the tunes but the lyrics eluded me. Sometimes half-remembered words pricked at my heart and eyes but the melodies played truant.

I remembered my first crush. Looking across the yawning valley of passed time, I found the features dimmed in my mind. I struggled harder and the cobwebs twirled like a kaleidoscope to reveal kind, brown eyes looking at a 16-year-old me with more than a little amusement. I strove harder, to salvage, from the cobwebs, a toothy, crooked, rather shy grin on a normally terribly stern face, not made any the less stern by the frequent mistakes that I made, on probation on my first job and that, too, in a foreign land. American English could have been Greek and escalators "moving metal monsters" and "computers" kept flashing "warnings" that, I was sure, would land me in very deep trouble!

Further efforts to assemble the individual features revealed a faded picture that looked more like a dream than somebody who was flesh and blood once upon a time. I plunged deeper into the recesses of my memory for words, the few words that had passed between two strangers and could-have-been-friends-if-God-had-willed. Words that I had held on to with such reverence and ferocious faith for 10 long years as I had tried to hunt that lost dream out.

I remembered desperately contacting friends in the USA after my sudden, unforeseen departure from there and arrival in India. A suddenness, tapering to the nothingness of a-forever-pending-goodbye.A suddenness that, I faithfully believed, had claimed the life of a romance-to-be, nipping in the bud very abruptly a friendship that could have been.

In the harsh, concrete reality of today, those dreams do not seem "silly" or "funny" at all. The total belief in my dream spelt a meaning that is denied to me in humdrum, vicious routine of today.

I leaf through the dusty pages of my old diaries again. Dust them reverentially and drawing out a scrap of paper, scribble a forgotten name on it. My sister-in-law and brother are leaving for the USA today. Maybe by some miracle, she will find the address of my dream? Suddenly, today is not so humdrum and routine anymore!

A fresh waft of air rushes into the room and brushes my face with its tender, ‘cobwebby’ touch. Who knows? Maybe.