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Quote by Abhijit Naskar

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Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

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Abhijit Naskar

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“Three years ago,' he said quietly, 'I began to have these... dreams. At first, they were glimpses, as if I were staring through someone else's eyes. A crackling hearth in a dark home. A bale of hay in a barn. A warren of rabbits. The images were foggy, like looking through cloudy glass. They were brief- a flash here and there, every few months. I thought nothing of them, until one of the images was of a hand... This beautiful, human hand. Holding a brush. Painting- flowers on a table.' My heart stopped beating. 'And that time, I pushed a thought back. Of the night sky- of the image that brought me joy when I needed it most. Open night sky, stars, and the moon. I didn't know if it was received, but I tried, anyway.' I wasn't sure I was breathing. 'Those dreams- the flashes of that person, that woman... I treasured them. They were a reminder that there was some peace out there in the world, some light. That there was a place, and a person, who had enough safety to paint flowers on a table. They went on for years, until... a year ago. I was sleeping next to Amarantha, and I jolted awake from this dream... this dream that was clearer and brighter, like the fog had been wiped away. She- you were dreaming. I was in your dream, watching as you had a nightmare about some woman slitting your throat, while you were chased by the Bogge... I couldn't reach you, speak to you. But you were seeing our kind. And I realised that the fog had probably been the wall, and that you... you were now in Prythian.”

“But when I slept I was always in the truck, huddling together with the others, all of us stinking, shivering, naked, squeezed together for warmth, all but one. One lay by himself against the barred door, the cold one, with a mouth full of clotted blood. He was the traitor. He had gone on by himself, deserting us, deserting me. I would wake up full of rage, a feeble shaky rage that turned into feeble tears.”

“In dreams we become timeless. We can stretch one breath to the infinite, nestle deep into that single heartbeat, and create something wondrously impossible. We can shape our worlds and live our lives to their fullest. As many lives as we want, and in any direction. But we don’t know at what point that breath, that heartbeat, will reclaim us and transform everything we built into forgotten dust. Not even a full memory, only a ghost of a dream, replaced by the incessant light demanding that our bodies adhere to its own cruel schedule.”