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| Sweet dreams are made of these. Who am I to disagree? |
I couldn't recognize my home. I knew where it was exactly, I could feel the house, but there wasn't a single landmark, a single symbol standing that looked familiar. In my dream I could remember that my home is a little 400 odd square feet tiny apartment on the fourth floor of five-story building with lots of tress around, but the house I went to was in the middle of a huge apartment building with lots and lots of other flats all around. On the particular story, the fourth floor, everything was taken down - the walls, the windows, and everything - for reconstruction. Pigeons were flying through the holes in the wall, gaping maws of window ports were covered with thick black paper, and puddles of filthy water adorned the floor all over.I went down to find the landlord, and she wasn't there. Nobody else remembered me. In fact the neighbors claimed the house was always like this, and I must have been out of my wits to claim that I ever lived there.
Pretty simple, aye? It is. But then I start to remember even in my dream that the house I grew up in, a staff quarter of Dhaka University, is lost to me as my mother retired. I have known no other place as a home till I got married. I was not even there when my mother and sisters shifted to this massive apartment building that houses some 30,000 people. I was happy in a tiny apartment in a semi-familiar neighborhood, and somewhat happy when I moved to another apartment on the top floor of a five story building in the same Dhaka neighborhood. Both the firth and the third homes had plenty trees around. Then my marriage fell apart, and the my final home as a married man was torn down to make space for a large apartment building. Through all these I made my office a second home, and right at this moment that office is being rehashed. No planning room will exist at my office anymore.
I felt so homeless in my dream. Nothing looks familiar anymore, nobody remembers my home. It's gone, more like they are gone, all of them. Only the pigeons and the thick black paper felt a bit reassuring. I know them both, only they are not to be mine. I know. And, probably I can't even talk about them either.
Somehow, when I woke up sweating and on the verge of sobbing out loud, I felt I'll never ever be able take someone through a trip to my home again. Homeless people don't do that.
Wrote this in May 1, 2010
