child inside!
child inside!
I have a machine gun in my hand and all type of bombs & bullets are flying in the air. I jumped high to avoid one of them which was destined to kill me. Regaining my balance, I shot one from my own gun, and it hit the other men in his belly. He fell down. Just after that I realised the magnitude of the mistake I had done. I can’t go to school tomorrow, they will hang me. I started shouting for a doctor but I was stupefied to see the men disappeared after a few seconds…..
I am running on a floor which is made of big cubes and there are places where there is none. It seemed like the municipal department have managed to maintain their reputation of lax and slipshod ways. I wonder what will happen to a person if he fell into that hole. I can vaguely remember why I am here. After I racked my brain, I remembered I have to rescue some Princess peach who will be in the far corner of the city. I started moving forward and saw a short creature covered with thorns all around his body with full intention to collide with me. I was pretty sure of an irereparable damage when I managed to jump and avoid him. After moving a few paces forward I saw a big tower like structure in my path, more like a pipe to hell. I was standing there wondering how will I go to the other side when I saw the same creature returning back with a ghostly duck behind it. I had nowhere to go….
This is a dream of course. I made myself pretty clear. No one is going to hang me or kill me. I was revising similiar kind of dreams from the past one or two months. Then I smiled at the thought of me playing contra and mario on my own video game which my father had promised me next month. I could hardly see the calendar in dark, but could visualize all the cross marks which I had been putting on it since the last 13 days. As we say love is in the air, I was happy every moment of the day waiting for next month. I was a good son, a good brother. In school while standing in punishment outside the class with my friends, I discussed new tips and tricks to finish tetris and bomber man. In lunch time we pontificated about how we had achieved milestones in bike racer and F1. In short, “I ate, slept and drank video games”. Similiar things happened when there were talks about my new bicycle. I raced and won in my dreams. I could carry on 20 friends on my bicycle like the military guys show in the republic day ceremony. Those thoughts about “the things” preoccupied my mind day in and day out.
Coming back to present. Recently I bought my new laptop, for those pedantic guys/gals, it was a Dell Inspiron 1525 configured to suit my taste. But when I brought the package home and opened it, there was no excitement or happiness. Just a plain feeling, I have bought a laptop. I would say, love was not in the air. I would not say I never really dreamed working and watching movies on my laptop but the intensity of that feeling was far too low to be even compared with what it was when I was a child. I tried to find a reason but could not come to a conclusion. May be as I grew, I realised the futility of materialistic things. It can be due to the reason that I have to take my own decisions now, while earlier I used to rely on my parents to get me something. This whole decision making process of to buy or not to buy, or what else can I buy, steals all the excitement and happiness which “the thing” can bring in itself. The other reason could be the money spent on the laptop was from my own earnings. 
Whatever the reason might be, those childhood feelings were not ephemeral and I could not think of any event in the past few years which made me so much happy and excited for months.
“Lately what made you happy for months”, I asked this question to my friends.
“khatte” Lemon singh blurted out with his as usual uproarious laughter.
But Munnibai thought for a while and gave a long reply about his excursions to lalaland, this summer. He told us about how he had spent three days with a girl in there and how he dreamt about it months before that meeting. He told us about his dreams, with the wordings written here slightly manipulated and embellished to suit the readers…
How will he hold her hands, how will he lie in her lap in a garden bench and how will she wave his hair. How will he talk about different issues and not get bored. How will he crack a joke and feel her sweet giggling. How will they look into each other eyes to find a whole new world with only munnibai and reshma rani (his gf) to explore….
I could have continued with this romantic narrative, but this will only digress me from the main point. This was one event which made him happy and excited for months and yes he dreamt about it. I could feel the same excitement in his voice, same fervour about “the thing”. I am still not sure about what is that “thing” which can make me feel like the same child which I was long back. But I am pretty sure I desperately want the same feeling, same excitement, same happiness and I then I will point at my belly, sorry, no, heart and say
“child inside”.
