This dream is real!

An old abandoned warehouse is home to a few artists like me, and my sir. Sir looks like Pankaj Kapoor. He comes to me and asks for a hand to bring down one of his paintings which he wants to present to the rest. I readily agree. The hour is dusk and faint rays of the setting sun glows dimly through the rusty glass windows of the high ceiling studio. It is shady, blue, rusty and smells of clay. Hay in every corner you can see them scattered all over. It’s almost a miniature style painting on canvas with some figures standing and forming a dome or a pyramid. And the painting looks so blue. Dark Prussian blue.

I pick up the painting and look up to follow him. By then he is gone. Downstairs. I look at him from his studio set like a tree house and me perched up looking like a little bird waiting for mother to bring some food. When I come hurriedly down the stairs trying to follow him, I almost trip and the painting falls from my hand. I manage to catch it somehow, saving it. He stands at a distance watching the whole drama, and silently smiles. I come down carefully and run briskly to catch up with his fast pace. A couple, foreigners I think, didn’t notice so keenly, pass me by giggling, the boy holding a spliff between his fingers, and the girl merrily following him, giggling. They are going upstairs to the terrace to have a happy time I presume.

I am still running briskly trying to keep up with sir. There are a few ladies in vision now – in a smoky ante-chamber they play around as geishas to men like us. They have no relationship with anybody living there. They swing and they giggle, they swoon and they wiggle through arms of men seeking pleasurable moments in their mundane time. Them, girls have come just to entertain us, give us all the pleasures in the world we fantasize. Sir takes a turn round a corner and is clouded by waves of girls like them in seconds. He talks to them and plays with them, with a copper smile on his face for what it seemed like hours. And I slowly feel myself drowning in a mellow poison intoxicating my senses to the brim. I am moving, swinging, I am floating with the wind that touches the surface of my water creating ripples that shine and shimmer like fiery dust of gold on a lucid pond of cold numbing calm.

While running behind him I had been constantly telling sir how much I adore him and respect him, and how lucky I am to be living and working in the same place with him. But none of these words seemed to bother him at all. He wasn’t interested to listen to what I had to say. He was just occasionally turning his head towards me from the front while walking, and sometimes smiled silently.

When covered in the ocean of entertaining girls I remember myself laughing, talking, enjoying myself. I am dozed - intoxicated, inebriated, drowned in the pleasures on offering. There are three girls on me, with me swinging by, in an impromptu to and fro motion. I look carefully, and one of them is Rekha. She swirls to stop me, holds me tight by my hand, she shakes and she jerks me off from sleep, she tries. She looks so beautiful with the red bindi on her forehead. She comes closer now, leans over and whispers in my ear the most important words of my life.