September 10

The scene is a rural landscape. It is some where in rural Bengal most likely with its kaccha roads and patches of greenery but there is something sinister in the landscape…it is not lush green but parts of it are barren and desolate. I'm trying to escape and there is a child with me. I don't know who the child is but she/he seems to know that we are in mortal danger and our only hope is to get on this train which is about to arrive. This train is filled with other half-naked children who are thin and gaunt from hunger and many of them are maimed with their limbs missing. It is a huge relief when we are able to get on the train at the last minute…someone pulls us in and we are huddled with the other scared children. I don't remember the rest of the journey but at some point this child and I get off and this child has someone/something with him…can be a pet or a soft toy. The scene after getting off the train is a ditch-like road which has on its two sides raised surface. So we are in this ditch-like road and the moment we are off the train, I hear a gunshot and the child with me is dead, sprawled out on the ground. The shooter is someone in uniform and he is aiming towards me from the raised side. I try to climb up on the other side but it is too high and then I decide to lie down thinking the man will not have a good view of me if I do that. But it turns out that as I'm lying belly-down on the ground I'm in perfect line with his shot and he aims at my head. I can feel the blood running down my skull and my face and then there is oblivion. Am I dead? I wake up gasping for air and I'm horrified and relieved at the same time. I'm alive. That was a nightmare.

The more I read these days, the more I feel I inhabit the stories and scenes I read about. It is hard to explain: at times I feel I’m one character and at other times I’m another. I’m constantly trying to find parallels between the story I read and the story of my life (if there is any such thing). I’m part of the narrative and I’m outside it. It is a surreal feeling and quite inexplicable. I’m not sure if I’ve always done this with everything I’ve read. But recently I’ve been more conscious of doing it. I not only draw parallels, I also compare and contrast my life with the lives of those in the story. Sometimes this is an absurd exercise simply because I might be reading a fantasy story or a story which is set in someplace far removed from my life is every manner possible, in terms of character and occurrences and yet I find a way to relate it to me or my thoughts.

I don’t know why I do this. I am not aware of any logical rational explanation. I’m sure every person who reads a story may in some shape or form try to relate that story to her life or perhaps just read it with the lens of experience that her life has given her or better still just read it as a piece of fiction, be entertained and that’s that. For me, the last option is never there. Any novel that I read is just not a piece of fiction or the figment of someone’s imagination: it is a living breathing world that I inhabit as long as I’m in the process of reading it. Only recently though I’ve been projecting myself into these stories as a character in the novel. And I’m not one character throughout. I am Vernon sometimes or I’m Red or Peter...it is not constant and finite. I can be more than one character in a particular novel. And when I say I am the character, it’s not that I’m literally that character but more like I project some aspect of me in the characters I read about. I agree or disagree with them or I think how I would act differently or even wonder if I was like them what would I do.

It is a very interesting phenomenon and I have to watch myself to see how often I do this.