Atomic Duck

It was June, but it wasn’t that hot anymore. In the last seven years, the temperature had dropped by four degrees. Throughout the world, everyone was forced to queue for weeks on end for drinking water. But that was not the only kind of queue there was.

At a Delhi police station too, there was a long queue. Mishti was used to standing in queues, but this particular queue—it was rather annoying. For the last fortnight, her dreams had been full of robberies and thefts; and here she was, at the station, to lodge a complaint about that.

But she had been in a queue for the last two hours.

There were five other children in front of her, and all of them looked quite off. One of them hadn’t slept for three weeks, he said—fear of thieves in his dreams had rendered him sleepless. His eyes were bloodshot and the bags under his eyes sagged so heavily that they looked like saucers from which cats could slurp milk. Instead of sleeping at night, he slept a little bit during the day, he said. And guess what … the thief didn’t appear.

‘But it’s not quite the same,’ he remarked rather sadly. ‘When you wake up, it’s already evening, and your head is in a bit of a tizzy.’

It wasn’t all great for those who slept in the night either. Their days were as hazy as for those who woke up in the evening. For the last seven years, the sun hadn’t been visible much. And when it was, a thick layer of smog concealed it.

Seven years ago, Crenikovania, a nation that had emerged from the erstwhile Soviet Union, and Russia had gone to war with each other. And as the war wore on, the Russian president, Ivanovich, had carried out a nuclear attack on Crenikovania. All the other nations of the world had then banded together, attacked Russia and captured and jailed Ivanovich.

Now, while the display of Ivanovich’s images and even uttering his name was forbidden, the world was bearing the consequences of the nuclear attack. A hundred thousand people were dead. Giraffes, leopards and rhinoceroses were almost extinct. And ducks had actually become extinct.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, pitch-black rainbows had been spotted. And in many European countries, rivers had become lethally poisonous. People were forced to drink sea water or die of thirst. The Arab countries had perfected a technique to desalinate sea water, and that was now their biggest export. Water was the new oil, the new gold even!

In India, quails, doves, hill mynahs and cuckoos had pretty much vanished. So had brinjals, okra and black-eyed peas. But the karela, the bitter gourd, was still around, much to Mishti’s bewilderment. What kind of people actually liked karelas? Why hadn’t they gone extinct instead?

Apparently, the effects of the nuclear disaster were going to be around for about twenty years—they called it the ‘nuclear winter’. It was so cold that no blanket or quilt could quite keep you warm. For twenty years, the water was going to remain lethally poisonous, sparrows were going to keep dying and all the world leaders were going to keep blaming each other for the nuclear attack. While people were both disturbed and startled at the turn of events, scientists and social scientists shrugged and responded in unison, ‘Well, this was inevitable!’

What scientists didn’t actually seem to have an explanation for, was why so many robberies and thefts were taking place in children’s dreams. Many, many children were seeing such dreams. In the dreams of children between the ages of ten and fourteen, a strange man took away a favourite toy, a notebook, a pen, a bat, a ball, a football…

But the thief was not quite the same. He looked different in different countries. Actually, children didn’t seem to be able to recall his face. Usually, these robberies and thefts in the dreams took place in total darkness. They couldn’t even discern the colour of the man’s clothes. Initially, psychiatrists and psychologists opined that this was some new form of mental trauma. But things had become so serious that the police had to create a new division to handle such complaints.

A year ago, in an abandoned government school building in Delhi, the ‘Unconscious Crimes Division’ (a division to prevent the robberies that were happening in dreams) was put into place.

Hidayat Ali, the division chief, was charged with recording the complaint of every child who had such a dream. It wasn’t such a bad idea. At least, children now felt that someone was listening to them. The police were actually going to try and catch those thieves. For those children who appeared a little too disturbed, Inspector Ali referred them to the police psychiatrist Aastha Singh.

Dr. Aastha was an expert in both consciousness and unconsciousness. She’d written two books on the meaning of dreams. (No one had actually read those books, though, since they had been released at the time of the nuclear attack; and since then, people had been preoccupied with the business of staying alive). And though Aastha knew that science did not understand dreams very well, she had kept at trying to understand dreams.

Finally, the queue moved, and it was Mishti’s turn. Inspector Ali asked her the same questions that he had asked many, many children before her.

