Cos’ rats ruin everything

Hello dreamers,

There are two things you should know about me:

1. I am a huge fan of Rajeev Khandelwal.

Faaiine. I will live with the fact that you don’t know this genius of an actor, this insane looker, this man of intellect and many talents, this adventurous soul. Sad you haven’t experienced the twinkle in his eyes, the gentleness of his smile, the ring of music in the way he talks. You get the drift, right? RK was my teenage crush and remains so. Just the mention of RK’s name does something to my hormones (*Naren cries and checks himself out in the mirror*) – 15 years since I first spotted him in what went on to become a hugely popular romantic TV serial called Kahiin Toh Hoga. My school friends can fill you in with stories of my craze for RK. Sample this: I begged the local cable TV operator to air a small-time channel called SAB TV so I can watch RK’s new-age show Left Right Left. I begged, pleaded, emotionally-manipulated the bhaiya to let me see RK as the cool Captain Shekhawat. He gave in. Yay!

Okay, okay, here is our man…

Just look at him…

Actually, us…

Ignore my chappals

2. The second thing you should know about me… I have fans too but I simply hate them.

They are neither homo sapiens nor do I desire them in any way. But it’s a one-sided love for them, stalker love, to be honest. Wherever I go, their network follows.

Meet them.

Cute? Not really.

I’ll spare you the trauma of being at the receiving end of an unrequited love and jump straight into the dream. I would request you to stay with me till the end because there’s a lot of surprise in store.

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I wake up early. Actually, I didn’t sleep well last night. I was tossing and turning in the bed, dizzy with the excitement of what lies ahead of me. Today, Rajeev Khandelwal’s XYZ film is releasing in the theatres of Bangalore, and mamma, papa, Shishir bhaiya, Kuku and I are going for the afternoon show. XYZ film had premiered in the north of India a few months ago and did surprisingly well, leaving fans like me in the south high and dry. But now our time has come.

I did watch the film on a streaming platform but it is something else to watch it on the big screen. Especially, when your family is as excited as you are, or at least, you have convinced them to trust your excitement. I won’t give away too much about the film but it’s a spy thriller, where RK busts an international conspiracy to blow up an Indian ship and recounts how he foiled the plan in flashback.

I am so excited that I want to dress up nicely. So I get out of my bed to take a shower.

I am walking past the living room to get to the better of the two bathrooms we have. For that, I first need to reach our patio and then into an outhouse. The layout convinces me I am in my childhood home in Himachal 🙂 I reach the patio and YIKKES!

Sniffing on the floor is my evil lover – a big, dirty, spiky rat. It senses my presence and stares right back at me.

I run back into the hall in horror and start broadcasting to my family: “There’s a big, dirty rat out there in the patio. Why do I always have to spot a rat? Why???”

There’s no time to waste. I need to get this rat out of my way and my important day. So I decide to organise an adoption drive and post the message as my WhatsApp Status.

Ping!!!

Kavitha: Hey, me and my aunt are ready to adopt the rat.

Wow. That was quick. Now I don’t have to live in terror. Yay!

Kavitha: I saw my aunt’s notebook, she has decided to buy it for Rs20 lakhs. Even I will buy the rat around that price.

RS20 lakhs? It must be an exotic species then.

Wow! I didn’t know Kavitha is so rich.

Why are they paying? It’s a free adoption.

How does it matter? Just let them take that ugly rat away.

There’s only one rat, which Kavitha’s aunt plans to buy. So what is Kavitha calculating money for?

Forget it. I have found ‘suitors’ and that’s all that matters.

I decide to go back to the patio and check on the rat. I reach and I….

“Mamma, mamma, the rat has died. Somebody has killed it. The stench is so bad, I am going to die. I can’t stand the smell. Please have it thrown away,” I shout at the top of my lungs.

Disinterested in my drama, mamma turns to my papa to say, “Go and take bath or we’ll get late for the movie.” In goes papa, then Shishir bhaiya, Kuku and mamma. One after another, of course 🙂

“Okay, gudiya (that’s me), now you go and take shower too,” mamma calls my name.

“What?” I can’t believe what I just heard. Mamma is asking me to cross the patio, where the rat is lying dead, to reach the bathroom! No way. “I will puke and die in that stench. I can’t go that side,” I shut the case. Meanwhile, papa is puzzled why I am acting hysterical. He offers an alternative: “Okay, you go to the second bathroom.”

“No, papa. The smell of that rat has taken over my senses. I can’t take that smell out of my head. Now I can’t go to any bathroom,” I rationalise my behaviour.

Papa gives up and sends Shishir bhaiya and Kuku instead, to convince me to rethink.

They come, they fail, they go away while I glide into the kitchen to discover that I am not the only one giving mamma a hard time today. Standing on the door of the kitchen is a young boy of about 10 years. He is new to our family. Looks like we have adopted him recently.

Just when I was falling for his innocence and curly hair, I realised he is a high-maintenance kid. He has told mamma he would go to theatre only if she gets him a glass belt to wear along with his jeans – or he won’t go. It’s a new fashion trend among kids, it seems. Mamma gives in to his tantrums and proceeds to get the glass belt from one of our rooms.

“What? We have a glass belt? When did we even buy that thing?” I quiz myself.

