Déjà vu
Do you know what déjà vu means? A shy young man asked me this question many years ago. I was studying french in those days and he was a heavy metal fan. When I literally translated the phrase, his eyes lit up. Yeah, that made sense, he said. Already seen. Déjà vu…a song by Iron Maiden.
That phrase has come back again and again to pester and haunt and taunt me. It’s not hindsight and not quite premonition. Rather, it is an uneasy sense of having been there, done that, of anticipating a moment before it has quite happened. I dream vivid dreams. Usually about real people and places. Days or months may pass before the dream flashes before me. Except that I’m awake and it’s happening in real time. It happens rarely and for that I’m grateful. It is unnerving and leaves me feeling shaken.
I expect déjà vu is only really remarkable in the early years. As I get older, words and experiences often come around again, a repetition that seems uncanny. As I settle into deeper, more meaningful relationships, I can anticipate reactions and responses from my counterparts far more easily. But is that déjà vu? Or just familiarity?
This is what I know of déjà vu. Many years ago, a phone call in the evening. My friend asks, are you alone? I say no, my parents are home. He says, sit down, I need to tell you something. S is dead. And I say, my S? He replies, no, my S. Two friends, both with the same name. One is my friend first. He’s alive and well. The other is his friend first. He is dead.
A few years later. My S calls. Are you alone, he asks. I say no, my husband is home. He says, sit down, I need to tell you something. My mind is already racing. K is dead. And the same litany. I have said these words before. My K, I ask? And S replies, no, my K. Two more friends, same name, one alive, one not.
It doesn’t end there. A quarter of a century later. The phone rings. It is my friend, the same one who called to say S was dead. He says, sit down, I need to tell you something. And I say, I don’t want to hear it. But this time, he laughs. It’s other news. Horrible liberating news but no one is dead.
I fully expect to hear those words again someday. Are you alone? Sit down. I need to tell you something. I will brace for the worst. Maybe, with luck, I’ll be let off the hook.
This morning, a gentle drizzle outside the kitchen window gave me a moment of disorientation. I was walking in Kodaikanal again, a misty drizzle settling on my hair and clothes. A faint whiff of eucalyptus and a wood fire made me dizzy for a second. Then I realised the mint in my morning tea was steeping and the watchman downstairs was burning dry leaves. I shook myself out of Kody and turned back to Mumbai…but I had been walking downhill in the mist, my breath cold and still, catching up with a friend walking ahead of me.
Déjà vu isn’t quite that hard to accept if your world has always been many layered. Where past and present seamlessly flow into the future, where the dead are in the same room as the living, invisible but not absent. A theory of multiple universes and many realities also resonates with the feeling. You may have been there and done that, just not in this reality. I’m happy to believe that out there, are other me’s. Happier, saner, calmer, not quite as angry. Déjà vu is like a connection between multiple selves – a way to acknowledge that all these are linked at some hidden level. Though they may never exist in each other’s worlds, there is some common ground, a shared reality between the many versions of you. Or déjà vu may be a subconscious way of remembering another life in a parallel world. And maybe one day, if you are very aware of your alternative realities, you may catch a familar face in the crowd, and discover it’s only another you.