A reflection that followed The Dream at the Beachside Temple
I had a dream last night that I have not been able to set down.
Not because it was frightening. Because it was honest in the way that dreams sometimes are — showing you something about your own life in images your waking mind would have edited out.
I want to try to put it into words. Not to interpret it neatly — I distrust neat interpretations — but because writing is how I understand what I am thinking. And this dream, I think, is trying to tell me something I already know but have not yet said clearly.
The Thing I Kept Trying to Capture
In the dream I was at a beachside temple of extraordinary beauty. There was a yaksha carving — large, intricate, the kind of thing you want to photograph so you can look at it later, properly, with enough time.
Every time I raised my phone and clicked — I saw Devi instead.
Not the yaksha. Devi. Appearing in the frame where the yaksha should have been.
I tried again and again. My mother kept pulling at my arm, hurrying me. My grandmother quietly held her back. Let her look.
But I could not get the photograph I was trying to get.
What This Reminded Me Of
I have spent a significant portion of my adult life trying to photograph the yaksha.
The career I kept trying to restart. The income I kept reaching for. The version of myself I kept aiming toward — the mobile app developer, the writer with a platform, the woman with financial standing. I would frame the shot, press the shutter, and find something else appearing. A move. A pregnancy. A father’s illness. A country change. Something other than what I had aimed for.
For years I interpreted this as failure. The inability to capture the thing I was going for.
It did not occur to me for a long time that what kept appearing instead might also be worth looking at.
The Devi in the Frame
What kept appearing in my life — when the career did not take, when the timing was not right, when the plans did not hold — was something else.
Depth. The particular kind of understanding that comes from having carried difficult things for a long time. The writing voice that developed not in a newsroom or an office but in quiet corners — a blogspot nobody read, an NGO that paid nothing, notes made while children slept.
Perception. The ability to read a room, sense what is unspoken, understand what people mean beneath what they say. This is not something you develop by having everything go smoothly.
Resilience of a specific kind. Not the loud kind. The kind that simply continues — through Singapore and Sydney and Bangalore, through loss and grief and the daily invisible labour of keeping a family functional.
These are not the yaksha I was trying to photograph. But they are real. They appeared in the frame when I pressed the shutter. I kept dismissing them because they were not what I aimed for.
Maybe I should have been looking at them more carefully all along.
The Support That Arrived When I Stopped Forcing
The most vivid part of the dream was this.
I was still trying for the photograph — still not satisfied — when I felt a steadiness at my back. Someone simply there, solid and quiet, not directing me but present.
Now click, he said. I am here.
I have been thinking about this all day.
How many things in my life have waited for me to stop straining before they arrived? How many times has support appeared not when I was pushing hardest but when I paused — when I stopped forcing the yaksha photograph and simply stood in the temple?
And how telling that even with the support, I still could not get the shot I originally wanted. He pointed somewhere else instead. Look — there is a Radha Krishna carving. Why not click that.
I clicked it. It was beautiful. Effortless.
The Things We Were Not Trying to Find
I think this is the dream’s honest message to me.
The life I have been trying to build — the one I aimed for, framed carefully, pressed the shutter on repeatedly — has not appeared the way I planned it. The career interrupted. The income unstable. The timing always slightly off.
But something else has been appearing in the frame.
A writing voice that survived multiple countries and a decade of being set aside. The capacity to hold complicated things — grief, dependency, other people’s needs — without being destroyed by them. Two children who are, despite everything, growing into themselves. A marriage that has survived more than most. A self that is still curious, still reaching, still sitting with a dream and trying to understand what it means.
These were not what I was photographing. But they are in every frame.
Maybe the Radha Krishna carving — the thing you find when you stop insisting on the thing you came for — is more beautiful than what you originally planned.
I am beginning to think it might be.
The Ferry With Just Enough Space
The dream ended at a ferry. There was exactly enough space for us to board. Not extra — exactly enough.
I woke up feeling that this was the first good thing. Not the temple, not the photographs, not even the steadiness at my back. The ferry with just enough space.
The just-enough is something I am learning to trust. Not the abundance I planned for. Not the perfect timing I aimed at. Just enough space, at the right moment, to step forward.
After years of pressing the shutter and finding the wrong image in the frame — I think I am beginning to understand.
The Devi was there all along. I just kept dismissing her because she was not the yaksha.
What have you found in your frame when you were aiming for something else? I would love to hear.