~~ Day 3: Dreams to Nightmares! ~~

Originally written on Dec 3 2015 –

As I am looking at these flooded photos of Chennai everywhere, I cannot help but recall a drizzling Friday in Chennai way back in November 2005…. It was a usual Friday with too much work, I came home late soaking in the drizzling rain and had plans to go to office the next day as well… As I woke up early on Saturday and heard my neighbor lamenting something about water in her house, I thought “aiyooo, paavam, yenna accho?”  (Oh poor lady, wonder what happened)… I was still lying on bed looking at the ceiling fan and wondering, how her ceiling might have had leakage in rain or may be some kitchen tap broke in the night with a fountain of water filling the kitchen, and probably, they never knew, and probably, there was no way the water could drain etc etc…Even as I was thinking all these possibilities, never once, did I realize that the severity was way more than a water leakage or just a short term draining issue! Never once did it occur to me, even in my so called just-out-of-dreams-state, that Chennai can ever face a calamity like flooded homes – until, just until, I sat up on my bed and saw my home-wear chappals floating about right in front of me, instead of its usual resting position on the ground, the rain + drain/ditch water mocking at me, may be, just waiting for the next session of rains, so it can blissfully soak my warm kurl-on bed rendering it probably useless for later use!  I remember being wide-eyed and terror-struck!!! I couldn’t for the life of myself, believe that my house was flooded. I first thought, I might have just had a nightmare and pinched myself, but it hurt! I turned to my roommate who was still asleep, Saturday being a no-work Saturday for lucky-her and she could afford to get up later than me! No, it was definitely not a nightmare! I tried to open the bedroom door a bit, still unable to comprehend what the hell had happened out of the drizzling night yesterday, when to my horror, in that faint sun light (ours was a poorly ventilated but superbly furnished house), I recognized the bathroom buckets happily bobbing towards the TV now and then… It was not the smart phone era, so I couldn’t click a pic, but then, the horror show that it was, experienced first-hand, all alone with a blissfully unaware sleeping room-mate on my side, is accurately imprinted in my mind and as I write this, I can still feel those terror induced goose bumps that rose in me, when reality slowly seeped in just like the water would have into the house! 

How easily dreams turn to nightmares, don’t they?