The City of Dreams

This is my home...

This is my home and not again mine..i live on borrowed land..but who really cares..this the city of dreams..my city..and in my dreams the world is mine..

But you do not yet know me..i was born a few days back..or maybe months..or years..dog years...i go once in a while to our public meetings..of our clan..you would have heard us sometime..i am sure you have..we create real nuisance with our howls , our demonstrations, meetings, and sometimes have had to be dispersed with pelting of stones..i am sure you have heard us..in those meetings we hear our folklore, about our past and our future..

once our ancestors told us about a time when man did not have to keep time..there was no time to be kept by a watch..no days of the week..no month..no year..and man just lived..the very thing they have forgotten today.but that is not my story.

today, i don't do much that gives me happiness..and i'm still very young to take up any profession professionally..i have been abandoned by my parents..so did not get much education..not even the basic life skills..but where life is the teacher you learn all your skills, probably, better than the most. i know i will be the best in whatever i do, i just am still undecided what..

i wasn't born here. i was born in a very remote village and was brought here, hidden in a bag, away from all prying eyes, with promises of a better world. i believed him, the man who brought me here. As if i had a choice or gave him one. But then again, i was the dreamer. My mother always scolded me when i would have a rhetoric for every situation, a dream for every dream. needless to say, i was looking for a new world. i was bored in that village. sometimes suffocated, because i was the unquestioned leader and i hated it. i was bored of leading and even though they said i was the best they  had, i wanted to give it all up.The man was only an excuse, i had already stepped out of my past world a zillion times in my dreams , in my future.

My dreams are all broken now. Yes, this city of dreams has loads of lights. It weaves many dreams in millions of eyes. I am not a leader here. I don't want to be. I feel happy being no one, being a face in the herd, following the senseless rules, living up to impossible unending expectations,. I chase the babies and school children in the rain, run after the bais who have come and settled in the city of dreams from their different worlds and come to work in my building,loaded in buses and trains..loaded with their dreams of a better house that does not leak in mumbai monsoons, a daughter who's married well, a husband who doesn't come back drunk, a face without beating and bruises..i bark at the well dressed men and women rushing off in the mornings with a noose on their necks and come back late, the noose tightening little by little  every night.. i imitate the watchmen who smoke beedis and share their stories from far away lands.. I eat exotic dishes, chinese, continental, indian, you name it, i have had it.i.. roam in the streets at night. i get into street brawls while imported cars and bikes zoom past in amazing speeds , killing men, women and children , smiling in their dreams,  on the pavement. We look at the mangled bodies, the brawl momentarily forgotten and then we start again. The lives are not that valuable here you know.

but the mirror is breaking...

it was a bane she had of reading thoughts of the animals. She shook her head clear of the thoughts  of the black ugly  dog,  that lay shivering alone, cold and wet in the mumbai rains amongst the false palms of their society garden..and looked away from its eyes that had kept her locked across the distance of fourteen floors. Staring at the blank wall, her blank life, she realised hers was the dog's life.