What do you think of when I say, “The Wall”? (Facebook users, anyone?)

This is more of trip down memory-lane. The apart­ment that I called home for the greater part of the nineties was on the coast of the Arabian Sea in Bombay. Maybe it was the proximity to the sea, or maybe it was just shoddy construc­tion — one of the bedroom walls used to be in terrible shape. On its best day, it had plaster peeling off (sometimes falling off in chunks). On bad days, it was home to forests of fungus. Trust me, it wasn’t pretty.

Strangely, of all the things about that house, this wall is the one thing that keeps coming back to me in my dreams. Almost every idea of “home” that my subcon­scious creates is some varia­tion on that house, ‘that house’ being identi­fied by a suspi­ciously similar wall. Not the view from the window, or the table with the crippled chairs, or the heavy iron cots, or anything else. Just that wall.

Dreams are, perhaps, the best form of enter­tain­ment. The brain comes up with a story and narrates it to you, and in most cases, you can actually partic­i­pate as a key character in the story. The plot is never boring — the brain would change the plot if it were. Pray, where else could you get access to a three-dimensional movie of this kind?

I had a dream last night. Perhaps it had something to do with my recent purchase of a laptop, because this was precisely what I was doing in my dream. Not an actual purchase, but I had a large box with the notebook in it, and I was lugging it around, presum­ably to get it home.

The twist was that in my forget­ful­ness, I kept leaving it behind at different locations — a class­room, on the road and so on — and each time, I walked back anxiously looking for it. When I left it behind somewhere on the road and then went back to hunt for it, it was returned to me by a passerby — but now the laptop was no longer packaged, and my name was printed (not written, printed) on it.

The good news is that I did get it “home” finally, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a house in real life.