Prachanda & a girl on a bridge

I dreamt that I was crossing the Narayanghat bridge in Bharatpur. But it was a deep and small brook in the dream, and the bridge was wooden and weak. Some of the planks were rotten and the river below was invisible. We could hear the roaring sound of the water striking the rocks below. There was a white crow ahead sitting on the handrail and was looking elsewhere. The fearful thing was that the floor beams and stringers were dangerously visible.

There was a beautiful girl walking with us. She was carrying a school bag which was half-open. There was a man walking by her side and I was following them. I must have been three steps behind the two. The girl asked, “Where are you going?” The middle aged man replied, “I am coming from Pokhari, Kaski and need to shape something for me and for my village I come from.” She looked at him and said nothing.

As we all were going to cross the bridge, the confident man asked the school girl, “Hold my hand, you will not fall.” The white-dressed girl asked instead, “You hold my hand, please.” The man was taken aback by her confidence. He smiled and looked at her, “What’s the difference? You don’t trust me!”

“For me, there is a vast difference, sir, and about trust, you read me wrong. If I hold your hand and if I take a wrong step, and something wrong happens to me, I may slip your hand go. But if you hold my hand, and something wrong happens to you, you will not slip my hand go. I have trust in you.”

The bridge ahead was invisible in the fog. It was grey and raw all around. The wind from the north was chilly and hit the bones. I was unable to hold the damp rail. I imagined the bright blazing sun of the Tarai summer and inhaled some confidence. Imagine blizzard and boiling water, frost-bite and heat-stroke, icy skin and sweat. The opposites give you confidence. But the dream was disrupted as it always happens. The images of time and space are very playful in dreams.

Is it that trust comes from the other who walks by your side or is it you who trust someone? They perhaps are not the same thing. There is the subject of your trust instead of you being the subject. Trust always lies outside. It is like the girl trusting the man in the dream. For me this is how you seek freedom not only for you but for the other too. If you believe that we all are connected, we trust best for ourselves if we trust the others. Someone said that self-trust radiates outward.

Is it that trust comes from the other who walks by your side or is it you who trust someone? They perhaps are not the same thing. There is the subject of your trust instead of you being the subject. Trust always lies outside.

It was just a sheer coincidence that I happened to read Prachanda’s call for trust. I do not want you to believe me but his words followed the dream. But I dreamt and then I read his statement this morning. Coincidences are not common! They obviously are not. So let me read that the man on the bridge was no other than chairman Prachanda. It makes sense. The girl must be a common Nepali.

What did the chairman say recently? “Have faith in me. If we can’t accomplish things in the next three months, I know we can never trust each other again and people will also lose faith in us again.” One thing is clear in his statement. He knows that we have lost faith in them in the past too. Consequently, he is aware of what he is saying. But let me return to the thoughts associated with the dream.

Trust is not merely an emotional attitude, it is an intellectual belief in someone. The attitude and belief associated with trust are what make trust such a vital social energy. Trust in oneself also creates trust in other. Thus trust is not a matter of the individual only but the person on whom you trust.

I understood the symbolism of the two people ahead on the bridge. I was wondering about the bridge and me. I was I, hence there is no problem while interpreting the ‘I” in the dream. But what does the bridge stand for?

I wrote an email to Jahnavi-appa because I was trying to connect to my colleague Pushpa Acharya who was not answering the phone. She wrote back to me: The bridge may stand for the fact that we all make mistakes. The bridge is the possibility of errors. We all err that is why we are humans.

She sounds right because the bridge ahead was not visible. After some steps, there was a white darkness, a kind of invisibility. I remember one more thing: We were not wearing shoes. Sometimes dream images appear to me one by one if I stress hard on my dream-memories. I do not comprehend the symbolism of the bare-feet. Then what about the white crow? Why was it looking elsewhere and not looking at us? Strange connections between fact and fiction!

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