Little Priya's Room

Rajesh couldn't move. This was one of those unpleasant dreams.  He was stuck somewhere between consciousness and sleep, his body frozen, his mind aware and yet susceptible to hallucinations. He had long suffered from chronic sleep paralysis. Long enough to know that resistance was futile. And yet he tried to struggle his way free for quite a while before he finally calmed down.

He found himself staring at the alphabet, painted years ago on his daughter’s wall. The letters looked old and faded now. The letters A, D and E had almost vanished. This was only in his dream. The real letters, he remembered, still glistened as if they’d just been painted. He was glad his dream had at least picked his daughter’s room as its setting. This was a nice place to be, even in a bad dream.

He realized he was sitting on the chair next to his daughter’s bed. The five year old slept blissfully just beyond his sight. He felt a sudden longing to see her face, but still couldn't move, no matter how hard he tried. Eventually he gave up trying and closed his eyes thinking that maybe if he could calm down enough he could go back to sleep.

There was a sound nearby.  A rustle of the bed sheets.

Rajesh opened his eyes. It seemed his daughter had woken up. Listening closely, he heard her pour herself a glass of water from the jar he kept on her bed-stand.

He noticed something odd. He was so used to how his daughter moved around that he could practically see her moving through the sounds she made. Even without looking. But right now, he couldn't see her. What he was hearing were slow and calculated movements of someone definitely more than five years old.

This was not his daughter. He could tell.

Rajesh panicked, forgetting in an instant that he was in a dream. Desperately, he tried to move his head towards the bed, grunting in his mind, straining against the grip of immobility, till finally, the shackles broke. As his head turned, his prying eyes found the person on the bed. It was a girl, no more than fourteen years of age. She was staring back at him, looking extremely rattled. He noticed her hands were trembling. He tried to say something but his tongue wouldn't budge. He shook his head in exasperation. The girl shrieked.

She ran out of the room screaming for her grandmother. Once again unable to move, Rajesh waited, helplessly staring at the bed. An eternity later he heard voices outside the door.

“Okay, calm down now,” said a familiar voice, “here…”

Click. The lights came on.

“The doll moved Grandma! It was staring right at me,” the girl said between sobs.

Rajesh heard footsteps approaching him. “The head’s come loose I guess.” He knew this voice. So when the woman took his head in her hands, and turned it to face her, he already knew he was going to come face to face with his mother.

“It’s such a ghastly doll. Wait…”

With some effort his mother turned the chair around, away from the bed.

“I’ll sleep here tonight, okay? Tomorrow we’ll move the doll to the attic.”

On the wall, at which he was now staring, Rajesh saw his portrait, decorated with a garland. Both the portrait and the plastic garland wore the dust of years gone by. The dust of nine long years.