Dear Reader,

What follows is a diary entry I wrote in July last year, a few days after I came to Bombay. I was too scared to publish this then!

I am still scared but I guess haven't shown you my face for so long that my sense of shame overrides my fear. Now, if I am dead or kidnapped tomorrow, please let them know I did this for you (and for me).

--

July 8, 2008

Last night Raj Thackeray came in my dream. I hadn't invited him (with fervent prayers and messages in empty bottles) but now that I have relocated to Mumbai I don't think he needs my invitation anymore.

Initially, I must confess, I was very suspicious. Raj Thackeray had come walking into my dream. I found this most mysterious.

Why did a national (laugh out loud) leader like Mr. Thackeray have to walk into my dream? He could have easily summoned me into his. Maybe this was going to be a revelation, I thought, or, maybe this gentleman wearing a white kurta pyjama slowly rising in my dream landscape wasn't Raj Thackeray after all!

Anything was possible from my visual position in the dream.

I could see the figure walking in my direction; yet it did not seem to move an inch forward in space. It was right there ascending in my visual field: walking briskly, appearing blurred and forever looking like Raj Thackeray.Like the queen in Alice's wonderland, this Raj-like figure seemed in a hurry: It was walking briskly to be in the same place.

Right then, I was overcome by a thought: The dream was stuck. It would not budge till I recognized the figure. And I would never be able to recognize the figure because I wasn't wearing my glasses. For a moment, I almost lost my cool and chided myself for not going to bed with my glasses. I often have blurred dreams and sleeping with my glasses on helps.

Suddenly I saw something move in my blurred field of vision. The man in the white kurta pyjama had taken off his glasses and had folded them and was now throwing the pair at me. The glasses fell right into my hands, and in complete harmony with dream laws, granted me perfect vision. Indeed this was a revelation: a meaningful dream that gets stuck, a dream that is rescued by first restoring its vision.

Doubtless, the figure was Raj Thackeray. Perhaps my doubt was structured in the dream itself. Wasn't it linked to a lack of vision? After all I would have had no doubts had I been wearing my glasses in the dream.

Now that I knew Raj Thackeray had walked into my dream and was continuing to walk at a spot, I wondered if he would talk to me. I tried to call out to him a couple of times but he did not respond. I got the feeling that he could hear me but did not want to talk to me. On his part he kept walking but never tried to communicate. No hand gestures, no spoken words and absolutely no telepathy.

Maybe I should get a little close and try to talk, I thought. After all this was my dream and I was well within my rights to hunt for some extra meaning. I wasn't surprised when I was moving at the speed of thought towards him. I moved a little closer to him each time I thought I should move a little closer to him till there was no more room left for me to move and we stood facing each other.

As I grasped the contours of his face, his eyes struck me. Without his glasses he seemed like a different man; a benign soul released from a bi-focal cage.

The next moment, everything around us vaporized; curtains were drawn and pulled at the same time and the landscape revealed itself to be the beautiful marine drive at the most beautiful hour of the day: 4 am. The two of us were no longer facing each other; the settings of the dream had suddenly changed. We were now walking on the marine drive pavement, extremely tired.

My energy levels were dipping and the dream was getting to a stage where emotional fatigue threatened to destroy it and wake me up. But there was so much to do. Before I woke up I wanted to know why was he here. Maybe he was a source in the guise of Raj Thackeray who wanted to share some classified documents with a reporter.

I was scared and tired and soon got very angry. I realized that this was a lousy dream and it wasn't getting anywhere. But I wasn't getting up without knowing why was this the way this was.

I mustered some courage and asked Mr Thackeray why had he come in such a lousy dream. Why did he have to first walk in, and then keep walking at the same place?And why did he have to make me walk? One doesn't get to meet great men in dreams every other night; such rare occasions come in a lifetime. And when they do, a young man can certainly hope for something more fruitful and revealing than a walk on Marine drive at 4 am in the morning; surely there is more to dreams than walks.