Tungsten!

It was a really strange dream…but first things first, I was very restless last night. Hardly did anything fruitful, except lying down on the bed and thinking, oh what’s there left to my life. Having finished The Girl on the Train, I had nothing better to read except The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and frankly, though I was enjoying it quite a lot the previous day, yesterday it seemed just not enough. I went to sleep with a very disturbed mind, in fact so far as I remember, I just dropped into a stupor, it was nowhere as peaceful and happy a deal as sleep after a long day.

The first thing I remember about the dream is, I was enjoying it.  It was raining. I was in a school bus. School bus, yes, but I was not a student, I was all dressed up like a grown up and talking with other adults. All of us were feeling lazy and enjoying the rain from inside the bus, we hardly had a mind to get down from the bus (God help that school!)

And then the students came up to me, in the bus - ma'am will you take today's class? (God helps those who help themselves...) - so I nodded, got down from the bus, dragged myself to the staff room, asked a random lady colleague - "any idea what I am supposed to teach today?" and she replied "tungsten", and I gathered my books and notes and left for the classroom.

It was not much of a surprise that the classroom was that same one as the one where we had our class VII classes in the annexe building. I always liked that classroom. But tungsten? I hardly remember anything about tungsten. And I don't particularly remember that tungsten was any special element that was taught separately to us. Whatever it is, I started teaching tungsten to an apparently sleepy, dreamy class, most of whom were enjoying the magical drizzle, and the rest were still trickling in. Now, that is something I do, I never bar anyone from entering my class, people come in even in the last minute. What's the point in being strict I never understood, if I teach well, people won't really miss my class if they can make it in time, and ahem, if I don't teach well, it is myself I need to correct, not my students...

I forgot to mention one small thing, I heard this song last night in a tv program and loved it...since youtube links are quite quite unreliable (আজ আছে কাল নেই) - it goes like this, "bhai re, rishton ki dagar hai mushkil, aise na milegi manzil, chalna tu sambhal sambhal ke...", there's a rendition by Shubha Mudgal, please look for it...

So students were trickling in, it kept on raining, I kept on lecturing on tungsten (???!!!) - it was slow motion, when he came in...

How on earth he became my student, don't ask me. He used to say (ever so proudly) that he was the topmost ranker in JEE in our entire batch in college. That rank, I am afraid was nothing much exceptional, 1500 something, and then it was his second attempt at cracking the JEE, and he never studied, he never ever attended classes, but well, all those things apart, he couldn't have probably lost that many years, that I could teach him (I am still not sure if I was teaching in a school or college or somewhere else - the students were in uniforms, but even we had an uniform at college, it's a different story that we never wore it). But it was him alright, his specs, his hair falling on his eyes...and...he entered the class, and then for some reason he came up to me, and stood behind me, it was so like him, to be always with me...near me, wherever I went.

My entire life changed while I dreamed on...from anxious edginess to calm, from disappointed dullness to charm...that's all, I can't do more poetry about it all...I just felt terribly protective about him, as if he's my baby, as if, the way he had always protected me when he was with me, I wanted to reciprocate in that dream...

After I got up and was in my senses, as I descended the staircase in a skipping motion, I found myself saying in my mind, so thankful, so so thankful that we live in the same city (I am really not sure about that, but I guess that's true), and I also found myself thanking the great statue of Netaji (please...please don't ask me to explain that...)

God, such a maniac I am, such an "always in my bubble" existence I have, and excuse me, tungsten??? Where on earth that came about, I am still thinking...