5
A Ridiculous Dream
What shall I call myself? I am a normal human being enjoying life as it comes. I am doing things as best as I can most of the times. I have all the needed feelings of human beings. I know what to love and what to dislike. I am on a journey on this earth for a reason.
I have been sent on a journey in this world. I had no choice about when or where it started. I do not know when, where or how it will end. I have no map for my future. All I know for certain is that it is bound to end sometime.
Of course, there are rules that apply to this great journey of human life but I have to learn them as I go. Although I cannot control them I have the ability to manage them. Even though some of us claim I may not know the real purpose of this journey.
All I know is that once started, I must continue every day, whether I feel like it or not. I started my life with no possession and when I finish I must turn in all I have accumulated.
In the end, it is believed that I will be rewarded or punished depending on my actions or karma. However, I do not know this for sure.
That is my set life and I cannot change it. However, with a little faith, hope, discipline, some sense of humour and belief in the powers of the Supreme Being fortunately I can help cushion some of the bumps in my life.
As a rule,
We are a fool,
When it is hot,
We want it cool,
And when it is cool,
We want it hot,
Always wanting
What is not.
But many of my friends think that I am a ridiculous, absurd and ludicrous person. Now some even call me a madman, silly and crazy. At times I think that we all can be classed as such but my friends are free to make their own judgement on my character, condition and construct.
That would be a promotion for me if it were not that I remain as ridiculous and childish in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me - and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly dear to me. I could join in their laughter - not exactly at myself, but through affection for them, if I did not feel as sad as I look at them. Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they won't understand it.
In my younger days I used to be miserable at seeming ridiculous, foolish and illogical. Not seeming, but being. I have always been ridiculous and half – baked and I have known it, perhaps, from the hour I was born. Perhaps from the time I was seven years old I knew I was ridiculous, foolhardy and laughable.
Afterwards I went to school, studied at the university, and, do you know, the more I learned, the more thoroughly I understood that I was ridiculous. So that it seemed in the end as though all the sciences and the arts I studied at the university existed only to prove and make evident to me as I went more deeply into them that I was ridiculous. It was the same with life as it was with science and art.
With every year the same consciousness of the ridiculous figure I cut in every relation began to grow and strengthen. Everyone always laughed at me. But not one of them knew or guessed that if there were one man on earth who knew better than anybody else that I was absurd, it was I, and what I resented most of all was that they did not know that. But that was my own fault; I was so proud that nothing would have ever induced me to tell it to anyone.
This pride grew in me with the years; and if it had happened that I allowed myself to confess to anyone that I was ridiculous, I believe that I should have blown out my brains the same evening. Oh, how I suffered in my early youth from the fear that I might give way and confess it to my schoolfellows.
But since I grew to manhood, I have for some unknown reason become calmer, though I realised my awful characteristic more fully every year. I say unknown, for to this day I cannot tell why it was. Perhaps it was owing to the terrible misery that was growing in my soul through something which was of more consequence than anything else about me: that something was the conviction that had come upon me that nothing in the world mattered. I had long had an inkling of it, but the full realisation came to me some fifty years ago when I fell in love with an angel who later became my wife, my life and the one who tamed me to be a different and calmer person.
I suddenly felt that it was all the same to me whether the world existed or whether there had never been anything at all: I began to feel with all my being that there was nothing existing. At first I fancied that many things had existed in the past, but afterwards I guessed that there never had been anything in the past either, but that it had only seemed so for some reason.
Little by little I guessed that there would be nothing in the future either. Then I left off being angry with people and almost ceased to notice them. Indeed this showed itself even in the pettiest trifles: I used, for instance, to knock against people in the street. And not so much from being lost in thought: what had I to think about? I had almost given up thinking by that time; nothing mattered to me. If at least I had solved my problems! Oh, I had not settled one of them, and how many there were! But I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared. I became a calm person but I was still regarded as illogical and indecorous by many.
And it was after that that I found out the truth. I learnt the truth on March 14th two years ago and I remember every instant since. It was a gloomy evening, one of the gloomiest possible evenings. I was going home at about eleven o'clock from hospital where my wife was on life support after her massive heart attack. I remember that I thought that the evening could not be gloomier. Rain had been falling all day, and it had been a cold, gloomy, almost menacing rain, with, I remember, an unmistakable spite against mankind.
