Mumbai, February 1999

The silent night is slashed by a feral keening. Amari looks behind. It is the peacock—again. Eyes shot with red fury, feathers quivering in a widening fan of rage and a beak yawning into a cavernous maw, it's black, snaking tongue reaching out towards her. Even as Amari watches in fascinated horror, the peacock lifts its clawing foot.
Amari’s feet weld themselves to the ground even as her mind shrieks at her to run. Blood pools around her feet, its metallic stench attacks her nostrils. She doubles over, her stomach heaving....
Amari Hussain sits up in bed with cold sweat beading her forehead. A complete disorientation fogs her mind. Is this Mayurkhund? Or Mumbai? It is 3 am, the air conditioner had gone off in the night. If she keeps her eyes open till daybreak, maybe the nightmare will not come back. A ray of green light from the flickering hoarding outside the window falls on Deven’s finely etched sleeping face. She touches his arm to feel the solid reality of him—practical and methodical. His obsession for detail drives her crazy sometimes. But then he is always so understandingly reasonable with her fantasy-filled changing moods and her reluctance to commit.
Sometime in the night, Deven had opened the window. Now the white mull curtains shrug listlessly in the limp breeze. She caresses her throat where a scream seems to have frozen into a fist and pushes it down with a big gulp of water.
Even in this white-and-blue bedroom hundreds of miles away from a lost childhood in a remote Rajasthan palace, the nightmare has the power to pull her back into the quicksand of her insecurities.
Still breathing heavily, Amari turns to switch on her bedside lamp.  Deven props himself up on pillows with the bed sheet slipping down his bare torso and his eyelids heavy with a sated post-coital sleep. His dreams, thought Amari ruefully, are always happy.
‘What happened, baby? Bad dream? The same one?’  Concern flickers in his eyes.

She nods not trusting herself to speak.

Deven sits up. ‘Come to me, baby. See, it was just a dream. You are in Mumbai, not in that decadent, old palace any longer.’ He tents the sheet to invite her into the safe haven of his nude body.
‘Oh Ammu! There are certainly no murderous peacocks in Mumbai. How long do you think they will last in this crazed traffic? Here, let me hold you till the shivers go away.’ He murmurs against her hair.
Amari cries in his assuring embrace. No nightmare should have the power to insinuate itself into her waking moments. But this one does... every time.

‘Did you ever have an unpleasant encounter with a peacock as a child?’ Dr Watankar had asked yet again when the dream had sent her haring into an hour-long session in his clinic with its striped wallpaper.
Amari could not think of one. Except maybe the time when Sonny had accidentally killed a peacock with his shotgun. The bird had thrashed about for long heart-in-mouth minutes before it died, its magnificent tail stilled in its long sweep, beak open, eyes glassed and vacuous.

‘Why this recurring nightmare now? Far from Mayur Mahal and its peacocks both in time and in distance? Maybe you should go to a regressionist who will be able to take you back to your childhood. I can make an appointment for you if you like.’ Dr Watankar had offered, shaking his impressive grey mane.
But Deven had termed it pure psychobabble in his brisk manner.
 ‘What utter nonsense! Regression? Come now, you are far too intelligent to believe this psychobabble. All you need to do is make up your mind and tell yourself you will not have your nightmare ever again.’ Mind over matter, that was the quintessential Deven. He practiced what he preached. Everything black and white, everything perfect down to the last detail—the carrots had to be cut in perfect discs, the chapatti perfect round, the curtains hung just so. He was the pinned precision to her drifting smoke of thoughts and moods.

Now as Deven turns and drifts back to sleep again, Amari curls an arm around him and presses her breasts against the wall of his firm back, inhaling the salty dampness of his brown skin like a talisman against the power of evil.

 ‘Don’t do that,’ he murmurs fuzzily, ‘It will get my motor running again, baby. We will both get late.’
I will not replay this dream, I will not allow it in my mind, and I will not brood…Amari chants. Deven is snoring again, at peace with his world. And Amari welcomes the brightening day that can scuttle uneasy dreams and unnamed fears back into their holes.