The Lost Letter and the Aftermath

Finally, Faaris showed up in my latest dream. I was out of touch with him for a long time, in fact the matter of worry was he had been possessing a secret letter of mine which I intended to write to my father and beseeching him to scrutinize whether it had any literal or circumstantial lapses or not. 

My first dream last year was quite baffling. My father along with his family was dressed up to attend a wedding, but enigmatically all were wearing shrouds from top to bottom. Father in his as usual mannerism was taking off and wiping his glasses (this time by hitching up the shroud of course) in regular intervals which he did when he fell short of time.  Mother was blabbering on and on to expedite my siblings' ways to fit out. My elder brother was polishing up his shroud and combing hair intently while my younger sister kept on bickering with my mother over a piece of lipstick. However, I was slurping a mug of coffee nonchalantly sitting in proximity.

My role in the dream was kind of a fly on the wall. My reclusive manner of dwelling in the family justified it. Since I grew clueless about the rest of the scenario of the dream, I made up my mind to meet my friend Faaris who was a devotee of a blind saint of his locality. Once I heard from him the saint named Baba Shahid earned eminence for fortuitously interpreting any complex dream. So, I had good reason to be very keen and curious about him.

It was windy and the afternoon was overcast. No rain. Yet heavy clouds were hovering overhead in labour pain. Faaris and I were heading towards Baba Shahid's abode by a rickshaw. No sooner had we ended up in the vicinity than the raindrops pattered on the hood. We had to get off in the mouth of a narrow alley and began to wade through the ankle-deep onrush of murky water. My helpless umbrella was wrestling with the headstrong torrent but to no avail. When Faaris gestured me to enter the ground floor of a ramshackle two-storey building, thunder rumbled aloud suddenly.

Baba Shahid was sitting cross-legged on a square of threadbare mat. His long and heavy walking stick was lying beside him like a snake sleeping in peace. The room smelled of mold and mildew, the dim solitary bulb was struggling to drive away the gloom of heavy weather and the impending dusk. We circumspectly slouched in front of him and Faaris greeted him with salaam.

How long we agonized I do not remember. Another booming peal of thunder woke the saint from his apparently eternal slumber. He broke the ice in a gravelly voice, ‘I know why you are here. Reveal your dream if you dare.’

I failed to locate his amaurotic eyes since he lowered his chin as if to single mindedly meditate upon the riddle of my dream.

Having disclosed everything exhaustively in the backdrop of the thrumming of unabating downpour on the broken window and before my patience was on the verge of wearing out Baba Shahid stooped towards my ear and muttered as if from afterworld, ‘Any of your family members will kill others!’
The voice drowned immediately in another crack of thunder.

However, the serene and soothing tenor of my family was disturbed only once the day when my elder brother flared up in disgust as my father rebuffed categorically to sell a piece of land which he inherited from my grandfather. My brother wanted to expand his garments business and for the sake of truth I also held a surreptitious avarice on it as I really needed some hefty bucks to go abroad for higher study.

Following this squabble, the dream that I had inevitably encountered, now I could deftly relate it to Baba Shahid's prediction and obviously my premonition about the security of my family exacerbated. In that dream I, accompanied by my elder brother and some other strangers, was sauntering a vast area of land. Out of the blue, I screamed in profound pain as something lacerated my ankle and I glimpsed a sizable reptile sliding past me. I supplicated to my brother to nurse my wound, to bind it tight so that poison did not travel through my vein. My brother denied instead and parted with the strangers manifesting unusual calm and acrimony.

Consequently, I prioritized to single me out from my family, left my house without telling anybody anything and began to live in Faaris's mess. I drafted the letter to warn my father so that he would be duly apprised of the looming doom and could envisage an escape route as soon as feasible.

Since Faaris was running a report regarding the scam and anomalies of a local member of the parliament and was about to unearth his drug smuggling racket, he had very little time to peruse my letter. On the contrary, I was counting time with bated breath to connive my following steps, but worse happened.

Faaris was picked up by a group of unknown persons in broad daylight and remained traceless until now. The double whammy for me was that my father being framed and fabricated in a corruption case got suspended from his job.

 In Faaris's mess my initial dream vividly depicted his stoical and tranquil temperament. A queen from her auriferous throne vociferated, “How dare you utter the truth? Don't you know I have prohibited the practice of veracity in my queendom?”

Faaris responded wearing a beatific smile and handing her a warning letter that was none but mine which I kept in his custody so far.

I lost the composure to anticipate the queen's probable reaction and woke up furious and alarmed.

I began to rummage about Faaris's desk, drawer, and cupboard in case I could determine any clue to my lost letter. I leafed through each book on his rich shelf and after some time surprisingly I could smell the vellichor swirling, curling, twisting through the pages and right away Ramisa's face flashed through my burdened psyche whom I found and whom I lost in a solitary old bookshop. 

Ramisa was absent mindedly turning over the tattered pages of an eighteenth-century novella on the day of our valedictory tryst. I was earnestly studying her esoteric expression. She lamented after a brief pause, “I have already got a first-class government job, but still, you are unemployed. How long will I wait? I have the right to pursue my own ambition.”

She accepted my silence as my riposte and wrapped up, “I have decided to close my chapter with you.”

She literally closed the novella and left the scene.

Who would hold back for a dependent pariah?
Ramisa rightfully embraced a tycoon in full regalia.

Days were passing by; the late-night moribund moon with her feverish glimmer witnessed the next episode of my dream. After being absconder for long I was banging at my own house with the heavy stick of Baba Shahid and as my elder brother unlatched the door, without giving him any chance I executed the mortal blow upon his head and in a wink his skull smashed into pieces and scattered all over the floor. In this manner I salvaged my other family members, but the supposed euphoria failed to contain me as at this juncture unfortunately I lost all control over my dream. I furthered my strides towards the kitchen where my mother received several strokes from behind before crumbling over the burning oven only to get engulfed in a little inferno. I slid into my sister's room and made the best use of Baba Shahid's stick to ensure her rapid demise. My father, who was sitting forlorn on the balcony, met with the same fate with similar aggression. His blood splashed over my face, and I woke up palpitated and shivering.

My languid eyes got fixed on the two lead headlines of the newspaper lying on the floor: ‘The missing journalist's bullet-hit body was found in a remote hilly area' and ‘The whole family in the neighbourhood was killed in mysterious circumstances'.  

I scrambled to my feet and without any ballyhoo resolved to meet with Baba Shahid, this time alone.