Suddenly between ten and eleven it had stopped, and was followed by a horrible dampness, colder and damper than the rain, and a sort of steam was rising from everything, from every stone in the street, and from every by-lane if one looked down it as far as one could. A thought suddenly occurred to me, that if all the street lights had been put out it would have been less cheerless, that the darkness would make my heart sadder because it would extinguish the light of my family life. I had had scarcely any dinner that day, and had been spending the evening with my children, and few other friends who had been there also.
I sat silent in the waiting room - I fancy I bored them. They talked of something rousing and suddenly they got excited over it. But they did not really care, I could see that, and only made a show of being excited. I suddenly said as much to them. "My friends," I said, "you really do not care one way or the other. I am waiting for a miracle to happen for my wife to wake up from her coma." They were not offended because they knew my suffering, but they just looked at me in disbelief. That was because I spoke with genuine concern, simply because it mattered to me. They saw it too, and it saddened them.
As I was thinking about the lights in the street I looked up at the sky. The sky was horribly dark, but one could distinctly see tattered clouds, and between them fathomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a star, and began watching it intently. It looked like the image of my wife, my Pretty Lotus.
That star had given me an idea: I decided to kill myself that night. I had firmly determined to do so three months before because I could no longer stand the sufferings of my wife who was on continuous oxygen supply waiting to end her life. I took out the revolver that my father had bestowed to me and loaded it. But three months had passed and it was still lying in my drawer; I was so utterly indifferent that I wanted to seize a moment when I would not be so indifferent - why, I don't know.
So for three months every night that I put my wife to bed, I thought I would shoot myself. I kept waiting for the right moment. And so now this star gave me a thought. I made up my mind that it should certainly be that night. And why the star gave me the thought I don't know. This was because we had taken a vow to live together happily ever after on our marriage night.
And just as I was looking at the sky, this little girl took me by the elbow. The street was empty, and there was scarcely anyone to be seen. A cabman was sleeping in the distance in his cab. It was a child of eight with a kerchief on her head, wearing nothing but a wretched little dress all soaked with rain, but I noticed her wet broken shoes and I recall them now. They caught my eye particularly.
She suddenly pulled me by the elbow and called me. She was not weeping, but was spasmodically crying out some words which could not utter properly, because she was shivering and shuddering all over. She was in terror about something, and kept crying, "Mummy, mummy!"
I turned facing her, I did not say a word and went on; but she ran, pulling at me, and there was that note in her voice which in frightened children means despair. I know that sound. Though she did not articulate the words, I understood that her mother was dying, or that something of the sort was happening to them, and that she had run out to call someone, to find something to help her mother.
I did not go with her; on the contrary, I had an impulse to drive her away. I told her first to go to a doctor or a temple. But clasping her hands, she ran beside me sobbing and gasping, and would not leave me. Then I stamped my foot and shouted at her. She called out "Thaji (Dad) Let us go and save her!" It was then that I realized that she was the image of one of my own daughters but she suddenly abandoned me and rushed headlong across the road. Some other passer-by appeared there, and she evidently flew from me to him.
I entered my home and went to my bedroom. My bedroom is small and poor, with a window overlooking the fence on the roadside. I sat down on my bed, looked at the prayer cupboard, opened the door of it and lit the incense stick and began thinking and praying. I prayed for the recovery of my wife and then lay quietly on the bed looking at the ceiling.
I sat up all night and forgot all my pains and sorrows completely. It was amazing that I stayed awake till daybreak, and have been going on like that for the last three days since my wife fell with a severe heart attack.
I sit up all night in my arm-chair at the study table, doing nothing. I only read from the scriptures by day. I sit - don't even think; ideas of a sort wander through my mind and I let them come and go as they will. A whole candle is burnt every night.
This morning Thursday 14th March, I sat down quietly at the table, took out the revolver and put it down before me. When I had put it down I asked myself, I remember, "Is that so?" and answered with complete conviction, "It is." That is, I shall shoot myself. I knew that I should shoot myself that day for certain, but how much longer I should go on sitting at the table I did not know. And no doubt I should have shot myself if it had not been for that little girl.
