Bodies

I have a comfort blanket. It is a white Ralph Lauren Home with long-faded tiny flowers on it that my aunt gifted my mom in the early part of the 2010s. It’s the perfect length, thickness, softness, and most importantly (of course) it’s got that extra bit of magic dust that comfort blankets need to have to guarantee you a good night of sleep. It also helps that Kochi doesn’t believe in changing seasons so this one blanket is enough to tide me through any weather. The only thing that has to change, maybe two nights in the entire year, is the fan speed when it gets “colder”. But the blanket remains a constant.

Every couple of weeks though, as is the tragic tale of any comfort blanket, it has to leave me to go to the wash. And I usually fill my time (and bed) for those sub-par days with some other stupid blanket picked off the shelf — always either too short or too long or too heavy or too crisp. But I just have to bide my time till Ralph finds his way back to me. This time, there was a bit of a twist. Ralph has been gone for longer than usual for some deep cleaning to get rid of any of my residual COVID germs from the deepest part of its fibres, and I’ve been left with an extremely colourful new bedsheet in the meantime.

The important part is that this bedsheet too has that wonderful magic dust — most nights I feel light the second I get under it, like I’m drifting around on a cloud traversing the breadths of the universe while I sleep. This one has never accompanied me on my sans-Ralph days before, but I soon start to call it the Dream bedsheet. Not because it’s my dream bedsheet — please, I would never do Ralph dirty like that — but because I’ve not had a single dreamless night since I’ve started using it. Some good, some bad, some insightful, some straight up disturbing. I don’t know where I would box the one I had today.

It’s Month X. In my dream, the little visits we sneaked to college in the middle of the pandemic never happened. We’re visiting college for the first time since the onset of the pandemic and somehow, it’s the dorms we go back to. To the first-year setting. As it goes, I’m usually a day or two late to go back to college and people are already there when I get there so that’s no different in the dream. I walk into the dorm and navigate my way through the lines of double beds; everything’s naturally incredibly dusty with two years’ worth of dust and grime on them. That familiar hustle of activity with everyone trying to sort out their beds surrounds me — some on top and some on the bottom — in the middle of everyone else trying to do the exact same thing. People who’ve had to come here without their Ralphs, hoping to find some other random one that fits the bill. The sound of heavy steel almirahs reluctantly creaking open and bedsheets being pulled off beds making fresh flurries of dust fills the room (dorm).

I set my backpack down and go closer to my bed (I had the top bunk) and lo! THERE’S A BODY IN MY BED. It seems to be napping (peacefully, guided by magic dust blankets of its own maybe) but naturally, it’s as creepy as it gets. I didn’t dare to touch it. As I look down the dorm again, with these new Body-seeing eyes, I see that in the lines of double beds, some have bodies on them. Some of these bodies, I instinctively know, have been cleared away before I came. And some of these beds never had bodies.

Somehow, I also know it’s not napping, it’s dead. Because it’s me. It looks like me, it’s got the same hair I had when we left for the pandemic, and it… well, with extra-dream knowledge, I know it ­is me. As is often the case when clones meet, since I’m confident that I am real and alive and must stay, I am just as confident that she is fake or dead and must leave. Despite my shock, as I ask around, turns out quite a few people ran into this problem of bodies on their bed (and notably, some didn’t). My friend E rather nonchalantly tells me she too had one on her bed and we rant passionately about how freaky that is, but with a familiar undertone of acceptance lacing the panic — the same way we discuss how crazy it is that we’ll be adults “soon”.

The way to go, she tells me, — as with all problems in the mysterious enigmatic NUJS hostels — is to call dada. Apparently, he gets rid of the body; cleans it just like they clean the dust or the old bedsheets, throws it away like he would a dead snake found in the hostel rooms somewhere. I take her advice very seriously, and call dada with an impassioned plea to come and please get rid of the body on my bed fast because it’s freaking me out, and more importantly I need to unpack my (non-comfort simple run of the mill bought sometime in 2021) bedsheets and make my bed. But I’m still perplexed, you see. Borderline offended. None of this makes any sense to me, and the lack of logic is affronting, it is disturbing. I decide to ask unnamed dada — harbinger of knowledge and wisdom in my dream — why these bodies are on our beds.

I reason with him, with the true fervor of someone who needs to win an argument so as to retain their sanity, that this was the same body I took home with me. It doesn’t make sense, there is no reason for anything to be left behind here because I took me back home. The same cells, the same atoms, the same everything, left this point of space-time and went on that flight, went back home and waited out the entirety of the pandemic. It is the same body, then, that got on a flight this time around, the same cells and the same atoms that waited at CCU baggage collect, waited at pillar 17 for an overpriced Uber, and eventually made its way back to college. So — I asked dada — what in the world is this residue that’s still here? What was left behind?

He tells me — with the instant wisdom and surety that can only belong to someone who lives in a dream — to please brush up on the rules of our world. “Every time you exert a force — have a life experience — you create charges that accumulate in a place over time. A dent in the space-time fabric that you leave behind. Over time, if you’ve left enough dents in a place, it becomes Matter in its own right. A weight bearing down on the continuum; a definite depression in the fabric of time, a definite distortion.” He’s too busy with clearing away the bodies to tell me more (besides he thinks the rest is obvious and I should figure it out anyway) but I understand dream-style that my body is my accumulated charges. A residue — a part of me that I could never take back. The part that never came on that flight, that never stayed with me waiting through the pandemic, the part that’s napping peacefully because it never lived beyond March 2020. An accumulation of life charges, of experiences and of personality that sleeps in that bed in the dorm and will never move beyond it. A dent — made far from Kochi (in Calcutta) and far from 2022 (in 2018-March 2020).

Just like he brushes off the dust of two years and throws away long-forgotten question papers and movie tickets scattered on the floor into the dustbin, he easily clears the body and puts it into the Pile with other bodies — all napping casually, all slightly altered forms of people I know, alive and well in front of me. It’s obvious within the dream that there is nothing to do but get rid of the residue.

I wonder if Ralph is better off in the wash.