Chapter 1
We were at last on the other side of the worm hole. I squinted and shaded my eyes until it became clear that we were descending into what looked, at first sight, like a familiar ground. It was the city that I left behind. And the concrete insect swooped over my house with a great hush, it settled over the rooftop.
It was a relief to get my feet on ground. What with the inexplicable pressure conditions inside the wormhole. The touch of solid ground was euphoric. No words were exchanged, I climbed down the stairs.
Our neighbours had perhaps come back from the vacation. Their main door stood ajar. I dropped by to say ‘hi’. The lady of the house, in her early thirties, was an attractive woman. She stepped out into the sun, leaned down to pick the doormat before lifting it up and beating it against the ghoulish lumpy wall outside. I thought I had startled her, for I was standing almost behind her back when she turned around, looked about her, and slipped back inside. I was standing right there, and she did not even notice me.
Back home, mother behaved just as strangely as the neighbouring woman. I sat on the chair that teetered under my weight. I whispered, cried, waved my hands animatedly and in a last desperate attempt, picked a bottle and flung it to the floor. That did the trick. Mother stood bemused, retreated into the kitchen and returned with a broomstick and a dust collector. Carefully, she brushed the pieces into the collector and emptied it into the bin outside.
Now, as a relief to my confusion, a squeak aroused my mother’s attention. It was from the neighbouring home. The lady started as if she had seen a ghost. This followed with my mother’s sudden realisation that I was home. She puckered her lips and wondered why my voice was not reaching her. The brief consolation of my sight also melted away as she noticed that it was merely a ghost, a lively image of my person that she saw. As she reached with her hands to roll her fingers into my hair, she felt nothing but the familiar touch of air.
My mother surveyed her surroundings to locate the source of a torch; she supposed that the image was issued out of a sophisticated torch. It was so full of life. It was so real. Alas! It was still an image. I watched this from a safe vantage point of my favourite hiding. I hid behind the bedroom door. If this universe was going to confound my mother, I thought I will at least save her the trouble of deciphering it.
As for me, I had deciphered it. Here on this universe, light travelled at a snail pace. Light that my body reflected, only reached my mother’s eyes after I, the source, departed. It was a strange place where, my body left an image that persisted behind me as a shadow does. Only, this shadow was full of colour and seemed very real. Light that left me from present wriggled at a snail pace and arrived at my past while I had lingered heavily into future by that time.
As for sound, it was lagging far-far behind. Before I left this universe, sound of me greeting the neighbouring lady echoed downstairs. If I stayed back, I would have heard my patient cries to draw mother’s attention.
Chapter 2
Back in the native universe that afternoon, I was cowering under the screechy old metal cot with my hands plugged lengthwise to my face like puckered lips. I felt so down and low that not a million entreaties would have roused me from the deeply set despondent mood. My back was wedged tight to the corner; I brought my knees closer and shrunk like a turtle. The old cement floor rattled as my frail weight stirred its crumbs.
I could not bat well. My bowling was terrible and my friends won’t play me in their team. What was I to do? I was in eighth standard when this incident occurred. Sound of the dustbin flopping to the floor outside aroused my interest. The narrow compound was guarded with two doors that loosely cast a metal ribbon between each other. A wide gaping hole at the feet of the doors entertained the rabid street dogs and snotty sewer pigs. The pale brown doors were worn with time; the battered ends stood like chisels that bore their frail jagged ends into the muddy floor beneath.
It was the afternoon of a sunny Sunday. Parents were taking an afternoon nap. Hallway was filled with the sound of father’s nasal swell. Like the soft roar of a train, the snoring swelled with every successive pitch until it welled and then followed a brusque slapping of the tongue against the roof of the throat. I tiptoed outside. The dustbin had crashed to the floor and its contents had dirtied the entrance of the compound. Onion peels slipped into the deep rings chiseled away by the feet of the doors on either side. In the corner where the bump of a rock supported the broomstick, was a cricket ball.