You see, though nothing mattered to me, I could feel the pain, for instance. If anyone had stuck me it would have hurt me. It was the same morally: if anything very pathetic happened, I should have felt pity just as I used to do in old days when there were things in life that did matter to me. I had felt pity that evening. I should have certainly helped my child.
Why, then, had I not helped the little girl? Because of an idea that occurred to me at the time: when she was calling and pulling at me, a question suddenly arose before me and I could not settle it. The question was an idle one, but I was vexed. I was vexed at the reflection that if I were going to make an end of myself that night, nothing in life ought to have mattered to me. Why was it that all at once I did not feel a strange pang, quite incongruous in my position?
Really I do not know better how to convey my fleeting sensation at the moment, but the sensation persisted at home when I was sitting at the table, and I was very much irritated as I had not been for a long time past. One reflection followed another. I saw clearly that so long as I was still a human being and not nothingness, I was alive and so could suffer, be angry and feel shame at my actions. So be it. But if I am going to kill myself, in two hours, say, what is the little girl to me and what have I to do with shame or with anything else in the world?
I shall turn into nothing, absolutely nothing. And can it really be true that the consciousness that I shall completely cease to exist immediately and so everything else will cease to exist, does not in the least affect my feeling of pity for my children nor the feeling of shame after a contemptible action? I stamped and shouted at the unhappy child as though to say - not only I feel no pity, but even if I behave inhumanly and contemptibly, I am free to, for in another two hours everything will be extinguished.
Do you believe that that was why I shouted that? I am almost convinced of it now. It seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended upon me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for me. I say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist for anyone when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like a phantom, as a mere appurtenance of my consciousness, for possibly all this world and all these people are only me myself.
I remember that as I sat and reflected, I turned all these new questions that swarmed one after another quite the other way, and thought of something quite new. For instance, a strange reflection suddenly occurred to me, that if I had lived before on the moon or on Mars and there had committed the most disgraceful and dishonourable action and had there been put to such shame and ignominy as one can only conceive and realise in dreams, in nightmares, and if, finding myself afterwards on earth, I were able to retain the memory of what I had done on the other planet and at the same time knew that I should never, under any circumstances, return there, then looking from the earth to the moon - should I care or not? Should I feel any shame for that action or not?
These were idle and superfluous questions for the revolver was already lying before me, and I knew in every fibre of my being that it would happen for certain, but they excited me and I raged. I could not die now without having first settled something. In short, my child had saved me, for I put off my pistol for the sake of these questions and began thinking of my wife who was on life support.
At that point, being a long time patient with sleep apnoea and NSIP I suddenly fell asleep in my chair at the table - a thing which usually happened to me before. I dropped asleep quite unawares.
Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, and through space and time.
Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it! My father died five years ago, for instance. I sometimes dream of him; he takes part in my affairs, we are very much interested, and yet all through my dream I quite know and remember that my father is dead and cremated. How is it that I am not surprised that, though he is dead, he is here beside me and working with me? Why is it that my reason fully accepts it?
But enough is enough. I will begin about my dream. Yes, I dreamed a dream, my dream of the Thursday 14th of March. They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake.
Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream - oh, it revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of sorrow and devastation. Neither I nor anyone else could save my wife. No miracle happened for me. She was gone. A relationship of over half a century just melted away.
I have mentioned that I dropped asleep unawares and even seemed to be still reflecting on the same subjects. I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart - my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.
In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or are stabbed, or beaten, but you never feel pain unless, perhaps, you really bruise yourself against the bedstead, then you feel pain and almost always wake up from it. It was the same in my dream. I did not feel any pain, but it seemed as though with my shot everything within me was shaken and everything was suddenly dimmed, and it grew horribly black around me. I seemed to be blinded, and it benumbed, and I was lying on something hard, stretched on my back; I saw nothing, and could not make the slightest movement.
My wife was looking at me from heaven and was planning to attend my funeral. Then suddenly there is another break in my dream and I was being carried in a closed coffin. And I felt how the coffin was shaking and reflected upon it, and for the first time the idea struck me that I was dead, utterly dead, I knew it and had no doubt of it, I could neither see nor move and yet I was feeling and reflecting. But I was soon reconciled to the position, and as one usually does in a dream, accepted the facts without disputing them.
