Dreams, death, and the child’s eye: A study of Sara Rai’s storytelling

By Ravi Ranjan* 

Sara Rai’s fiction in Hindi has always inhabited that delicate space where memory, sensation, fear, and imagination intermingle to form the inner landscapes of human experience. Among contemporary Hindi writers, she stands out for her ability to locate profound emotional truths within seemingly ordinary domestic worlds. 

Her story "The Flight of the Ababil" is one of her most subtle achievements, a narrative that appears at first to be a simple tale of childhood, siblings, games, and household rhythms, yet unfolds into a deep meditation on death, fear, hope, and the imaginative labour through which children make sense of the world. What makes this story extraordinary is not merely its subject but its perspective. 

It is not a story about a child; it is a story written from within a child’s consciousness. Through eight‑year‑old Reshma, Rai constructs a world where reality and imagination coexist without boundaries, where symbols and sensations carry meanings that adults often fail to perceive, and where the earliest awareness of mortality begins to take Âshape.

Reshma’s world is filled with rats, snakes, vultures, storms, dreams, and folk beliefs. Yet none of these appear as mere narrative devices. They are elements of a symbolic universe that the child interprets with her own logic. The rats that invade the house, for instance, are for the adults a sign of illness and misfortune, but for Reshma they are delightful companions. She imagines feeding them bread, holding them in her hands, and befriending them. This contrast between adult meaning and child perception runs throughout the story. 

Childhood, Rai suggests, is not a state of ignorance but a distinct mode of understanding, one that receives the world through sensation, curiosity, and imagination rather than through fixed social meanings.

Reshma’s refusal to go to school becomes another subtle marker of her position outside the structured world of adults. She has time to observe, to think, to imagine. Even the falling of a tooth becomes for her a magical event. She looks at her reflection in the mirror and marvels at her changing body. In these moments Rai captures the formation of self‑awareness in childhood, the gradual recognition of one’s own body and place in the world. The folk belief of placing a fallen tooth in a rat’s hole is not merely a ritual for Reshma; it is a game, a mystery, a possibility. Childhood here is a realm where the ordinary becomes enchanted.

The story is saturated with folk beliefs—witches, curses, magical doors, the old woman with dogs, the snake’s eye, dreams of the dead. Rai does not treat these as superstitions to be dismissed. Instead, she shows how they become tools through which Reshma interprets events. A child’s minÀd, as psychologists often note, turns to mythical explanations to make sense of uncertainty. Reshma’s fears—of sadhus, of snakes, of the names of the dead—are not irrational intrûusions but organic developments within her consciousness. She believes that knocking seven times on a door can open it, that witches may exist, that dreams carry messages. Imagination is not sepout e from reality; it is part of her reality.

The story’s exploration of childhood social dynamics is equally nuanced. The brothers’ treatment of Nilima—mocking, humiliating, sometimes violent—reveals the natural emergence of power relations within children’s play. Reshma sympathises with Nilima yet fears exclusion from the group. The desire to belong outweighs moral clarity. Rai does not moralise these scenes; she presents them as the politics of childhood, where cruelty and camaraderie coexist.

Death enters the story gradually, not as a single event but as a growing awareness. The children play at dying, floating like corpses in the water. Reshma sees the snake’s carcass and hears warnings about its eyes. She dreams of a man in a black robe reading out the names of the dead, each with a date written beside it. In one of the document’s lines, the dream is described as a moment where “death becomes not a random event but a pre‑written destiny,” a revelation that terrifies her when the voice approaches her own name. These dreams are not mere nocturnal episodes; they become part of her waking consciousness. Death, for Reshma, is not yet tragedy. It is mystery, silence, absence, a strange peace. When she imagines floating like a corpse, she wonders whether dying might be pleasant. This is the unique perspective of childhood, where the finality of death has not yet fully formed.

The sadhu’s curse marks a turning point. His vague warning—“Watch out on the tenth”—lodges itself in Reshma’s mind. Adults forget such encounters, but children store them deeply. The curse becomes an invisible threat, a seed of fear that grows quietly. This is how death often enters consciousness: not through clear events but through lingering apprehensions.

The appearance of the yellow vultures is one of the story’s most striking scenes. Vultures, traditionally associated with death, sit motionless on the semal tree. Amma sees them as ominous, but Reshma finds them beautiful, colourful, like ancient birds from another age. Their sad eyes and stillness transform them into symbols of timelessness. Here again Rai juxtaposes adult fear with child wonder, revealing how meaning shifts with perspective.

The storm that follows is another moment where nature becomes charged with significance. For the children it feels like doomsday, yet once it passes, it becomes a festival of gathering mangoes. Fear turns into joy, destruction into abundance. This rhythm of transformation—fear becoming play, death becoming imagination—runs throughout the narrative.

The real intrusion of tragedy arrives with the phone call announcing the younger brother’s accident. Until now death had been present only in symbols, dreams, and games. Now it becomes a real possibility. Amma’s face changes, her voice breaks, and the secure world of childhood trembles. Rai does not describe the accident; she focuses entirely on Reshma’s reaction. 

The restraint intensifies the emotional impact. On the train journey, Reshma feels overwhelming guilt. She remembers jumping over her brother once and imagines that this small act caused his injury. Such irrational guilt is natural in childhood, where the self is perceived as central to events. Rai captures this psychological truth with remarkable subtlety.

The story’s ending is among the most beautiful in modern Hindi fiction. A bird flies high in the sky. Reshma thinks it is an ababil. Her brother had once told her that the ababil flies the highest and is completely free. In that moment the bird becomes a symbol of hope, liberation, and possibility. Reshma constructs a simple logic: if this is an ababil, her brother will return. There is no rational basis for this belief, yet human life often runs on such fragile hopes. The story ends on this note of faith, where imagination becomes a refuge against fear.

Through Reshma’s consciousness, Rai reveals the complexity of childhood. It is not an innocent paradise but a world filled with fear, cruelty, loneliness, wonder, imagination, and hope. The child does not merely observe the world; she creates it. Rats, snakes, vultures, sadhus, storms, dreams, and birds all become part of a single experiential universe. The narrative has no linear plot or dramatic climax. Its movement occurs within the child’s mind, where small incidents accumulate into a profound emotional structure. The opensssssßs ending keeps multiple meanings alive, reflecting a postmodern sensibility that resists final truths.

At a deeper level, the story becomes a sociological exploration of how children construct meaning from cultural symbols. Durkheim’s idea that categories of thought—time, space, mortality—are socially shaped is vividly illustrated in Reshma’s world. Her understanding of death emerges through collective representations: folk beliefs, family myths, dreams, symbols like vultures and the ababil. Bauman’s notion of modern ambivalence toward death also resonates here. Reshma’s oscillation between fear and hope mirrors society’s unresolved anxieties about mortality. Children, positioned at the margins of adult rationality, often carry these anxieties in imaginative forms.

Ultimately, The Flight of the Ababil is not merely a story about a little girl. It is a story about the moment in human life when the mysteries of existence first reveal themselves—when death becomes thinkable, when fear becomes intertwined with imagination, and when hope emerges from the smallest signs. Rai’s achievement lies in her ability to portray this consciousness with artistic honesty, without simplifying its complexity. Reshma becomes not just a character but a representation of universal childhood, where life and death, fear and hope, reality and imagination encounter each other for the first time.

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*Professor and former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper