[A few months old dream]
Like several times before, this morning once again I had this horrible nightmare of erupting Vesuvius.. only this time, it was elaborate, so real... the fear of death that also burning and/or suffocating to death ! If I were a good painter I am sure I could paint it perfectly...
Not sure it was dawn or the sunset... I think it was a sun-set because streets were busy and full of people... but it was't the streets of Napoli, rather it was a kind of my home town Lala in India morphed into Naples. I was alone inside my parent's house.. I heard an explosion and looked back immediately and what I saw was the death itself... biggest possible explosion, as if the whole Vesuvius mountain has exploded ! Vesuvius lost it's head long time ago... much longer than we can think of, but what I saw, felt like it's happening now... the blowing off of the peak of that mighty mountain opening up the portal to hell that started to throw out black smoke, fire and all hell... as if the lava tore apart the clouds and were going to touch the sky and even farther... the sky was full of ashes, much like the burning of the slash-and-burn that I witnessed from the window of Chhurda's house in Gharmura, several years ago when I was just a little kid... I remember, ashes of the burnt leafs were flying away from that distant mountain and reaching far away lands... some of them ended up near my window too ! Only that time the fear of death and the meaning of life was out of the picture.. but what happened in that sunset, this morning was as I said, death itself... but I don't know why I was confused, one moment it scared the hell out of me and in the next moment I was thinking about the ethics of, "What if I take a picture of the eruption with my smartphone ? " ! Because I could hear the cumulative scream of thousands of burning humans and yet that shameless desire to take a picture was popping out somewhere in my mind ! At that moment I saw maa watching the eruption as if she was enjoying it... as if it was not much different than the Diwali-fireworks... as she always enjoyed the Diwali.. I think probably she enjoyed much more than little-me, because even at this age, I have lost my enthusiasm for fireworks and things like that ! I was thinking all these and then I saw a wave of black stuff flying fast, approaching towards us... chunks of Lava hitting everywhere in our neighborhood destroying big buildings in a moment... I started to warn her, to come inside the house as if it would be much safer... but she wouldn't listen.. this feeling was much like the one that came to my mind when I was in Cherrapunji with Subhasish and Pritam, I remember we were standing at the edge of a mountain and there was an ocean of cloud beneath our feet... it was beautiful beyond all metaphors and we all almost at the same time uttered, "I want to jump and die", I believe that Japanese couple uttered the same thing in their language ! I saw this feeling clearly in my mother's eyes... I don't know what that guy was thinking two thousand years ago when watching the same thing from the other side of the Tyrrhenian sea, from Naples !