And now I was cremated at the funeral house. They all went away; I was left alone, utterly alone. I did not move. Whenever before I had imagined being buried the one sensation I associated with the grave was that of damp and cold. So now I felt that I was very cold, especially the tips of my toes, but I felt nothing else.
I lay still, strange to say I expected nothing, accepting without dispute that a dead man had nothing to expect. But it was damp. I don't know how long a time passed - whether an hour or several hours. But all at once a drop of water fell on my closed left eye, making its way through the coffin lid; it was followed a minute later by a second, then a minute later by a third - and so on, regularly every minute. There was a sudden glow of profound indignation in my heart, and I suddenly felt in it a pang of physical pain. The drops of water were the nectar of life to repair my wound.
"That's my wound," I thought; "that's the bullet . . ." And drop after drop every minute kept falling on my closed eyelid. And all at once, not with my voice, but with my entire being, I called upon the power that was responsible for all that was happening to me:
"Whoever you may be, if you exist, and if anything more rational that what is happening here is possible, suffer it to be here now. But if you are revenging yourself upon me for my senseless suicide by the hideousness and absurdity of this subsequent existence, then let me tell you that no torture could ever equal the contempt which I shall go on dumbly feeling, though my martyrdom may last a million years!”
I made this appeal and held my peace. There was a full minute of unbroken silence and again another drop fell, but I knew with infinite unshakable certainty that everything would slowly change. Then suddenly I saw that I had got out of the funeral pyre and was flying up with my wife who was travelling ahead of me at the speed of a rocket. I tried to catch her but all in vain.
I suddenly regained my sight. It was the dead of night, and never, never had there been such darkness. We were flying through space far away from the earth.
I did not question the being who was taking me; I was proud and waited. I assured myself that I was not afraid, and was thrilled with ecstasy at the thought that I was not afraid. I do not know how long we were flying, I cannot imagine; it happened as it always does in dreams when you skip over space and time, and the laws of thought and existence, and only pause upon the points for which the heart yearns. I remember that I suddenly saw in the darkness a star. "Is that Saroj?" I asked impulsively, though I had not meant to ask questions.
"No and yes. That is the star you saw between the clouds when you were coming home," the being who was carrying me replied.
I knew that it had something like a human face. Strange to say, I did not like that being; in fact I felt an intense aversion for it. I had expected complete non-existence, and that was why I had put a bullet through my heart. And here I was in the hands of a creature not human, of course, but yet living, existing.
"And so there is life beyond the death," I thought with the strange frivolity one has in dreams. But in its inmost depth my heart remained unchanged. "And if I have got to exist again," I thought, "and live once more under the control of some irresistible power, I won't be sad, sorrowful, lonely, vanquished and humiliated.”
"You know that I am afraid of you and despise me for that," I said suddenly to my companion, unable to refrain from the humiliating question which implied a confession, and feeling my humiliation stab my heart as with a pin. He did not answer my question, but all at once I felt that he was not even despising me, but was laughing at me and had no compassion for me, and that our journey had an unknown and mysterious object that concerned me only.
Fear was growing in my heart. Something was mutely and painfully communicated to me from my silent companion, and permeated my whole being. We were flying through dark, unknown space. I had for some time lost sight of the constellations familiar to my eyes. I knew that there were stars in the heavenly spaces the light of which took thousands or millions of years to reach the earth. Perhaps we were already flying through those spaces. I expected something with a terrible anguish that tortured my heart.
And suddenly I was thrilled by a familiar feeling that stirred me to the depths: I suddenly caught sight of our sun! I knew that it could not be our sun, that gave life to our earth, and that we were an infinite distance from our sun, but for some reason I knew in my whole being that it was a sun exactly like ours, a duplicate of it. A sweet, thrilling feeling resounded with ecstasy in my heart: the kindred power of the same light which had given me light stirred an echo in my heart and awakened it, and I had a sensation of life, the old life of the past for the first time since I had been dead in my dream.
"But if that is the sun, if that is exactly the same as our sun," I cried, "where is the earth?"
And my companion pointed to a star twinkling in the distance with an emerald light. We were flying straight towards it.
