without dreams

GREEN

it fills your eyes till you wonder whether the universe has any other colour to offer: there is so much green that it spreads like the great ocean on all sides as far as the eyes can see. although it hurts you to look at it, it is a colour that speaks to you. you wonder what it is about that particular combination of yellow and blue that reminds you of flowers mating. stretching beyond, beyond the village, into the horizon, there are nothing but fields buttered with afternoon sunshine. damp smells, earth smells,.. enter your nostrils, fill your throat, play upon your tongue. in your hungry imagination you can nearly taste the still-growing plants that soar above you and all around you. in the distance you can almost see a structure. beyond the steep descent of rice paddies, the stiff towers of sugarcane, there is a structure in that sea of green. it is there though you can not see it. you know it must be there but it does not want to revel itself to you. not yet at least. you remember that place. it is smudged against the sun, slowly rising out of the ground in a cloud of steam. its rough beams, its loopsided, slapped together surface, the comforting familiarity of it's one roomed splendour. it's your...

HOME.


one of the few things that ABDUL could count of being a part of his personal history was a seemingly inexplicable attraction to the colour green, as if somewhere, in a past life, he was connected to the earth. other than this, and fragments of memory and dream, he had little, by the time he was seventeen, to call his own. he sometimes felt that he had been denied something, but couldn't quite understand what. it was as if someone had deliberately obstructed his consciousness, erected a high mud wall beyond which there were endless fields of green that weren't meant for him. he had heard that others saw a magnificent vision as they slept- some of stalely homes, some of their villages in the mountains, some of the women they loved or lusted after- but only the image, if it could be called that, which appeared half-formed in his sleep was a distant structure in a sea of green. and that too rarely.

he guessed dreams were for those who didn't fall, as if unconscious, into their beds of twisted jute after a day of hard labour. or for those with a little imagination who enjoyed story telling even in their waking lives.

GREEN

it filled his eyes till he wondered whether the universe had any other colour to offer. at two and half, his eyes were still adjusting to the brightness of everything. there was the sering orange of the sun as it dove into an immense sugar cane field, row upon row of crop rising stiffly rising to meet it; a dizzying expanse of rice terrace; the rattan plant doubled at the waist by water and wind; the shine of wet blades of grass after a heavy rain; the yellow and red of his mother's clothes drenched with the downpour, dark, almost transparent. his small hands pulled at her blouse,at her black hair, at the cheap tinny earrings that framed her dark face till she shrieked in pain and gave him a stinging slap on the wrist. they were both wet and smelt of rainwater.

he remembered now that her dark face made her smile, with its pure row of white teeth, dazzling to his eyes. his fingers would often make their stealthy ways to her half open mouth.

perhaps she went without food to feed him. perhaps she was just a girl. with a girl's as-yet-unformed body, curveless, stark. perhaps, he could never be sure, she was just a spirit his mind conjured up to fulfill a primal need. after all it was difficult to trust memory., for most of what he chose to remember, bordered on conjecture-images pieced together after dreams-and the rest the desperate works of his imagination. it was simple, he didn't have a memory, so he fashioned one for himself out of nothing. when he awoke from one of those dreams, he could never remember exactly what he had sen but was always left with a vague sense of bereavement. it was heaviness that remained with him throughout the day and discoloured whatever he looked at. something he felt sure: was missing; he had lost a part of himself in another land.

when his stomach was full, his world was colour and shape. he looked at things with the curiosity of a two-year old child. slowly the black thread around his neck, the shiny square of metal hanging from it rubbing his bare chest as he walked unsteadily into the light. slowly the objects would reveal themselves: the blur next to the hut, a tree; a flash of yellow, the sun; the dark shadow approaching him wrapped in cloth, his father. and there were other children too, but older than him. a few girls perhaps. just their smiles remained to remember them by.




- shabano bilgrami.