The Guitarist. (On my way to Hyderabad)

           I wake up in to pitch darkness. Lying on my back, I jerk myself straight up. My left knee hurts. I flicker my eyelids and strain my eyes in arbitrary directions. It’s of no use. I see black, the darkest shade of it. My heart pounds within rapidly. My entire body sweats profusely. I turn my head around in all possible directions to find at least a ray of light. But, there is none. I shake my head in despair. I try to remember where was I last night. “In my room stuffing my garments untidily in my red VIP suitcase, I was in a hurry” I try to remember more “I got off my car at my friend’s place, helped him stuff his luggage in my car’s dickey and drove off in a hurry” I don’t recollect where I was heading to. I try to recover from my present turmoil. After being in immobility for quite a long time, I try to move. I place my left foot front. My knee hurts.

          I feel the thick layer of foliage beneath my foot. It is grass, wetted by morning dew. Okay, one thing is for certain. It’s early morning. I walk briskly in no particular direction. My left knee hurts. I don’t know why, it suddenly feels as if I’m walking for ages, searching for something. The cool breeze increases the nip in the air to an uncomfortable extent. I shudder and cross my hands to regain a bit of warmth. Where am I?

         Walking for quite a long time in what I surmise to be vast grasslands, I find myself clueless as to where I am? And how did I come here? Suddenly I hear a sweet enchanting voice from far away, uttering something in a particular alluring rhythm, it is a female voice. Singing something. I don’t get the lyrics distinctly but however, it seems to be a familiar song. I run in the direction where the intensity of her voice seems to be increasing.

         As I approach the direction more and more, the voice becomes more vivid and familiar. But still I couldn’t recognize whose voice it is? Or what is she singing? Still the positivity of the music enchants me and makes me follow it.

          I observe the pitch black surrounding gradually changing its shades in to lesser degrees of darkness. The ambiance turns grey, then a bit lighter shade of grey, now it’s blue and I’m still running. My breaths slowly spurts its paces and makes me pant irrepressibly. Suddenly the voice stops and so do I.

          Now the ambiance is a slightly fader shade of blue tending towards a pale yellow. I can see my imaginations turning into a resplendent reality. I can see vast grasslands in front of me, with sky scraping trees and mountains behind.

Grasslands with skyscraping trees! Where the hell am I? 

         Then slowly the nip in the air depletes as the pleasant warmth soothes the atmosphere. Now I could see the sun emerging far away from the valleys. The pale yellow turns brighter and dominates the darkness in to nil. Then again the sweet mesmerizing voice plays, still far enough to not get the lyrics but close enough to identify the instrument played in the background music. Guitar. I start running again. My left knee hurts.

         I can see a round wooden platform far away, located in solitude. A rotating chair is placed upon it across its diameter, right at the center. The silhouette of the person seated on it is distinctively of a girl. She is seated on it casually with head slightly tilted towards the Black-Brown Acoustic Guitar held gingerly across her torso and rested upon her thigh, that was positioned keenly to provide a rigid support to her right arm that was vivaciously swaying and strumming over the strings to emit a melodious rhythmic sound that reverberated all across the eternal grasslands. I’m completely taken by the moment, by the sound, by the stranger playing a Guitar.

          By now, the slightly husky feminine voice is becoming clearer and the lyrics are identifiable.

         “Sun rahi hu sudh budh kho ke koi main kahani… poori kahani hai kya kise hai pata… may toh kisi ki hokey yeh bhi na jaani… rut hai ye do pal ki ya rahegi sadaa…” – Iktara.

          It is one of my favorites. The song itself makes me run faster towards the person whose voice is driving me crazy. It was being sung by a voice, which was a bit different from the original, different in the way I wanted it to be. It sounds perfect to me.

          I’m now running at a superhuman speed towards my muse, whose voice and appearance had completely owned me by now. My left knee develops a terrible pain. Still I run. Then suddenly something clenches my right foot from beneath the ground, I loose my balance and tumble off. That something felt like a human hand. It started jerking me relentlessly. The enthralling voice went off.

         The pleasant heavenly world where I woke up a while ago is loosing its charm into a sharp bright yellow light. The grasslands disappeared, the mountains disappeared, and the wooden platform vanished and took away the girl, who incredibly played the Guitar while singing “Iktara” with insurmountable magnificence.

“ Arjun get up! GET UP! C’mon dude GET UP”, screamed Anukul, while fiercely shaking my leg, “GET UP DUDE! Secundarabad is the next station.”

        I opened my eyes to find myself sleeping on one of the upper berths of Secundarabad Rajdhani Express. A yellow dusty lamp was glowing with full intensity, right in front of my eyes. I was drooling on my pillow possibly because of the feminine figure from my dream. My left leg was dangling down the narrow berth, absurdly obstructed, at the knee, by one of the supporting iron bar of the berth. My left knee hurt. My right leg was still being shaken to wake me up.

“ Idiot! I was about to meet her”, I screamed.

“Her? Whom?” replied a baffled Anukul.

“Forget it. Move I’m getting down” I somehow forced myself to wake up and climb down. Fetched by cell-phone from the basket beside my berth. It suddenly started ringing.

“ O re manva tu toh baawara hai… Tu hi jaane tu kya sochta hai… Tu hi jaane tu kya sochta hai baawre… kyu dikhaye sapne tu sote jaagte…”  - The same song.

   

       The alarm rang twice before and got snoozed automatically. And, now I put it off.

        The entire dream came back to me. The song, the pain of my left knee, the girl with a guitar, the never-ending grasslands, mountains, eerily hued ambiance and the bright yellow light in the end.

        So, the dreams are somewhat a hypothetical mixture of, memories that you have and memories that you want to have. No one has yet been able to find out what makes our brain project such, beautiful or disastrous (as the case may be), movies on our eyelids while we are deep in our sleeps.

         This dream resonated with my real life to a certain extent; still leaving me in utmost bewilderment as to what I wanted more, the Guitar or the Guitarist. 

       

        I unchained our luggage; dragged my red VIP suitcase through the corridor till the inner door of our coach and left it beside the first compartment. Then I approached the main exit door, clenched the two long supporting iron rods on the either sides, carefully arched my body and peeked outside to see Secundarabad approaching.