"And are such repetitions possible in the universe? Can that be the law of Nature? . . . And if that is an earth there, can it be just the same earth as ours . . . just the same, as poor, as unhappy, but precious and beloved forever, arousing in the most ungrateful of her children the same poignant love for her that we feel for our earth?" I cried out, shaken by irresistible, ecstatic love for the old familiar earth which I had left. The image of my poor child whom I had repulsed flashed through my mind.
"You shall see it all," answered my companion, and there was a note of sorrow in his voice.
But we were rapidly approaching the planet. It was growing before my eyes; I could already distinguish the ocean, the outline of Australia; and suddenly a feeling of a great and holy jealousy glowed in my heart.
"How can it be repeated and what for? I love and can love only that earth which I have left, stained with my blood, when, in my ingratitude, I quenched my life with a bullet in my heart. But I have never, never ceased to love that earth, and perhaps on the very night I parted from it I loved it more than ever. Is there suffering upon this new earth? On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love. I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left, and I don't want, I won't accept life on any other!"
But my companion had already left me. I suddenly, quite without noticing how, found myself on this other earth, in the bright light of a sunny day, fair as paradise. I believe I was standing on one of the islands that make up on our globe the Fijian archipelago, or on the coast of the mainland facing that tiny island of Denarau.
Oh, everything was exactly as it is with us, only everything seemed to have a festive radiance, the splendour of some great, holy triumph attained at last. The caressing sea, green as emerald, splashed softly upon the shore and kissed it with manifest, almost conscious love. The tall, lovely coconut trees stood in all the glory of their blossom, and their innumerable leaves greeted me, I am certain, with their soft, caressing rustle and seemed to articulate words of love.
The green grass glowed with bright and fragrant flowers of roses, hibiscus and pretty lotus. Birds of familiar shape and make were flying in flocks in the air, and perched fearlessly on my shoulders and arms and joyfully struck me with their darling, fluttering wings. And at last I saw and knew the people of this happy land. That came to me of themselves; they surrounded me, kissed me.
The children of the sun, the children of their sun - oh, how beautiful they were! Never had I seen on our own earth such beauty in mankind. Only perhaps in our children, in their earliest years, one might find some remote faint reflection of this beauty. The eyes of these happy people shone with a clear brightness. Their faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a serenity that comes of perfect understanding, but those faces were gay; in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy.
Oh, from the first moment, from the first glance at them, I understood it all! It was the earth untarnished by destruction; on it lived people who had not sinned. They lived just in such a paradise as that in which, according to all the legends of mankind, our first parents lived before they sinned; the only difference was that all this earth was the same paradise in the Pacific.
These people, laughing joyfully, thronged round me and caressed me; they took me home with them, and each of them tried to reassure me. Oh, they asked me no questions, but they seemed, I fancied, knowing everything without asking, and they wanted to make haste to smooth away the signs of suffering from my face.
I woke up and found out that it was time for me to go to the hospital to be with my wife. On arrival there we were told that no miracle would save her life. Her life support was turned off at ten thirty in the morning of Thursday 14th March. We could do nothing to save the angel who meant so much for all of us. Such is this life on this earth.
And do you know what? Well, granted that it was only a dream, yet the sensation of the love of those innocent and beautiful people has remained with me forever, and I feel as though their love is still flowing out to me from over there. I have seen them myself, have known them and been convinced; I loved them, I suffered for them afterwards. Oh, I understood at once even at the time that in many things I could not understand them at all; as an up-to-date Fijian progressive and contemptible member of the Prasad Family, it struck me as inexplicable that, knowing so much, they had, for instance, no science and art like our.
But I soon realised that their knowledge was gained and fostered by intuitions different from those of us on earth, and that their aspirations, too, were quite different. They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours; for our science and art seek to explain what life is, aspires to understand it in order to teach others how to love, while they without science and art knew how to live; and that I understood, but I could not understand their knowledge.
They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves. And perhaps I shall not be mistaken if I say that they conversed with them. Yes, they had found their language, and I am convinced that the trees understood them.
They looked at all Nature like that - at the animals that lived in peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them, conquered by their love. They pointed to the stars and told me something about them which I could not understand, but I am