I have a headache again today, but this time I know exactly why. I had a dream this morning, of a fairly ordinary day. I was soon leaving the country and my mother and I, with younger siblings in the backseat, were driving around running some errands. We had to stop at someone’s house on the far bank of the canal but it was very green and cool and damp, like England not Lahore. My mother got out of the driving seat and stumbled and fell on her back. We leapt out of the car to see her lying very still on the road, with a gentle unknowing smile that now, in wakefulness, reminds me of the look in her eyes when her illness was very advanced. My brother cried out, ‘Don’t try to get up!’ and I realised that her back must be broken and everything had changed. I woke up, heart pounding, with a tight ache starting in my forehead that remains to now.
I suppose it was my mother’s illness and death, several years compressed into one short dream. Enough to give anyone a headache.