Sidharth Monga's India vs Pakistan fever dream

Last night was the first in three that I went to sleep without fever. At around 4am, I woke up with fever, and a fever dream.

I have had quite a few of these through the last three nights: repetitive, vivid, all-consuming, still extremely difficult to remember when I wake up with a parched throat. And yet I have been going back to the same dream when going back to sleep.

I vaguely do remember meeting the ghost of a cricket match in my dream. I call it IP. Short for India vs Pakistan. IP has been extremely anxious, passing the anxiety on to me. Not that I am not anxious already. I don't remember the conversations we have been having well enough to reproduce them verbatim, so please bear with my paraphrasing.

One thing I clearly do remember saying to IP is that no recovery can begin until we accept that whatever has happened so far, wherever we are right now in life, was inevitable. That there is nothing anyone could have done to avoid that. That it is no one's fault. Only then can we move on.

Okay, it's already working. Writing down things can help you remember. Now I remember why IP was anxious. They didn't like what they had become. They just wanted to be a cricket match with great performances and memories.

Memories of the time a whole country opened its arms and welcomed those from the other side, refusing to let them pay for food or clothes, showing them how well they had looked after the Nankana Sahib gurudwara left behind, opening their homes for their neighbours, comparing notes on dal makhni, butter chicken and mangoes, realising how little different they all were. Memories of the time one stand in one ground felt the best way to deal with the heartbreak they witnessed minutes ago was to applaud the opposition as the better side only for that emotion to catch on like wildfire and reverberate far beyond just the stands.

Memories of even last year, when fans of both teams grooved together to Pasoori outside the MCG, elevating the already popular song to a status very few pieces of art attain: a unifying force for nations at odds, which is quite befitting as the song at its heart is a lament of the writer of the song who couldn't travel to India to collaborate on a project because of the world we live in.

That night in Melbourne, India and Pakistan collaborated to play the most magical of T20Is that culminated in a last-ball finish and a roar that could be heard by my colleague Alex Malcolm's partner at their home two suburbs away. You could see the afterglow of the match on the faces exiting the MCG. Now MCG has hosted massive footy games, but never yielded anything quite like it.

All these memories almost made me feel better, but the pasoori, as IP duly went on to remind me, is that these memories have become aberrations with them. All the ugliness came back to mind. The burning stands just two Tests after Pakistan were given that standing ovation in Chennai in 1999. The stone-pelting at Indian fielders in Karachi 15 years before the two teams kickstarted that magical tour in 2004. For everything good that happens to them once in a while, said IP, there were tens of instances of ugliness, hate, jingoism, opportunistic politics and capitalism.

Again, I asked, was it possible for things to have turned out any different? Or was it possible for the cricket rivalry to only have good memories? I mean, how many things would we have to wipe off for IP to just remain a cricket match? The Partition of 1947. The war of 1965. Of 1971. Kargil 1999. The last is not a historical conflict even. Many survivors of it are still alive, they still think of the victims, of the horrors of a terrible time.

I remember telling IP that for their own piece of mind, they have to accept things as they are. "You were never meant to be just a cricket match like other neighbours, say, Australia and New Zealand, play. You don't get a choice in the matter. You were going to be the vehicle to legitimise - sometimes, just be able to express - our feelings that otherwise can't even be acknowledged: hatred, anxiety, fears, revenge, pettiness, shame, guilt, love, joy, dreams, forgiveness, pain, reconciliation."

To the best of my knowledge, till two days before the Pakistan match, only four Pakistanis outside the Pakistan team bubble were here for the match: commentators Waqar Younis and Ramiz Raja, statistician Mazher Arshad, and businessman-cum-super fan Bashir chacha. On Thursday could come in journalist Shahid Hashmi and - on my flight from Delhi to Ahmedabad - PCB chairman Zaka Ashraf, his family and other delegates to a welcome befitting their status.

Still it will hardly be India vs Pakistan in the stands. The pasooris of the world we live in!

In my delirious state, I remembered a press conference of a BCCI official late in July where the official didn't even want to talk about the protocols for fans to come.

Even in a normal state, I wouldn't know what to make of it. All I am thinking right now is what I think I told IP: it will be all right, have faith in Virat Kohli and Jasprit Bumrah, and Haris Rauf and Babar Azam. They will speak Punjabi to each other. They and their team-mates will play great cricket. They will rise above this again.

It won't quite be MCG but, as it has been on loop in my mind for the last three days, "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final." That bit of poetry is written by Rainer Maria Rilke. In my head plays David Bowie's Heroes. Let's all be heroes. Just for one day.