I see her some nights - every month or so when I am asleep and dreaming. She's dressed in black in the land of wars. I never see myself in those dreams - I just feel my heart pounding and my body panting. I don't know what I am in those dreams but I've seen this dream several times to realize that I probably am a business man or a passer-by hiding behind some barrier. I look at her from there. She holds no armory and in her, I feel no treachery. She's dressed in black- pure black. The only part of her you can see is her eyes and the lips and her nose behind a translucent black clothe. I do not know what that clothing is called. I never bothered to look it up in a dictionary. All I know is that she looks at me and stares. She gives me a look I can't make anything out of. It feels cold and I feel as if she wants to tell me something from over the debris of brick and shells that she is climbing on probably trying to get to the other side of it. It feels as if she's calling for help or maybe it just signifies her acknowledgement of my existence there. I look at her for a moment or two when time comes to a hold. I can hear no sound and see anything but her. I don't feel my heart beat. It feels, for a moment, that we two are the only beings alive there and breathing and I realize that I know that girl. Then from somewhere a blast of smoke comes to block my view from behind the walls. Dimmer and dimmer she gets as the smoke grows thicker and thicker. When the cloud has finally cleared out, I realize that she is no longer standing on top of that brick hill. She too has disappeared along with the cloud. Maybe, she's fallen off that hill and is behind it now, away from my sight but something in me does not let me go and see for myself. I then set out to seed a thought in my heart that she never was there, just a dream, just a confabulation.
But, deeper within, I can't help but think about those eyes - brown and yet the brightest I've ever seen. It seemed to hold so much within it - so much of feelings I now try to grasp a bit of. The comprehension, I feel, is taking me to another time halt as my brain tries to work out what she might have been trying to tell. I hear something, never made out what that meant either - some sort of sound most probably a call at me. I try to understand what that is, I try to understand what she was trying to say and try to think back to where I had seen this girl before and how I really did know her. But, before I do that, just before I understand, I wake up and the only thing that remains is those eyes in my memories looking at me.
Sometimes, I wonder if I were the enemy there. The smoke was my gun's and what made her disappear from the debris hill was my bullet. In that case, the looks she gave me would not be a call for help or a mere recognition but pain, anguish and fear. I don't know if I were an enemy for sure though. I don't know if I were a friend or just a stranger to her. All I can tell with certainty is that she was there and I had seen her and that I had known her well before somewhere.
Someday, I will walk up to her before the smoke blackens the way and ask her if she wants to be friends with me.
- Prashanta Ojha
