Where Reality meets Illusion

There I was, lying on the mattress, listening to music ranging from English pop to Indian classical, admiring the tunes, eyes closed. Each note was bringing about a different emotion in me. With each rhythm a different picture was laid before my eyes. Images were dancing around inside my head, in tandem with the words that were flowing into my ears. What a wonderful feeling, I had thought. But that was just the silence before the storm - that one deep breath before the plunge.

The poison consumed the hour before had begun to take effect. Slowly but surely, my mind was being invaded. As the images grew in numbers, they became more and more indistinct. Thoughts came one after the other, slowly at first, but then quicker and quicker. A thousand visions seemed to run before my eyes at the same time. A million thoughts tried to make their way into my head, each fighting for the limited space available inside my skull. They came so fast, that it became impossible to hold onto one feeling for any fraction of time. I was thinking about my computer for a moment, only for the image to be shattered into a million sparkling pieces, juxtaposing themselves against the dark void around them to become stars in the night sky the very next instant. I was a mighty emperor commanding a vast army, but then again I was a small child, afraid of the monster in the closet. The thoughts became a blur, and I was thrown into oblivion.

I closed my eyes, trying to put myself to sleep. But how could the mind relax when it is being bombarded with a plethora of emotions? I seemed to be dreaming and conscious at the same time. My heart was racing, trying to keep up with my thoughts. Every physical action seemed to require the utmost attention and dedication from me. Every movement seemed to drain the last drop of strength left in me. I remember being asked to go to the kitchen to have some lemon water which would have helped with the intoxication. But as I tried to stand up and failed miserably, I felt a kind of helplessness never ever experience before.

My only constant in this world of chaos was the clock mounted on the wall beside my bed. I watched its hands move slowly forward, struggling to rotate like a rower trying to row upstream. With thoughts moving in and out of my mind at lightning speed, time seemed to slow down. Every minute seemed like eternity. Every time I reopened my eyes, I expected the night to end, to see the floor bathed in sunlight. But my hopes were always in vain, for the damned clock would have moved forward only by a minuscule amount.

My tired brain finally managed some respite in the wee hours of the morning. I had to contend with intense dehydration the next day, and I managed to lose about 750 grams in one night. It was almost twenty hours before I could fully recover from the ordeal. It took another’s night’s sleep for my ability to concentrate to come back to normal.

When I try to remember the things that happened that night, I am faced with a void where the answers should have been – almost as if someone had erased parts of a passage from a blackboard, and I am trying to make sense of it. I vaguely remember walking around the house, not knowing whether it was real or an illusion, neither being able to confirm nor deny my memories. Whether what happened, happened for better or worse is not for me to decide. But I am sure of two things – I am never letting myself be poisoned again, and I am never going to forget Holi’s eve of 2015.