A Caravan of Dreams

Mingled with the lack of breeze, the afternoon heat was oppressive. And to top that, the sunshine was so bright it hurt the eyes.

Abhishek sat in the small college cafeteria, on a spartan metal/plastic chair at a metal/plastic table. There was just another couple slouching over their drinks in a corner of the cafeteria, whispering to each other, smiling often. He, on the other hand, sat alone.

He had just bought himself a coke bottle, the small one that has the legendary feminine shape. As he sat watching the bottle placed on the table in front of him, the bottle sat and sweated. Moisture had formed on the surface and one of the droplets had just acquired an existence large enough to pull it out of its static, rooted perch and push it on its journey down the glass surface.

The droplet moved fitfully, in jerks, stopping to weigh its new situation, its next moves. His eyes had caught the movement just when the droplet had left its birthplace and they had followed it with a strange interest.

He seemed oblivious to the world around him, the cafe, the students coming in and sitting down, students leaving, chatting, whispering. His gaze through the bottle presented a fancy stretched-crazy distorted world outside the window. The ageing fan overhead cranked at its usual groaning pace, and he sat there, just watching the drop plod on.

Sometimes it would collect a few nearby droplets and merge them into itself, plucking them out of their inertia, out of their reverie, out of their fear of leaving, and gave them a place at its heart, in its ever growing existence. The gathering of the weak and the insignificant was leading into a powerful force of nature, hurtling down the smooth perspiring glass.

The newly arrived droplets joined the shimmering dream-world of the drop, filled with a purpose, filled with motion and direction. The ever growing surface reflected all the world it could see around itself. It mirrored the dreams all around and made them its own. The droplets became one with the fitful revolution, swimming inside the ever growing community of former droplets, and were all held together by the tension that always remained on the surface. The insides of the drop seemed to dart in different directions every now and then, as if there was a conflict raging inside. But somehow, under its weight, the drop continued its downward and onward journey.

Abhishek watched the drop reach 3 quarters of its way to the bottom of the bottle, and then he suddenly, but gently lifted the bottle, and held it up above his mouth. The drop shuddered a bit with the motion despite the best efforts of Abhishek and moved faster to arrive at the edge of the bottle. And there it hung out, a tiny bit at first and then slowly burgeoning, shaking and shivering, reflecting the world and inflating it as it grew in size.

Abhishek waited patiently, mouth open, watching the drop with rapt attention. All the energy, the purpose, the motion, the dreams, all of them fused together into the shivering drop, and finally they all let go!

The drop fell, gently, as if swimming in the heat without breeze and splashed on his tongue! He closed his eyes and merged the drop with himself.