W. G.The Woven Guild

I am not good at having emotional, evocative dreams. The ones you remember forever.

So, I make up my own. I have been good at making up things since forever, I believe. Stories, arguments for debates, identities.

I never got a chance, in my almost 17 years of life, to be in the same room as my maternal grandmother, my Nani, at a point in time where I could cherish that memory for the rest of my life. I wish I had a ‘rest of my life’ with her. My grief is of a very peculiar nature. It’s partly inherited, and mostly curated. I spend everyday not recalling, but thinking, dreaming. Thinking about the what-ifs, dreaming about the same.

So, I had a dream.

The room is brightly sunlit. Nani and I sit on the opposing ends of the same brown dining table on which I have placed my laptop, the one I’m writing this on. She has her large, circular, red bindi on her forehead. Her red lipstick and her hair perfectly tied up neatly in a bun. The bun is adorned by a fragrant gajra and a red rose, the former as white as a swan and the latter as red as the red of love. Her eyes have that sparkle and that kohl, the black, bold and beautiful kohl. She’s smiling, she’s smiling because in this supremely fictive lifetime, she clearly sees how she shares an uncanny but beautiful resemblance with her daughter, and how her granddaughter hopes she’d inherit the same. She looks poetic. She is poetry. My favourite muse.

I like to believe that I have inherited a few things from her – her love for literary arts, music, leading, and, hilariously enough, mostly staying away from the kitchen.

In this dream, she has watched me grow up. She has watched me celebrate my birthdays and cry and smile and win competitions and succeed and fail. She has watched me through everything. In this dream, I don’t feel envious of kids who sprint to their Nani as soon as summer holidays begin. I have watched her go through life, tell me stories about her childhood, and be the bold, ambitious, magnanimous woman that she always was.

The sunlight makes her look heavenly, but in this dream of mine, she’s nowhere close to that. She’s meant to stay. She stays. She stays until I graduate school and college. Until I get a job. Until I marry. In that dream, I don’t have to live with tales, second-hand memories, and the comforting fact that she loved me most. Sometimes, I wish I lived a bit longer with that love. I’d somehow wrap it up in her favourite saree and hold it close to my heart. Forever.

We talk for hours with nothing much to catch up on because she has seen me grow up already. She knows me inside out and often talks of how I resemble her intrinsically, at least. She knows my love for books, prose and poetry, music, debating, just talking my heart out in general, lip products, too, the colours maroon and black and navy blue and white.

In this dream, I don’t write this article. I know an awful disease won’t take her away from me before I even turn 6 months old. Hell, I don’t even think of something of that sort. Let alone live it.

This dream is mine. These are the 7 minutes.

My 7 minutes.