By Jay Samanta
Arin’s nightmares didn’t come on a schedule, which was the worst part.
Some weeks he slept like a stone. Then on a Tuesday he’d find himself in a corridor with water rising around his ankles, something behind him that never had a face but always had a smell, like wet cardboard and old pennies. He ran. In dreams he was good at running. His legs worked the way they never did when he was awake, long and loose, and he’d take the stairs three at a time, shoulder through doors that opened onto other corridors, other water.
He woke before it caught him. He always did. He’d lie there with his heart going like a washing machine on the spin. He’d check the time on his phone. 3:12. 3:40. Once, 4:04, which felt like a joke.
Then the ceiling fan would come back into focus, turning at its usual lazy speed, and the room would be just a room. A chair with yesterday’s shirt on it. A charger cable curled on the floor like a sleeping snake. He’d drink water straight from the bottle by the bed and tell himself it was nothing, and some nights that even worked.
*
He was twenty-four. He worked from home, cleaning data for a logistics company whose office he had visited exactly once, for a joining formality, where a man he never saw again, had shaken his hand and given him a mug with the company logo on it. The mug held his pens now.
The work was strange, and he didn’t mind it. Trucks went from Haldia to Siliguri, from Durgapur to somewhere in Jharkhand, and every trip left a trail of mistakes. The same address was typed four different ways. A consignment weight was entered in kilos in one row and quintals in the next. A driver’s phone number had one digit missing. Arin fixed them, one row at a time, and there was a quiet satisfaction in it, like picking stones out of rice. By evening a messy sheet became a clean one, and nobody would ever know he’d touched it.
His mornings ran on habit. He was up by eight, unless the night had been bad, in which case it was nine. He had tea first, real tea with a real strainer, because his mother had once told him instant was for people who’d given up. Then, with the laptop on the little table by the window, where the light fell across the keys, he stayed until about eleven and then moved on to the wall. The team call was at 11:30 and he kept his camera off. Everyone did, so nobody asked.
Lunch was whatever he’d cooked the night before, reheated. Rice, dal, an egg if he was feeling ambitious. After lunch the flat went very still — that long dead stretch of the afternoon when even the street outside seemed to be napping, and he worked through it with the radio low, half listening to a station that played old Hemanta Mukherjee songs between advertisements for hair oil.
At five, he went out. He’d made that a rule, a small one, because he’d noticed that if he didn’t, whole days could pass without his feet touching anything but his own floor. He went down three flights, past the shoes outside the doors, a pair of big black sandals, two small sneakers with lights in the heels, a single rubber slipper that never seemed to have a partner. Then he went past the lane, the tea stall, the pharmacy with its green cross, the corner shop where the owner nodded at him and said nothing, which suited them both.
On the way back he’d stop at the end of the road where the bamboo was going up. Puja was a couple of weeks off, and a crew was building the pandal, lashing poles together with a speed that made Arin feel faintly guilty about his own hands. Kids stood around watching. A man on a ladder shouted instructions nobody seemed to follow. Arin watched for five minutes, never more, and then walked home before anyone could look at him for too long.
Groceries came in the morning. Dinner, when he didn’t cook, came at nine. The delivery guy had tried at first. Cold today, dada[1], he’d say, or Match last night, did you see? Arin had mumbled something, and by the second month the man had stopped trying. He handed over the bag, said, “Thank you, dada,” and left. Arin counted it as a kindness.
*
Sundays his mother called at six, always at six, as if the phone company had given her a slot.
“Are you eating?”
“I’m eating.”
“What did you eat today?”
He’d list it. She’d sigh at the egg. Then she’d tell him things he half followed, who had got married, whose knee had gone, which neighbour’s son had come back from Bangalore looking thin. She talked the way water runs, steadily and without needing him to answer. He liked it more than he let on. He just couldn’t say so, and the not-saying had hardened over the years into a habit, like a door that sticks.
That Sunday, near the end, she said, “You’ll come for Puja[2]?”
“I’ll see.”
“Pritam’s mother asked about you. She said Pritam says you never reply to anything.”
“I reply.”
“You reply in a week,” his mother said, and there was no anger in it, only a tired accuracy that was worse.
After she hung up he sat holding the phone. Four group chats sat in a row in his notifications, red numbers climbing. School friends, college friends, a cousins’ chat that had once planned a trip to Digha and never mentioned it again. He muted nothing and opened nothing. He told himself the quiet was a choice. Some days it was.
*
In October, the dreams changed.