On no! Mamma was trying to lift the glass belt off the hook but it got stuck, fell and cracked. The belt is still quite wearable but the kid is beyond consolation. He is not shouting at us but his face says it all, he is heart-broken.

Wait. Why doesn’t he speak anything? As I implore him to talk, he points his finger back into the kitchen and gestures to say that he is loving how fast my mamma is making rotis and how round. Oh, damn! He is hearing- and speech-impaired, I realised. Overcome with guilt of labelling him a brat, I decide to surprise him with my sign language skills that I picked up at a workshop a few years ago. I sign about a car and then a man who runs on all fours, faster than a car! The kid is ecstatic.

With my job done, I retire to my bedroom. I am sitting by the window side that overlooks a school. As I curse the rat for ruining my day, I hear young and happy voices coming from the left side of my window. Now I see a beeline of kids dressed in home clothes rushing to the school, with their schoolbags on – all boys.

I stop a hurried kid and ask him what’s the buzz about. “We have exams today,” he answers as he runs forward. Next, I hear a group of students whispering about a new jeans trend. “You know that jeans comes with a glass belt, which highlights the waistline,” I overheard them saying. Just when I connected the dots between that chubby kid and his obsession with the glass belt, he showed up – smiling ear to ear. “Look, look,” he lifted his shirt to reveal his slim waistline, which he was able to achieve with the cracked glass belt. He lunges forward to hug me and say bye. “I am going to write my exams,” he announces and vanishes in thin air.

Wait. What? Was he not supposed to go to the movies with my family, with that glass belt on?!

Not my problem. I brush his childishness aside and switch the TV on to kill time because my family has left me home alone with a dead rat and gone to watch an RK movie. Good for them.

As my cruel fate would have it, RK’s interview is airing on the first channel that I tune into. “I have done 20 films till date which have stories told in flashback but none has ever done so well at the box office as XYZ has. So much so that it’s become a talking point down south, a market that’s new to me,” RK is telling the reporter while my mind is wanting to kill that already dead rat.

Image by Devon Breen from Pixabay

“Gudiya, it was such a good film,” papa bursts into my bedroom with a stellar review of RK’s film. “Oh okay,” I force a smile on me while also imagining how mamma and papa would have reacted to those sexy songs in the film. Shishir bhaiya and Kuku would have drowned in shame, I visualise further.

Now mamma, Shishir bhaiya and Kuku are taking turns to sing praises about RK’s film and I just want to mute their reviews. I am upset, more upset, most upset that a rat ruined my date with RK.

I am so upset that I wake up. I am in my senses now and I know that the rat was a dream and so was RK’s film. But I am still upset. So upset that Naren is wanting to cuddle and hug me but I am not interested. After invading my kitchen, my study room, my road trips, the rat has now started invading my dreams as well. How low will you stoop, you rat?!

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Now is the time to unfold the surprise. In the first blog, I had told you that in six out of 10 cases, I can decipher where my dream originates from. Let me demonstrate it to you today.

Why did I see Rajeev Khandelwal?

I saw the dream in the wee hours of October 17, a day after RK’s birthday. The last thing I read on my phone before going to sleep was messages on my school WhatsApp group, which went like:

Shriti: Umm.. Can someone remind me what day is it today? Please get it right.

Apurwa: Amavasya.

Shriti: Aww thank you for participating in my silly game Apurwa but you too forgot! It’s Rajeev Khandelwal’s bday today.. 😛

What about Rajeev Khandelwal’s film

On October 16, a day before I had the dream, I saw the teaser of his upcoming web series, which tackles the unglamorous but important story of the Naxal movement. So I was looking forward to seeing RK in a new project.

Why the rat

Evening before the dream, Naren and I had gone to eat the most yummy momos in our side of the town, Yeshwanthpur in Bengaluru. As I got down from the car, my eyes fell on a big, fat, dirty rat foraging something on a broken pavement to my left.

It’s become an internal joke in my family that if there’s a mouse or a rat around, it will first give its darshan to me and then maybe, at all, to others. Rats stalk me, haunt me, ghost on me.

Who was that child

After returning from the momo stall, Naren and I decided to watch something on TV. Much browsing and disappointment later, we opened a short film called Pencil Box. It revolves around a young boy with curly hair who loves to watch his mother make rotis. That kid also finds himself in the mid of an unsuspecting adoption battle. I saw that kid in my dream. Him 👇

What about Kavitha adopting the rat

Two days before the dream, I had put up an adoption post on one of our trekking groups to help three kittens find a home. To which, our friend Kavitha had responded, “I wanted to keep a pet but I travel a lot sometimes, so if Linga (another friend) is ready to babysit my pets. I can take one 😂😂”

Why I wanted to dress up

A few days leading up to this dream, I was scrolling my old pictures. I realised, once upon a time, I used to make efforts to dress up nicely but now, it’s zilch and I don’t like it. Naren has been encouraging me to dress up and feel better and that sentiment made it to this dream, I guess.

What about that glass belt?

No idea. But I won’t lie I am fed up of the flab around my waist and have been working on it – half-heartedly. I am on intermittent fasting but also on a daily diet of pakodas :p

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Have you dreamt about your celebrity crush?

Have you encountered your enemy-animal in dreams?

What is the most close-to-reality dream you have dreamt?

Let me know in the comments. I am waiting!