I looked about me; whoever threw it, was not coming back to collect it. So it had to become mine. I stepped on the raised platform and through the bedroom window, threw the ball inside. Now, with the weight of a surprise possession, I surveyed my surroundings.
Our house wore uneven lumpy rock faces outside. The whitewash was coming apart. The compound was very narrow; two oversize adults can wedge themselves tight if they were carelessly passing each other. Our neighbours in the opposite house had gone on a vacation. The back of their house stood tall before the face of ours. The two tall walls with their lumpy ghoulish faces fascinated me throughout my childhood.
In the dusty corner, around a discarded reading table, ants were dragging along a cockroach’s corpse by its antennae. The neighbourhood was unusually calm on Sunday afternoons. It was about four and slowly sun was slipping away and the people were waking up. By nightfall, a mesmerizing transformation would take place here. Through the evening, sunlight splashed a pale oblong shape of light that lithely stretched across the reading table, kissed the end of the table and sluggishly dropped to the floor. Here, the oblong shape stretched across the floor until it met the face of the wall opposite and rose to crawl over it until it replicated the square mouth of its source, the brilliant crisscross pattern of the lattice on one of the doors guarding the compound.
There was a tap on the door. Tut, tut, tut.... the tapping grew into the sound of a rake dragging its teeth along the door’s face. I approached the door with caution. A creature had trapped its leg in the ribbon shaped metal latch of the door. It was a monkey; he was holding a guava fruit in its hands. I loosened the ribbon to set him free but instead the doors opened and before I could bear the thought of protection on my mind, the creature lunged forward in an attempt to dig his teeth into my cheek. My left hand was still holding the door and it served well to protect me as the involuntary reaction swelled in my spine and whipped the door hard to a close.
The monkey squealed, struck his slender paws to the door and crawled up the battered door to surface at the top. I slowly stepped back. This was turning into a dreadful afternoon. The creature hoisted on the top of the door, skidded to the floor, raced into the corner, stepped over the raised platform and through the window, slipped into my room. Only a moment later, he resurfaced with the cricket ball and ran away.
For the rest of the day, the thought of monkey both haunted and befuddled me.
Chapter 3
The next morning, at school, I found the monkey again. He was still holding the ball; my classmates watched him from a distance. They found it amusing that the monkey should hold the cricket ball so dearly. After school, the creature was still outside. So we gathered around him. Some kids threw paper balls at him and he didn’t budge. Many followed; they all began tearing papers out of their rough notebook, folding them into rockets with sharp noses. Most of the rockets flew tantalizingly close to the monkey but whirred at the end and flew off tangent. However, the wind carried one to the spot between his eyes; one struck him on the temple and the other on his pink bottom as he arose to leave.
One of the teachers noticed the commotion and reprimanded us. Apparently, the auto rickshaws had come to a standstill with all the students holding up the movement.
Later that night, when I was returning home from tuition with couple of my friends, under the sulphurous yellow lamps, the monkey greeted us again. His tail was battered like the frail end of an overused rope; his jaw muscles had gone limp and he drooled slovenly. It was not until I passed him that I noticed the deep gash that was left on his skull. Blood poured out of the gash and soaked the cricket ball in a thick red paste.
Streaks of paste ran down his back and his pink bottom was flowing in a red puddle. A horrible sight he was; hair on his chest showed signs of a nasty blow. As though someone had flayed him with red hot iron, blows had formed stripes of hairless patches.
Moon swam up and perched himself atop a rather long cloud that didn’t seem to collapse under his weight. Sumptuous evening breeze flung its arms over treetops to drop a dry leaf here and a patter a broken twig there. Streetlights suddenly began flickering with impetuosity hitherto unknown to me. The lane on which we stood motionless, stirred like the dormant wing of an insect. We glued our eyes to the strange transformation the street was undergoing. All was dim now; not a sound escaped my mouth. I looked about me and my friends were gone. The neighbourhood wore an eerie silence; where was everyone?