The first one: ‘What is your name? How old are you? How long have you been dreaming these dreams?’

‘My name is Mishti. I’m twelve. It’s been five days.’

Twelve! Hmmm … she was five when the world had changed then.

The second: ‘What are the robberies that take place in your dreams?’

‘A photograph from my childhood photo album is stolen.’

‘The same photo every day? Or different ones?’

‘One photo a day.’

This was a little weird.

The inspector then asked, ‘What’s in the photos?’

‘The album has the earliest photos of my childhood. There are photos from my second birthday. There’s one in which I’m wearing a red cap and my father is dancing with me, even though he was running a fever that day. There are photos of our visit to the Kolkata zoo, and many others; and of my class in Jamshedpur. I only remember Mallika and Rohit in that photo, but there are many others in it. And there’s another one from the Kolkata zoo—I’m standing beside a lake and…’

Mishti suddenly remembered that she had brought along that photo. She took it out of her bag and placed it in front of Ali. Mishti was three or four in the photograph, standing beside a lake, like she’d said. Behind her, a duck stared right into the camera.

A slight smile played on Mishti’s face. But the duck looked like it didn’t give a quack about what was going on.

The inspector hadn’t seen a photograph of a duck for some years now. For the last seven years, he hadn’t even thought about ducks, or what had happened to them. But now he suddenly felt a creeping sadness overcome him. What bad luck that these beautiful creatures were both small birds and lived on water! The effects of the nuclear attack had been most pronounced on smaller life-forms, and it was water that had been polluted the most. Ducks’ bodies secreted a certain kind of oil, known as preen oil, which spread over their feathers and prevented them from getting too wet. After the nuclear attack, their feathers were the first to get affected. Their bodies simply stopped secreting that oil. And soon, ducks were pretty much the first species to vanish.

Before asking his next set of questions, Inspector Ali paused. As far as he could remember, this was the first instance of a photograph being robbed in a dream. Children mostly complained about missing pencil boxes, tiffin sets, clothes and toys. Well, there had been some unusual ones. A child had once complained about his own voice being stolen, but this seemed to be the first instance of a photograph robbery. But still, he checked on his computer whether it was. And yes, it was!

The third: ‘Where are these albums kept in your home?’

‘In a green iron almirah. Third shelf.’

Inspector Ali then offered his usual suggestion: ‘When you go home, change the album’s location. Keep it in a different place, or maybe under your pillow when you are sleeping. The robbery dream won’t take place again.’

Mishti shook her head and replied, ‘We’ve done that already. For the last three days, we’ve changed the location of the album, but the thief manages to find it every time.’

Inspector Ali decided he had to get Dr. Aastha to take a look at Mishti. But he thought he’d ask her one more question.

‘Do you remember the thief’s face?’

Misthi gestured that she did. This was unusual. Ali was taken aback. He asked again. Mishti replied without hesitating, ‘Yes, I do. Very clearly. If I see him somewhere, I’ll easily be able to identify him.’

This was a new development. Inspector Ali had met more than a couple of thousand children so far, but no one had so confidently stated that they remembered the thief’s face . Even as he was thinking about it all, Mishti spoke up, ‘Small eyes, a light moustache, a triangular face and a wound below his eye.’

Inspector Ali immediately sent for Dr. Aastha. It was clear to him that Mishti wasn’t making this up. Could such a person exist in the real world? Probably not. But maybe if they were able to sketch this thief and show it to children, their fears would go away…

Mishti continued describing the thief. Inspector Ali and Dr. Aastha listened; and the police artist, who had also been summoned, began to sketch. To begin with, he sketched on paper, then transferred it to a computer and with Mishti’s help, made a few changes.

Eventually, Mishti exclaimed, ‘This is the guy! The one from my dreams. Get him!’

They’d hit pay dirt.

Dr. Aastha then took Mishti to another room. There, she explained to her that three things went into the making of dreams.

The first—our imagination. That’s why we have dreams in which we fly or do other impossible things in our unconscious state.

The second— our fears and desires. Things we want and things we think about a lot appear in our dreams in the form of strange events, characters and faces. For instance, Dr. Aastha said, ‘I still dream that I’m in school, it’s examination time, and I can’t remember a thing. This is because of my childhood fear. I’m much older now, but the old fear hasn’t quite left me. It lurks in some corner of my mind.’

