'Anti-Life' ?

Leafing through an excerpt from an old Martin Gardner article over my 4 AM coffee , I read that there could possibly exist two galaxies where time goes in opposite directions and where evolved beings like you and me in one galaxy would regard their own time as ‘forward time’ and scoff at the time in the other galaxy as ‘backward time’.

?It makes for an odd visual that swims in front of my eyes through the vapor of java beans as I stare out of my bedroom window on a near perfect Sunday morning, trying to imagine a new story born out of an old beginning and speeding towards a different finale in the anti-world where we live – ?me & the I that I was not to be.

?I don’t know why the visual starts again in a room and over a cup of coffee. In it, he has already finished his and is lighting up, reading out of a newspaper from a calmer age. The television news playing in the background gently assures him that the bad news is from distant places that have no connection to him . On the wall, the cuckoo clock is up to its usual con, displaying its urgency to go somewhere, when in reality he knows & I know that it has not moved an inch in all those years . Whatever was bound to happen in his story, has somehow not happened. At least not in the same sequence. Maybe some misplaced orbits of misled stars in a mistaken cosmos have spun him off onto a different trajectory.

?And then suddenly I see myself in the scene . And I hear the rumblings of an argument. “ Oh no, not again !” I am about to exclaim, but stop short.

?Somehow, in the scene now, we are making up a fight and are gradually getting friendlier , like a video being played with the rewind button on. Suddenly the video speeds up. Suddenly I realize that we are many decades away from death, our pain easing progressively with each passing moment . Like a kaleidoscope gone awry, we are unlearning and un-becoming ourselves at a furious pace, experiencing firming up of our muscles and eyesight & sharpening of our intellect and empathies, as if it is the most natural thing to happen. Somewhere in the midst of it, we start laughing – a hearty innocent laughter that reverberates through our senses . In no time, all our worldly wisdom has shrunk beyond recognition and our dormant ardor has woken up, expanded and filled the space between our silences . He is eager once again to read from ‘Casablanca’ and quote his favorite lines to me, teasing me about my obsession for Flaubert’s Emma. The calendar tells us that soon we shall be seventeen – He, awkward & serious . Me , bratty & flirty. In the mirror, I see a laterally inverted him, sitting by a window, writing in his diary in the reverse order with his left hand, starting from the last page and concluding on the first. Outside, the wind is slowing down – like the departure of a litany of disasters towards some other faraway planet . The incoming light from the window washes him at a strange angle and in it, I see two knowing eyes peering at me. Eyes where some deep secret mischief is brewing. Something magical is about to happen . Magic , that wears a hint of danger. Something tells me that I should lock my eyes into his and crawl through them . And into life…..

?Something tells me that if I did that, I might tumble into an bottomless catastrophe. Or an eternal bliss……

?Taking the last sip of my now barely-warm coffee, I wonder ?if Gardner was right - then somewhere during the course of this colossal mishap called life, the two of us may have intersected each other at some point ? Like trains moving in opposite directions over the bridge across forever, each of us looking the other way at that precise moment , abrupt and halted in our wrong voyages, averting collision and inching towards strangers who would inhabit us. Like it always happens at the edge of darkness, we would continue to move on, tread destiny and clumsily survive, trying to unravel mysteries of shadows and boundaries of light. And in that one frenzied moment, we would fall apart , littering the shores of time – with blood, with fire. Soon it shall pass – the moment. And each of of us would be alone again, carrying ourselves home.

?And two stars would fall off the skies, lighting up the sands of incoming and outgoing time where four footprints would glisten for a while. And then the tide would come in.....

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Image - My 2022 short story collection & my personal favorite among my four books.