The Sim-ilar Archive Of Every Double Ganger

Chapter 6

One morning I got up, and suddenly I wanted to be anywhere but, here.

I could feel myself slipping out of my dream and into myself. And for that one minute I was in both places. And I so desperately wanted to be there again.

That is how my sleep is. I slip out of it with as much consciousness as I have in me. It is as simple as that. One minute I am asleep and the other I am completely awake.

So many times, when I get up at 4 am at night and my Train Of Thought begins, I cannot go back to sleep. I do not know how my brain manages to pull it off without having a stroke, but it is always constantly thinking.

At times I sleep when I am having the worst day ever ( Do Not pay attention to my superlatives, I have way too many of those). And when I wake up, suddenly everything is different, and I am in a different world all together.

My brain still hopelessly holding on to fantasy, likes to think that I travel through parallel worlds as I sleep.

But if I continue to talk about the relationship between my sleep and I ( believe me, we have one) , this book will be an Ode To My Sleep( if anybody gets this reference, you people are important and I love you)
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Yesterday was the first time I met Vasudha. I do not know if we actually connected as much as I think we did, or if it is my mind wanting desperately to connect to someone. But whatever it was, it was good. And after reading the books that I read, and watching the movies that I watch, I wanted something like it so badly. And after years of sifting through conversations and people, I found the inkling of it. And for what it was worth, I didn’t want to let go of it.

Most of our conversation was relatively normal. We talked about books and music and traffic ( If you’re in India you know that traffic becomes something of a common topic to rant about)

I do not know what it is about me, but I manage to make almost everything philosophical. With me it is either stupid or deep. There is never anything in between.
But I told her something that I had always thought about traffic in our country. For the record when I came across this observation I was pretty proud of me. P.S- Tell me if you agree okay?

Okay so I always thought that we as people do not have boundaries. It is like we are allergic to them and try our hardest to stay away from it. We do not have boundaries so we cannot wait behind the black and white lines of chaos. We do not have boundaries so we cannot adhere to the burning signal of red, telling us that beyond this, there is only hell. But we pass over the lines and go further against our conscience.
We do not have boundaries so we latch shackles of insecurity on to our women and our children. We do not have boundaries so we reel in our young as soon as there is the mere inkling of fish. We do not have boundaries at all.

And I kept saying ‘we’. I always say ‘we’ because as much as I would love to say I’m different and flawless, I’m not. I’m them in some way or the other.

And usually when I tell somebody something that has plagued my mind like this has, they tell me with silent laughs and emojis ( new generation yay) that they don’t think so much and that I do much of it (thinking) and they slide the conversations under the bed and start one which does not make them feel guilty about what they have done. ( Rant: I feel people in India do at the bottom of their entire being have a conscience, but it has become so easy not to have one, that they ignore it entirely. Because it makes life simpler. But wake up call guys! It’s not going anywhere. The shit you have done is not going anywhere)
And so anyway, when instead of dissing me and laughing at me for thinking so much, she gave her own input into this topic, and made it our conversation and not just my own, I felt this thing that people probably refer to as halleluiah.

She said to me, that it sucks to see people be this way. To see in their eyes the joke that they have made the entire concept of signals. And that there are people in our countries we can anyway not expect anything of. People with window panes as dark as the night sky and glares that allow them to look past what is real and into the world in which they can do whatever they want. People with tabacco stains already engineered in their mouths. People who will look at the police man and know that there is nothing that guy can do.

And we cannot do anything about them, she said. It will take the revolution of a millennium for them to see it.

She said to me, that it hurts most when we see people like us, people like our parents. People who know better, do it. When I see someone from what is considered a ‘good, cultured family’ break signals like they break condom seals and spit ‘paan’ so that their DNA is all over the road, I lose all hope completely, she said.

She said that and suddenly our serious conversation was hilarious. I laughed at her dig at the award winning family planning systems in our country for hours.
Our conversation went from Shame On Our Country’s Honour to Metaphors Of Sex 101 in seconds.

Soon I was talking about how they are like dogs, and want to mark their territory with their Leonardo Da Vinci level spitwork( artwork+spit)

And I went home that day on my bike( it’s a Suzuki scooter in case you thought I’m cool) wading through the sea of stupidity and more importantly spit, I thought that that was the most interesting conversation I had ever had. And I knew that I had to have it again. And again and again and again. And I would never be tired. Never be tired of feeling like finally someone also felt the same things that I felt.

So when I woke up and felt overwhelmed with the feeling that I want to be away from the barking dogs and Music Of The Gods playing in the distance, I knew I wanted to call her.

Because I wanted to go tripping to the uninhabited islands of Bora Bora and she was my only hope of feeling even a little bit close to that tranquil.

And so surprisingly without any nervousness about calling someone I had only talked to once,

I picked up my phone, and I dialled the number and waited till the call was connected to adventure and the rings took my closer to my ‘anywhere else’.