LITMIR.BIZ

       He heeds his master’s words: A dream is not to be taken lightly. A dream is a powerful ally, coming to your aid. A magic tale, written in invisible ink. A golden thread, tying together the worlds.

      5

      Praeda

      You are at a yard sale. Tables are set up on a sprawling, lush green that covers an entire hillside. Not the typical fold-up, garage sale variety tables, but substantial pieces of furniture, antiques. Some more ornate than others, each covered with some type of cloth, from tattered linen to rich velvet. Candles, feathers and books are arranged on every surface. Along with all manner of stones and jewels. Each table is surrounded by buyers and sellers, bartering. Scattered among the tables are makeshift living rooms. Handwoven rugs from India and Afghanistan, rolled out on the grass, set the frame for each open room. Each space is anchored by colorful high-back chairs, couches, and settees arranged in clusters. People of all size and skin color sit together in these outdoor rooms, chatting enthusiastically, smoking from hookahs, drinking tea. You wander curiously through this mélange and then across the grass to the edge of the green where there is a steep cliff, overlooking a meandering river. The edge of the river is littered with broken bits of terra cotta, a living history of countless cups of chai.

      You turn back to the gathering on the green and in a blink you are sitting in a dark purple chair, speaking to an old woman in pale blue robes, who hands you a cup of tea and asks you if you can see. Of course I can see, you think. But before you can answer out loud, she leans towards you and points her index finger to the middle of your forehead, then touches the spot lightly. The instant she does, a hole in your forehead opens up and the solid surface that was your skin ripples around her finger like water. At the same time, you see thousands of people in white robes standing about on an invisible plane, which stretches out beyond the horizon. One of them, a beautiful woman with sparkling green eyes and brilliant red hair, stands in front of you and bends down to speak. Like what you see? She says. And before you can answer, the old woman removes her finger and you are back in the outdoor living room.

      Unceremoniously, the old woman asks what you have to trade. You look at your empty hands and think for a second. This, you say, as a deck of cards materializes in your right hand and you send an arc of cards through the air and into your open left hand, bridging the space between.

      Card tricks, she huffs, and waves you off.

      You shrug, finish your tea and excuse yourself. She doesn’t understand, you say to yourself. Sight is not the same thing as vision.

      Without bridges, there are no connections. Without bridges, there are only chasms. Without bridges, there are only longings. We cannot wait for the land to flatten and the stream to narrow before we seek to cross.

      6

      Charybdis

      Life moves but it is hard to say in which direction. Maybe it only crosses dimension. Maybe nothing is linear. Maybe all is perfectly still and there is only the traverse of the mind, in a spiral, through parallel worlds. Maybe what we see is only a trick of the brain. Maybe time only exists because of clocks, their hands moving around a fixed center to keep us focused, aging. Or maybe it’s all a dream.

      I wake up as the plane touches down in the dark at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. There’s nothing like air travel to scramble context. Climb inside a giant metal tube in one world and step out hours later into a completely different reality. It’s a lot like dreaming, but in reverse.

      In a dream, it’s the dream world that is foreign (even if it makes some sense while you’re there), but you wake up to a familiar world. When you travel to the other side of the planet, the world you wake up in is the one that doesn’t make sense. Absolutely everything is different, the people, their clothes, their voices, and their skin. The streets are not recognizable, nor the vehicles and buildings that line them. The air you breathe smells and feels different. And there are even colors that never cross borders. I was told, by others who had been here, that nothing could prepare me for India. If air travel is crossing dimensions, going to India is traveling through time.

      I walk off the plane tired, stiff, and probably still a little drunk. Though reality is so skewed I can’t really tell. I wait on the concrete platform with the crowd of other passengers. After about half of them have claimed their bags, I start to get that feeling. That unmistakable mixture of hope and fear. Even if the airlines have never lost a single bag of yours, what if you’re in India when it finally happens. After almost all the good people waiting have spotted and retrieved their luggage, my backpack finally shows up. I do my best to act like I was never worried, collect it and head towards a doorway where I see others exiting.

      After a twelve-hour flight, in which the numbers of passengers alone means the restrooms are practically inaccessible, I need to make a brief stop before the next line. Since I don’t read Hindi, I’m careful to watch which door the men are coming out. Inside the doorway there are tiny rooms with holes in the floor and buckets of water set beside the holes. This has been explained to me. Pour with the right, wipe with the left. I balance my backpack carefully in one corner while I attend to one part of being human which, even in the relaxed standards of the twenty-first century, isn’t considered part of polite conversation. The simple act of defecation, its absolute ubiquity, its undeniable unpleasantness, along with its inescapable necessity, ought to keep us from thinking too highly of ourselves. It ought to lend towards humility and compassion for our fellow humankind. But somehow it doesn’t. Especially in Western society, where we are numbed to these things through our surgical sterilization of almost everything. (I confess I did bring hand-sanitizer with me,

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