A crack developed from my feet and it traversed the length of the lane on either side to form a bow shaped ring and shrieked back to a close. I was standing on what had now become the spine of an insect; the lane puckered into wings and flap flap flap….off I flew with my hands locked around an old tree’s bark that grew out of the spine of this metamorphosed insect.
The insect carried me to such great height that I could now witness the houses with dim lit apertures on their sides; houses with flickering lamps now blossomed from a gloom into full bloom. Moon stepped out of his hiding. As the great ball of pearly white descended into the night sky, it splashed nightly charm that rippled across the space around him, some reaching as far as to the backwaters of my dilapidated home on earth.
The concrete insect gathered speed and the monkey which I had almost forgotten, began squeaking in horror. The scene beneath drove me to the point of concussion. We gained height and in a moment, the curve of earth seemed laughably inferior to the concrete flaps.
And after a point, melting of the scene began. Cities transformed into huddled pin pricks of light on the great emptiness. Now the insect preened its concrete wings, the jagged ends were dropped one by one. In a moment, it had acquired a streamlined body and I must say I was ill prepared for the dive. The insect folded its wings closely round its bosom, I hugged the bark and the poor thing, monkey, clasped its hands around my neck. We gained such speed in the dive that I thought we would merely dig into earth like a rabbit does a burrow. But as we neared earth, something altogether confounding took place. The dive seemed to melt the surrounding space so much so that it chirruped and blew apart as if a sharp spear had exploded a water can.
I had a feeling that we were breaking into an invisible hole. A worm hole. And, we speared our way into the hole. Nothing could have prepared me for this dive. The pressure seemed to suck away the space around it, so much so that, what was left was sheer emptiness. My lungs wallowed and eyes strained to the point of a collapse. It was a hollow we were diving into; sound vanished around us; light was all but gone. In a state of desolation, I hung to the old bark that seemed to chip away the ground around it. If it came loose, I would, I thought, stretch apart like a muscle tendon under tensile force.
A hint of light pinched its way out of a fissure and seemed to grow but subsided, once twice and thrice…finally the light grew out to swaddle us in the warmth of a neat blue sky. The sound came back to my ears; my lungs inhaled what was to be the first whiff of a new universe. An alternate Universe.
Chapter 4
Back in the native universe, pearly moon reflected his charming image in the pools of water around us. Apparently, it had rained a bit since I left. I was perhaps gone for about a couple of hours, for when I returned, father was fast asleep. But I could not resist. How could I? I woke him up from his syncopated train-like snores and narrated the events of the day.
He replied “Yes,” and he seemed to fall asleep again. Then he arose fully. Struck by a thought, he grew weary and uncomfortable. Perhaps he wanted to pay a visit to the alternate universe that I had been frequently visiting. Ah! nothing wrong in that. Who could resist such a thing.
Later that night, I woke up to find mother and father quarrelling in hush-hush tones. There was the mention of alternate universe. So I dragged myself out of the bed and at once sat by the bedroom door. A different voice spoke. It was a familiar voice. Father’s friend. The famous neurosurgeon Uma. Father said “But,” slight hesitation, and he was about to continue when Uma cleared her throat and said “there was a brutally mutilated monkey stuck in the doors of your compound entrance.”
To this, mother retorted angrily “any one, anyone.... could have done that to the monkey,” sound of the broomstick beating against the wall followed a hush “why would our son kill a poor creature?” she sounded very firm.
Father patiently explained “I met his tuition mates. Our son never went to tuition this evening.”
“Alright,” mother’s resolve seemed to waver a bit “you said that before. So what do you reckon has happened with our son”
Uma said “he is suffering from schizophrenia. He mutilated the monkey beyond recognition. Then, his mind tried to suppress that memory. Schizophrenic patients create alternative realities to escape suppressed memories. In your son’s case, he has been claiming that he travelled into an alternate universe. His condition is in a far advanced state. His explanations of the alternative universe are evocative of greatly distorted reality. Worm hole, light speed dilation, concrete winged insect….if you notice, his mind went to such a stretch of impeccable imagination only to serve the ultimate cause – to suppress the memory of one blood soaked monkey.”
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