The corridor was gone. Now he was in an ordinary house with a tiled floor and a calendar from a sweet shop on the wall, and the thing behind him had stopped being behind him. It was in the next room, doing something patient. He could hear a chair scrape. He ran anyway, out the back, into a field of cut paddy where the stubble stung his feet, and the dream tried a new trick: it let him get far away. It let him think he’d made it. Then he’d turn and the house was right there, same distance, same lit window.
He woke at 2:50 and didn’t go back to sleep.
The next day he made mistakes at work, which almost never happened. He converted a weight twice. He sat looking at a driver’s name for a long minute without reading it. After the call he went to the window and watched the street, a woman beating a rug over a railing, a dog crossing without looking, and he thought: if I woke up screaming right now, who would know?
The lady downstairs, maybe — only if it was loud.
By evening he’d decided not to tell anyone. Telling meant a doctor, and a doctor meant a waiting room full of people, and his shoulders climbed toward his ears just thinking about it. He looked things up instead — night terrors, recurrent nightmares, screen time before bed. Two hours later ,he had a list of things he already knew: sleep earlier, less caffeine, talk to someone.
Talk to someone — he turned the phrase over. It sounded like advice for a person with someone.
*
What finally cracked it open was small and stupid.
One evening he came back from the corner shop, a packet of bread in his hand, and found one of the little light-up sneakers lying on the landing. The heel blinked weakly, red, then nothing, then red again. Its partner was nowhere. He stood there for a while, the way you stand in front of a problem that isn’t yours.
Then, because it seemed wrong to leave it, he knocked on the door.
A woman opened it, tired, her hair half out of its clip, a toddler wailing somewhere behind her. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “He’s been screaming about this for an hour. I thought the neighbours had taken it.”
“I found it,” Arin said, which was obvious, and held it out like evidence.
She laughed, properly, a real laugh with no effort in it. “You’re the one on the third floor. Mine’s the noisy one. Sorry about that, by the way. He doesn’t sleep.”
“It’s fine,” Arin said. “I don’t mind.”
It was true, and it surprised him. That was all. Thirty seconds, maybe forty. Walking back up the stairs, he noticed his shoulders had come down from wherever they lived. He’d said a sentence to a stranger, and the building was still standing.
*
He still muted the group chats. He still ordered dinner at nine. But a few nights later, when Pritam’s name came up with another voice note, a three-minute one, Arin listened to the whole thing, and then he recorded a reply. Eleven clumsy seconds. He sent it before he could delete it.
Pritam called back within a minute. “You’re alive. I was about to send a search party.”
“Sorry. I’m bad at this.”
“You’re terrible at this. It’s fine. What’s going on?”
“I’ve been having these dreams,” Arin said, and then, because it was already out, he told him. Not all of it — the corridor, the water, the field. Pritam was quiet for a bit, and Arin braced for the joke or the advice.
“My cousin got those,” Pritam said finally. “Years back. She said the trick was telling somebody the dream out loud in the morning. Made it smaller, she said. Like it couldn’t live outside her head.”
Arin laughed, a short surprised sound. “That’s not a medical opinion.”
“No. But does it hurt to try?”
They talked for another forty minutes, about nothing much. Pritam’s job, his terrible landlord, the pandal near his house that had a theme this year, something to do with fishing nets. Near the end Pritam said, “Come for Puja. Mashi asked me to tell you, and I’m telling you.” Arin said he’d think about it. For once it wasn’t a way of saying no.
*
The dreams didn’t stop. Two weeks later he was back in the house with the sweet-shop calendar, running across the stubble, and he woke at 3:30 with the sheet knotted around his leg.
But he lay there and thought: I’ll tell Pritam about this one.
He listened to the building settle, the pipes ticking, the faint hum of the fridge. Somewhere below, a child coughed and was hushed. He felt it the way you feel a wall behind your back in the dark.
Then he closed his eyes, and the house was still there, and he went in anyway. This time he didn’t run. He walked to the lit window and looked.
It was just a kitchen.
[1] Elder brother, here used as a term of respect
[2] Durga Puja
Jay Samanta is an English literature student and writer from West Bengal, currently pursuing his B.A. (Hons.) in English at Panskura Banamali College (Autonomous), affiliated with Vidyasagar University. His writing explores memory, identity, vulnerability, loneliness, technology, and contemporary life. His creative works include The Space Between Notifications, published in Borderless Journal, and SWAANG (Disguise), published in Aporia.
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