THE UNINVITED

I had been burying my emotions; masking; concealing; stifling and smothering. The form, rather, the silhouette of a small girl wearing a lehnga chunni hopping frolickingly from the kitchen to my little daughters room and back and forth ,with her anklets providing the most audible rhythm to her happy hop, in the middle of the night. Managing the passing weeks, months, and years ...

Once upon one of those nights, I heard the anklets ringing with the hopping of this figurine that was moving from one room to another inside my house. God knows what that shadow was up to .While I , the mom, frozen with fear ,unable to  move an inch out of that paralyzed bed .Or had I helplessly got reduced to a selfish human ,whose primordial fear ,even overtook the maternal instinct in her ? In that, that i didn't move out of that deplorable bed to go and check on the well being of my lill' one?!!All the while wanting to scream, but probably too benumbed by the horror of the unwelcome visitation .


After a couple of minutes of its movement to and fro ,it finally and most menacingly decided to allow its steps to flow towards my room .(While  I, as I faintly  recall ,was up to, as if , hoodwinking the hobgoblin that i was as hard asleep as could be, so it  could carry on unhindered ,with its plans .The instinct of self preservation, screamed loudest in  the process, proclaimed though with a guilt ridden tongue ).It came right behind my bed ,behind my head .That was it !By then my fear had reached it point of saturation ,to come out bursting in the irrepressible screams ,that happened breathlessly . But the trauma ,as i  understand ,was far too much  for me to go through .And ,the pain of not having been able to hear even one of those screams ,that had seemingly erupted  full blast ,was what i scummed to .It remained all bottled up?Yes ,it did .There were actually no horror stricken screams at all !I still fail to understand it all ?

I sat awake ,wide awake ,as if ,for the first time .Yes ! it actually was for the first time ,that i became conscious of the scenario around ,still not accepting ,that all that which had just occurred was a neat nightmare.To me i had seen all that ,with my eyes first  opened to the soft sound of her anklets.How could i open my eyes all over  again to realize that it was a vision that belonged to the canvass that the mind had painted. And so adroit that it emerges as the finest of the fine creations! With that absolute "willing suspension of disbelief" achieved ,that it leaves you absolutely confounded with the intensity with which it hits you .

I continued sitting frozen in my bed for a good fifteen minutes after the vision dissolved itself most mysteriously behind my bed .I could still not dare to step down ,to check on my daughter sleeping most innocently  in the other room .

While my simple friend, in her kind innocence advised me the next morning, of the standard ways to ward off evil spirits, I found myself left wondering at the ingenious ways of the human mind. After a couple of years a student of mine told me that what i went through was actually an instance of sleep paralysis. a different kind of nightmare where you are actually dreaming but the sequence comes across as a real one. And jokes apart, as we might want to now laugh at the comedy of the so horrifying nightmare, but come to think of it man!...

I was left wondering : Do we turn illusions into realities and our life into a journey of a series of illusions?