This weekend I was bored at home, flipping tv channels, when I saw this very cheesy, formula driven badly executed horror movie One Missed Call. It was really quite a bore but I saw it anyway because there was nothing better to do. It was late in the night and I hit the bed immediately after watching it. My sister was still awake working on the laptop on her bed. We share the room.
10 min into my sleep I was suddenly woken up by a moaning noise made by my sister. I sat up and called her out turning towards her bed. She looked up from the laptop and said, “What?” I realized she didn’t make any noise and I was just dreaming. I said, “You didn’t say anything did you?”
“No, why?” she replied.
I said, “Nothing” and pulled the quilt back, adjusted the pillows and stretched my back a bit and moaned. As I heard my own moaning I realized this was exactly the same sound I heard in my dream few seconds ago. “wow this is just like the missed call movie I just saw” I thought and fell asleep.
In the film basically people received phone calls from the future, as in the call details on the display showed a future time and date and when they took the call they heard their own voices and on that future day and time they somehow died.
I however didn’t think either me or my sister is going to die because I heard myself from the future. I just thought it was one of those mini deja vus.
There is a weird family that lives on the floor above us in our Dwarka flat. I keep hearing these squeaking noise of a door closing and opening all through the night which I just presume to be coming from their rooms. The construction of these houses are such that you can hear these sounds, I tell myself. I also hear crazy noises of somebody scratching the floor with nails. It was not until a month of me hearing these noises that I found out they have a dog, yet I wasn’t exactly scared.
I do wonder why do they keep closing and opening the door all night or why do they scratch their floors but that doesn’t mean like a typical horror story I get up in the middle of the night and start following the noise and end up entering their house. The characters in a horror story have no sense of privacy they will just enter any random building. Take the movie Ju-on: The Grudge for example – in every other scene the charecters followed some noise here and some shadow there.
Tell me, in real life if you saw a strange shadow somewhere what’s the first thing you’ll do? If its me, I will switch on all possible lights I have and then gather as much crowd I can. If I am alone in the house I will immediately go out on the road, go to some crowded place. But people in ghost stories don’t do these logical things.
What I am trying to say is that in reality we are braver than we think we are, “darna zaroori hai, par mana bhi hai, upar se asaan bhi nahi hai.” I think we come across many unusual situations which we take more lightly than we ourselves could imagine and when faced with clear and present danger we handle the situation with more logic and presence of mind and less fear.
I mean, think about a typical horror movie, the most common formulas that exist in a horror story are things that we encounter quite often but they don’t appear so scary to us, do they? Let’s say a cat. A cat appearing out of no where into your living room or bed room window is a sure sign of evil spirit as per horror stories. Few months back one such cat appeared in our home, my sister ended up making it a pet. After a month of feeding it milk and other delicious cuisine the evil cat might have just thought, “What man, how do I scare these people now, sweet fellas are busy feeding me milk and all.”
Two months after the cat entered our home, Jango my adorable nightmare, our dog died. Jango was old so we were not surprised though it was extremely sudden. The cat disappeared the next day and our maid said she saw the cat lying dead in the colony play ground. If you connect the pieces it does seem very bizarre. But we didn’t see it that way until now when I started writing this post.
In our lives we encounter bizarreness with much ease. Dreams in itself are so bizarre but we see them every other night like a nice film show and wake up thinking “ah that was a nice dream.”
Yet another thing is this feeling called Deja Vu. I don’t know about others but I have it quite often. Not very dramatic ones but the micro deja vus. Like somebody will say a certain line and I will immediately feel I have heard that same line, within fraction of seconds the mind will start recognizing the other pieces in the scene and will tell me, “Yes I have been in this exact scene before.” I am talking about scenes of day to day activity, like a sceen where my boss is saying [“Sanjukta we are really running out of time” right then our accounts manager enters and starts to talk and then suddenly my boss’s cell phone rings.] As it happens bit by bit my mind recognizes the pieces as ones scene before.
Why does it happen like this? Does it mean our future is rolled out like a film roll and once in a while we get a glimpse from it? Does it mean we are all a part of a program. Or does it mean our mind only thinks it has seen the pieces before but it really has not simply because it can possibly not.
I think its the later because in every deja vu incident I have felt, the knowledge factor has been missing. In the scene I described above if somebody could pause at the point where the accounts manager enters and asked me “What will happen next?” I will not be able to say, “now my boss’ phone will ring.” Yet when it does ring, I feel I knew the phone will ring.
Deja Vu is just one of the many bizarreness we encounter, my decreasing readership being the other. People what do I have to do to make you read my wonderful writing? Write more often, ya I get it. Low readership is one Deja Vu I don’t wanna go through for sure.
Dr Sanjukta Basu 
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