It was one of those ‘dreams’; the chosen few. I hardly ever truly ‘dreamed’ in a coherent sense. The Northern Lights and the ‘Shakespeare & Co’ bookstore in Paris – my childhood had its dreamy shares. But then my general ‘dream conformation’ doesn’t have the binding and blinding visions.

I have more abstract sidebars, not prominent ‘dreams’, for dreams are meant to appear, only to disappear, existing on a flimsy Hollywood action-plot in a fairy dimension. Good or bad – dreams share the same ideology – the momentary attachment.

I think I feel the need to share what I mean when I say, I always dreamed of volunteering in Kargil, at the India-POK Border. Back in Kolkata (my hometown), wrestling with the baleful existential crisis I couldn’t fathom at that time, and volunteering at an NGO called Bhumi Kolkata, I would often nag, in months of rotation, to my best friend with ‘I want to go to Kargil. I want to teach the kids there. Not in Kolkata!’ How I picked Kargil up, among all places, has everything to do with our diving geo-relations between India and Pakistan, and the way my interpretations around the border had piled up in my mind; remote, vulnerable and dismissive. But was it? Was it remote? Was it vulnerable? Was it dismissive?

Years later, as chances and circumstances gushed into a fluid and freezy middleground, I leaned on the wooden railings from Bob Sir’s parents’ mudhouse for the 134-degree open sunset hovering over the town of Kargil, like an apocalypse of shots of yellow and shoots of blue-sketched clouds. Bob Sir’s nieces and nephews curiously peeked from behind the half-ajar door to call me to the kitchen. But I was with the sunset. I was the ‘dream’.