I have a mouth but I cannot scream. I hear my name but I can’t respond. There is a net above my head and walls to all three sides. I was bound and gagged. I couldn’t move an inch. I did not know for how many hours or days I had been lying there. Where on earth was I? It wasn’t a room, I barely had space to struggle, it was not the boot of a car. It was not any place I could imagine- and yet I lay there for heaven knows how long. And straight ahead I see a passage with a television at the end. From my cramped position, I squinted to see the screen that was probably the only thing along the long damp are I was entrapped in that showed any sign of activity.
There was something very strange and eerie about it. The screen flickered every now and then. To one lost to all sense of time, the constant 12:00:00 view on the screen was meaningless. It was noon. Or was it midnight? What day of the week was it?
As I tried to delve over all these thoughts, wondering what had happened after that perfectly normal day at work, trying desperately to recollect that sequence of events as I walked back home in the rain and sopped at the seemingly shady park for shelter. What of those numerous cats down the alley I passes and the disturbance of birds in the trees nearby? Was it all an omen of sorts? But then, the non-superstitious like me make nothing of such premonitions and move on. Suddenly, the area above me came to light and as I adjusted my eyes to the change in brightness, I saw the screen show a young girl, in a white dress, sleeping on a solitary bed in what looked like her own room. Pin drop silence save the sound of her breathing. So she was alive. But something was wrong- it seems like she was in a sleep so profound that it seemed unreal. How long had she been like that?
I woke up the next morning at 8 a.m. and found myself in the same room as the girl in my dream, or was it reality? I am still in the same clothes as I was in when I was bound. Did it all really happen? Or is my mind playing tricks? Am I trying to escape from someone or something? I comprehend nothing of my present situation and feel that I have been travelling in a place with no space or time. I seem to do everything fine for the next 12 hours at least. I spend the day like it was my own; funnily everything in the room is mine except for how it looks. My parents come home and things go back to normal.
I spent the last 24 hours, sleepless, delving into the roots of my favourite authors Haruki Murakami, Dick Francis, and Daphne Du Maurier, reading books that made me bring together abstract imagery, magical realism and mysticism in my own true period of somnolence, letting me jump from one world to another, pulling me in so deep that my mind is entranced.
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