A Strange Morning

I blog from a Cybercafe in T. Nagar (I had to produce photo identity and give my mobile phone number just to get in), in the middle of what has been the strangest of mornings. The strangest of mornings, I now believe, are often mornings where nothing strange really happens. After a busy day and nostalgic evening (I went to Higginbothams on Mount Road after years - Amma used to take me there when I was a kid, and somehow, in the last few years, I've never been there. It has changed since I last went there. The books aren't where I remembered them to be. But there's still that same old-world loveliness about it - the building, the interiors, the complicated system of collecting your bill at one counter, paying cash at the next and collecting your bill at the third.), I came home and just crashed by nine-thirty (this was the result of a horrendous train journey - the train, supposed to reach Cantonment Station at midnight, reached at 1.40, and I had been dropped off at the station at 11. Then, I had the dreaded Side-Upper berth. People think the side-middle is a bad berth. Let me assure them, as an experienced customer of the Indian Railways, that the Side-Upper is the worst. Because the side-middle exists, the height of the side-upper has been increased. This means that the sloping edge of the train makes it impossible for one to do anything on the berth but slide in and slide out. Also, the side berths are too short. I cant sleep with my legs stretched. Then, there's the usual Bangalore-Madras problem - in Bangalore, it is a bit chilly (it was raining that night) and by the time you near Madras (at unearthly hours of the morning, mind you), you're sweating. If you're stuck in an upper berth, you have to get down, wake the lower berth dudes and ask them to open windows and turn on the fan. Painful, I say.) I hadn't seen the TV throughout yesterday, and I quickly checked mail in someone's office last evening.

My dream was funny - I dreamt of being asked to play some song in Sahana (can't remember the exact song now) by my teacher. I remember thinking that I didn't know the song although my teacher insisted he had taught it to me just last week. Then, my notebook revealed that such a song was taught to me, and I tried playing it from the notation. My last memory of that dream is that my playing sounded nothing like Sahana, and I complained that I needed reading glasses, because I couldn't see what was written in the book.

Also in my dream, TV news said that Prabhakaran was dead. I woke up and thought about this. (I hadn't still heard the news that he was actually dead, mind you.) I concluded that I had this dream because I discovered TamilNet a couple of days ago, and at Higginbothams, I came across two or three books by this guy (I forget his name) on the Tamil Cause, and why the LTT must be taken seriously.

The front page of The Hindu really shocked me. Perhaps, Thatha was watching the news just before I woke up and my sub-conscious mind heard it. Maybe I saw it somewhere - at a newspaper stall last evening, or some TV in some office that I wasn't concentrating on. Twelve years ago, I remember dreaming that Karunanidhi was dead - I had this dream in my father's student's house in Nepal. Karunanidhi is still alive.

This morning has been a series of long, important phone calls, of humming Sahana while shaving and showering, of hot idlis with maanga thokku, of this wondrously odd novel called 'Zero Degree', of all sorts of newspapers from around the world on Prabakaran's rumoured death, of disjointed thoughts, unformed ideas, vague plans.

Nothing strange has happened. But I've felt strange all morning.