The woman in the rose garden

This morning someone blogged about a dream she had last night.  I figured I might do the same.  Only this isn’t a dream …

She was as real as you and me.

She was standing in the rose garden, wearing a bright red and blue sari, with intricate gold embroidery.  Her long dark hair was hanging in a plait down her back, a white dog at her feet.  She was there one moment and gone the next.

I came down from my apartment on the 11th floor with the elevator and paused in the lobby to tuck my shirt in my pants.  While doing so, I glanced out the floor to ceiling lobby windows and that’s when I saw her … the Indian woman in the sari.

I didn’t think anything of it, as plenty of Indian women live in my building.  It was only when I got outside and the woman was nowhere to be seen that she had my full attention. 

She couldn’t have gone far.  From the lobby to the front door of the building had taken me a matter of seconds.  Where could she have gone?  I looked to my right, I looked to my left, I scanned the whole area, but the woman seemed to have gone up in smoke.

Passing the rose garden I continued to look for her in all directions.  So mystified was I with her that, even after leaving the building grounds, I continued to look for her.  I kept turning around, examining every inch of the front garden, but there was no sign of her. 

Where could she have gone in the mere seconds it took me to get from the lobby to the front door?  I suppose, if she lived on the ground floor, she could have climbed on one of the balconies, but someone I didn’t see that happening.  If she had worn jeans and a T-shirt, yes, but not in the sari she was wearing.

Curious as I am, I couldn’t let it go.  Was this woman real or was she some kind of spirit?  She didn’t look like a spirit, not that I would know what a spirit looks like.  I’ve seen them portrayed in pictures and paintings as transparent or luminous beings, which this woman was anything but.  She was as real as you and me.

A few weeks later I learned that Adheri and her white poodle had been killed in a car accident on their way to the vet.