Mishti could see where this was going.

Dr. Aastha then said, ‘The third—people and events and happenings around us. Things that happen in the real world and affect us, appear in our dreams. Like I’m meeting you today. Maybe tonight you’ll see me in your dream.’

Mishti then said, ‘Sometimes I see things in my dreams. Even as I’m seeing them, I realise I’ve seen this dream before.’

‘That’s déjà vu. Things we see or experience, which we think we have seen or experienced before. Scientists still don’t know why this happens.’

So what is it that scientists actually know? wondered Mishti. They don’t seem to know the important things.

Dr. Aastha sensed that the girl wasn’t quite convinced.

‘You probably think scientists aren’t that smart, huh? But there is a reason why this happens,’ she explained. ‘The eyes see and then transmit the information to that part of the brain that is supposed to put it all together and send it to another part of the brain which processes it and then transmits the information back. But sometimes that part of the brain is busy elsewhere, and delays the transmission. By now, the earlier part of the brain has already seen the image and because of the lag, two parts of the brain see the image a second apart. That’s when you get this feeling of déjà vu.’

Mishti still wasn’t entirely convinced. She then wanted to know why she was seeing the same dream again and again. Dr. Aastha said that too was a way of understanding dreams. The human brain had two kinds of memory—short-term and long-term. Our dreams are mostly short-term. We forgot almost all our dreams when we woke up. Even the ones we remember for a while longer, we forget in a day or two.

‘Do you remember what you dreamt about last night or the night before last?’ asked Dr. Aastha.

Mishti shook her head. She didn’t.

Dr. Aastha then explained, ‘The part of our brain that preserves our dreams as a long-term memory is known as the hippocampus. At night, when we’re asleep, the hippocampus gets to work. It goes over the day and figures out what to preserve for long-term.’

She paused and then asked, ‘Do you remember what you were thinking about when you were brushing your teeth this morning?’

Mishti shut her eyes and attempted to recall. She couldn’t remember anything at all. Then she also realized that she couldn’t even recall what she had eaten for lunch three or four days ago.

‘Now we have to try and figure out why you remember the thief’s face and why you see the same dream again and again.’, said Dr. Aastha. If you can try and remember and then start writing down your dreams, maybe we’ll get a clue. What the hippocampus isn’t doing, you have to do yourself.’

#

When Mishti came home, she kept trying to remember where she had seen the thief. Like Dr. Aastha had suggested, she decided she was going to bed with a notebook and pen. In case she woke up during the night, she would immediately record her dream.

For the next eight nights, Mishti drank a lot of water before going to bed, so that she would wake up to relieve herself and be able to record her dream. This drinking water idea was also Dr. Aastha’s. Soon enough, she realized that besides the thief and the photograph, there were a few other things that appeared often. She made a list of things she saw more than twice:

• A river with a wooden bridge
• Herself, hauling a bulky bag to school. And some other children on the way back home. When she went to school, it seemed like it was almost the end of the day, or on a day when school was shut
• Her nani’s home and nani peeling boiled potatoes in the front yard
• A bird flying over the river
• Kokal, her childhood friend

As Mishti’s list expanded, she realized that the thief was now appearing less and less in her dreams. Nobody understood why this was happening, but just like everything else on the list, Mishti understood the thief wasn’t a permanent fixture either. She then started to slot her dreams into the three categories that Dr. Aastha had told her.

Meanwhile, Dr. Aastha pored over accounts of dreams of children from all over the world in which robberies took place. The more she read, the more she understood. She figured that she could divide these children into two groups. One group had begun to see these dreams on their own. The other began seeing it when they heard about such dreams from friends. That meant that they had been influenced by what they heard.

Inspector Ali also noticed was the sketch prepared from Mishti’s description resembled Ivanovich. Since the whole thing had begun because of Russia and Ivanovich, it seemed logical to conclude that the thief in the children’s dreams, and Ivanovich were one and the same person.

Ali promptly spoke to Dr Aastha about it. She agreed—her own research seemed to be pointing in that direction. In instances where children had begun dreaming on their own, she discovered that older people in their homes had been discussing Ivanovich a fair bit. But that still left the question—What did the stealing of Mishti’s duck photograph in her dream mean?

After pondering over it for a while, Dr. Aastha realized that they were completely overlooking something . ‘Clearly, the nuclear  disaster has not just affected ducks, plants and animals—it has affected the health of children too.’

‘The body or the mind? Or both? Yes, I’m sure it is affecting them. But how does that connect to the robbery?’ asked Inspector Ali.

‘We know that the absence of Vitamin C in the diet, which we get from lemons, oranges and other citrus fruits, results in scurvy, in which old healed wounds make a reappearance,’ explained Dr. Aastha.

Inspector Ali hadn’t heard of scurvy and was surprised to hear of what happened when you got it.

Dr. Aastha continued, ‘So if the deficiency of a single vitamin can affect the body so much, how much could the effects of a nuclear attack affect one? Vitamin C deficiency brings alive old wounds. Could nuclear pollution revive old and fearsome memories, that then make their way into people’s dreams?’

#

Ten years passed. The haziness that hung over the skies had cleared a bit. Karelas had finally gone extinct—Mishti had got her wish. But so had guavas and bottle gourds. Mishti still dreamt about the duck photograph, but the thief no longer appeared in her dreams. Thieves no longer featured in most children’s dreams as well. Such cases were now few and far between. The government decided to shut down the Unconscious Dreams Division, and Inspector Ali was soon to be reassigned. Dr. Aastha’s research too meandered in other directions.

She forgot all about Mishti.

Mishti secured admission to a college in Meghalaya. She looked forward to leaving Delhi. Among the first things she packed was her ‘dream diary’. It had a record of her dreams from the last ten years. What her hippocampus had attempted to discard, Mishti had managed to retrieve and record in her diary. She now had access to an important way of understanding herself. Most of her dreams, she realized, seemed to be triggered by her desires, her fears and things happening around her. Her dreams rarely featured flights of imagination.

At college, Mishti studied English Literature and read many novels, stories and poems. After a couple of years, she and her friends travelled around Meghalaya. She visited the famous ‘root bridges’ of the state, improvised from the roots of ancient trees. They helped people cross the many rivers and streams of the region.

Over the years, like everywhere else, many of the state’s rivers had become lethally poisonous due to the nuclear disaster. Many root bridges had withered away and many jungles were blackened, as if fires had raged through them. Despite all this, a strange kind of beauty permeated Meghalaya which no nuclear disaster could completely wipe out. One evening, as Mishti sat on the banks of a dried-up river, her friends told her about a cave nearby. The roots of trees which seemed to have survived the nuclear disaster dangled from its mouth. Rumour had it that the plants in the cave were still alive and kicking; and that somewhere inside, a river flowed.

Mishti and her friends decided to visit this wondrous cave. The cave did have enormous roots dangling from its mouth, but they had all blackened and withered away. Everyone switched on their flashlights and went in. Unlike the roots and just like they had heard, there was actually a living, thriving river in the cave. Mishti bent down and ran her hand through the water. The water was odourless and flowed freely, like water should. The depths of the cave in front of them appeared dark and forbidding. Everyone decided to head back.

But as Mishti turned to leave, she felt a sense of déjà vu.

‘I’ve been here before,’ she thought to herself.

She stopped and stared at the river. Her friends continued to move towards the exit and called out to her. Mishti wanted to reply, but she was in a daze. She tried to remember when and where she had seen this place. In a dream perhaps?

And then she saw it—in a little crevice in the cave, two ducks sat huddled together. Mishti couldn’t believe her eyes. Weren’t ducks extinct? Even as she stared wide-eyed at them, the ducks hopped out of the crevice, entered the water, and sailed away deeper into the cave.

They looked just like the duck in her childhood photograph.

Had the photograph thief brought the duck from her photograph to this cave? Was Mishti dreaming? Was she being silly in connecting this incident to her strange dream from many years ago? Was it her brain acting up, eager to find a happy ending to every story?

Mishti had no answers. She then heard her friends cry out from a distance, ‘Come quickly. We’re leaving.’

Mishti closed her eyes and conjured up the image of the two ducks. She made a mental note to record this incident in her dream diary, even though it had actually happened. She smiled and made her way out of the cave.

#

That night, Dr. Aastha and Inspector Ali both saw the same duck in their dreams.