[Minu Varghese]

During those days, when he used to tell me every morning about the adventures he had the previous night in his lucid dreams, I never dared discourage him, lest I snatch away his only means of escape from the ‘rebarbative claws of civilization’, as he called it.
However, as time passed, I seldom saw him awake, and heard less and less from him, except during those late midnight hours, when I woke up to the sound of plangent chants to find his gibbous, skeleton-like form crouched at a corner of the bed and muttering in an alien tongue. Solipsistic as in lucid dreams, the gifted student, whose name was once expected to become lapidary in history, concluded that there was nothing consequential to do in this world. That is why, I guess, he decided to do nothing except sleeping and dreaming, and finally, decided to stop breathing as well.