In my delirium yesterday night, I dreamt that Desoumal is nothing but an extravagant jigsaw puzzle. I could see vivid glimpses through his life in sepia, spread over the years and how they fit together seamlessly to reveal a strange meaningless existence. Not surprisingly, the vision broke the moment the flu left me, but few pieces remained to haunt me today. I need to write this piece out fast, lest my memory goes completely blank.

The dream moved through time, space, and his life. Somehow I always knew the age. It was as if I was viewing his life through a camera’s viewfinder, instead of the aperture and shutter speed, I saw his age and other parameters overlaid on the happenings. In one of the pieces, there was the fragile looking disgruntled seventy year old man wirelessly hooked to the cloud, sitting on the roof of a house in Goa. His internal biological processes closely monitored by an anonymous call center employee, one whose job is to alert Des, his family and the doctors about any fluctuations in his internals.

That piece of puzzle was an exact fit with a particular event from when he was sixteen, a fateful day when he found himself fascinated by the supernatural tolerance of the himalayan yogis and the naga babas, who would completely dip themselves butt-naked every morning in the freezing water of the Ganges, and yet remain untouched by any malaise. That puzzlement sat adjacent to the piece of time later when he would practice the act on his own body through a freezing cold winter, eventually falling terribly sick and sowing seeds for years of corticosteroid dependence that would slowly eat through his body, causing him to be easily infected by any random germ floating through the wind. In this specific instance, the canvas even revealed how the flu virus traveled through the burritos cooked by his girlfriend, make their way into his blood stream, and then make him suffer and moan in pain at their will, through two largely sleepless nights of delirium, juxtaposed perfectly with the day when he’s supposed to move, for maximum effect.

I could also see him listening intently to the tales narrated by his grandfather about strange exotic lands, the seven year old child trying to piece together a scene through fragments of his tales and an atlas, the very places he would visit later in life, make acqaintances and absorb influences that would make him shift careers multiple times.

The yellow canvas was full of interconnected shapes — photography causing massive dents in his pockets in his late thirties, an expensive hobby acquired purely due to provocative images of women on photography magazines; three failed film projects which could have been something had he finished them in time, second phase of vagabondish wanderings that would deeply influence his tummy. Everything was in there, or so I felt at that time. And, of what I knew of Des, it all made sense. He tried to be everything, and thus ended up being nothing, an irony that would make him laugh on his deathbed.

I have forgotten most of the details by now, but I do remember how it all came together, a blank canvas with images and words popping up; all I need to do is to get a chart large enough, write out all the parameters that have come to define his existence, and then extrapolate. Life’s not that hard to figure out actually… once you get a flu.

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