3 The Relatives Will Meet Soon

Her maternal grandparents hailed from a small village in Ukraine. They were simple folks and had a close-knit community there. At present only her grandmother was alive as her grandfather had passed away a year ago. This was the information that had been passed on to her by her maternal relatives who had come to meet her earlier.

Her grandmother had two daughters and one son. Now, there were only one daughter and one son. Both were well settled and the son and his wife along with her cousins lived in the same village. Her uncle was the head of the village level organization that looked to the development of the village etc.

Her father would converse mostly in Russian at home and in Russian or English with foreign students or foreign patients in the hospital where he worked. He knew how to speak in the Hindi language as well as in the Punjabi language. He could speak kangri the dialect of Pahari language. However, her mother would speak Russian at home and like my father, she would converse in Russian or English with foreign students or patients at the hospital. She understood Hindi very well but her spoken Hindi was not so good.

Tania, on the other hand, had been taught to speak in all the three languages since her childhood. In college, she took up Sanskrit, as an ancient language, to help her understand the texts that were available in old books. However, the languages she used to converse in were Russian and English with the colleagues of her parents as well as the patients in the hospital where they both worked as doctors.

It was getting late and time to get her dinner together. As she entered the kitchen, she remembered her mother's cooking and the making of mouth-watering dishes. Since her father was a vegetarian, her mother had stopped eating meat and had become a vegetarian too. Tania had become a vegetarian too as the meat was never cooked at home.

She made some mixed vegetables and had her dinner of mixed vegetables, salads with bread as she did not feel like making the chappatis. After finishing the dinner and washing up the utensils, she checked all the locks of the house and went to her bedroom to read a little and then sleep. Hopefully, she would be able to sleep as she had completed the tension work of submitting her thesis.

Tania's paternal grandparents would commence their onward journey on 19th May from their hometown for Moscow and were likely to arrive on 21 st May. She had decided that she would be going to receive them.

They were to undertake the first leg of the journey by Taxi to a place called Pathankot in the state of Punjab. This route was downhill and would take them about 2 hours or so, and they would be leaving in the afternoon. At Pathankot, they would board the Rajdhani train for Delhi. It would be an overnight journey. At Delhi, they would spend the day visiting old family friends and at night they would take the flight for Moscow. Aeroflot operates direct flights from Delhi to Moscow covering a distance of 4,344 km in just 05.30 hrs. Hence, they would be reaching Moscow early morning and by the time they cleared immigration/customs, it would be 7 am.

Similarly, she had tied up with her maternal grandmother to come on the same day i.e. 21 st May. Her maternal grandmother would be leaving her village with her maternal Uncle to reach Kyiv. Upon reaching Kyiv they would head for the airport and take the flight to Moscow. The time taken to reach Moscow was 01.20 hrs and the distance to be covered was about 740 km. Tania would be receiving them also at the airport. They would be arriving at approximately the same time as relatives from India.

At present, it was still March and still two months to go. There was ample time for Tania to prepare the house to receive guests. So, she got down to a thorough cleaning at the rate of one room a day. This way, she got rid of all the junk that she had accumulated in the house over the years. Even otherwise, it is said that if you do not use something for three years, it is better to get rid of it as you are not likely to use it in the future, Some other person will make better use of that item.

The thorough cleaning made her tired every day and due to the tiredness. The minute her head touched the pillow, she was asleep and visiting dreamland. This cleaning business literally helped her to sleep.

Since the demise of her parents, Tania had been having problems sleeping in this huge house. Her imagination had run amok, and she would imagine thieves entering the house, or she thought of ghosts at every noise made by the woodwork pertaining to the contraction and expansion of the wood. In this connection, she had visited a number of doctors and had even visited a psychiatrist to help sort out the issues. All of them told her that there was nothing wrong with her and that she was a highly imaginative person. If she argued with them in order to try to put across her problems, they would get annoyed with her and tell her that they were the doctors and not her. This sort of replies by such doctors were extremely infuriating.

Tania thought to herself that she should take the bull by its horns and sort out this problem herself. The best way was to read about recurring dreams and what they meant. So, she went to the market and hunted the bookstores. She got herself a book on how to interpret dreams.

The next few days she was literary devouring this book and managed to figure out that most dreams were our imagination and were linked to things that happened during the day as well as to some past event. As regards dreams that were the same day after day, they definitely had some meaning.

The temples and forts that she was seeing in her dreams were perhaps known to her from some previous life.

Tania was a bit suspicious about this past life stuff. It was something that Indians believed in and some other religions in the world believed in this past life and Karma. In simple words, it meant that each one of us is born again and again to pay back debts or to receive payments, to avenge a wrong done to him/her in the previous life, i.e. bring to justice someone who has perhaps murdered you or badly harm you. You may forget but the soul does not forget. Many believed that your bad deeds get back to you threefold and that too within this life. Karma does not wait for the next life.

"Tania, girl, what are you getting into?" she spoke loudly to herself.

A search on the internet revealed that there was something called 'Past Life Regression' which came into prominence all over the world due to the works of Dr Brian L. Weiss. Dr. Brian Leslie Weiss was born on November 6, 1944. He is an American psychiatrist, hypnotherapist, and author who specializes in past life regression therapy. He has done research on reincarnation/ rebirth, past life regression, future life progression, and survival of the human soul after death.

He had earlier studied at Columbia University and later graduated from the Yale University School of Medicine in 1970. He completed his internship in internal medicine at the New York University Medical Center. Thereafter, he returned to Yale University to do a two-year residency in Psychiatry. Thereafter, he became the Head of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai Medical Center, Miami.