I waded through a blue fog that smelt of burnt wire and dampness. There was a large polished metal sphere waiting for me. My fingers almost froze when I caressed its cold surface and opened a small door. There were a lot of colorful buttons, handles, and a small blue leather seat.
“I hope I come back in one piece with this thing” I began to wonder and stepped inside.
The was a quiet hiss and then I was all alone. The clanking and buzzing noise of the machines in my laboratory have all died down now.
I buckled up and set the date to December 4, 2013. There was a red button staring at me, which would start the chain reaction that would pierce the fabric of time and take me back twenty years.
“I am going to be the first.. the first person to travel back in time! Well done, Sam, you are brilliant. I am going to become THE Sam, that changed history forever”
I squeezed the red button and watched patiently as the machine came to life. My body began to tremble as the sphere started to spin. Twenty seconds later I found myself vomiting and sweating from the intense burning heat. The deafening noise pierced into my skull and I could not hear my own screams.
But then… all of a sudden, there was silence… a grave, sinister silence. And then it was only me screaming. Startled pigeons scattered in all directions. I laid there clutching to the ground like a fetus. It was a hot and dusty concrete floor.
The landing was not perfect, but it worked!
I lifted my trembling hands and pressed the timer on my wristwatch. I had exactly 60 minutes before the portal reopened. It was my only ticket back home.
I stood up, lifting with me the weight of generations of skeptics and naysayers. I made it!
I looked around. I knew this place very well. It was called the Old Tower block. I lived on the fifth floor of this building in 2013. I picked this location carefully based on all the calculations I made from reading my old mite-infested diaries and forgotten emails.
The building kissed the skies at 8 stories in height and the wind was strong enough to pull a lean person away and throw him into the dark waters of the Adyar river, which snaked right next to the building like a foul-smelling beast.
I walked carefully dodging the blue water pipes that ran in every direction like a maze, intertwined cable wires, and the dark brown shards of broken beer bottles that sunbathed for decades. The parapet wall welcomed me. I missed the brilliant view.
The dying evening sun was sinking at the horizon, under the silhouettes of buildings of different shapes and sizes. The Adyar river gleamed in a blackish orange hue and it ran like a nerve dividing the rich and the poor neighborhoods. One side of the river was dotted with tall buildings, luxuriously painted houses with security guards, tennis courts, parks, and lush tall trees. On the other, one could see rows of dilapidating structures with unpainted red bricks and ceramic sheets for roof, makeshift tent bathrooms, and many small apartments in the same identical shade of dusty grey. Posters and banners of political rivals embellished the buildings in different places.
The Adyar river left a faint smell of decay on everything it touched, and the kids wore the scent as they played along the banks of the dead river. Plastic leftovers of all sorts were left scattered everywhere along the banks, perhaps a gift from their fellow Chennai city dwellers.
I knew that in exactly two years this world will turn upside down. The river will swallow all the poor dwellings and submerge the small identical apartments on one side, while the other side would receive food aids dropped from helicopters, but not without some amount of damage and death. But death had a particular taste and preference for the poor and down-trodden.
I realized what was at stake. I looked at my watch – 49 minutes to go.
“Damn! Enough of sightseeing and falling into your purposeless flashbacks. You have work to do. Run!” I scoffed at myself.
I knew my objective clearly. I had with me a small black pocket notebook filled with overflowing notes on important dates, people to save, and a list of things to invest in. I must stuff it inside young Sam’s pockets somehow and rush back to the same terrace.
The decades-old lift would be a bad choice. It warranted a lot of patience and I remembered being stuck in the cramped space twice. Once when there was an outage and the second, when the lift failed and they had to break the door to save me. I picked the stairs and started to descend; my poor knees sobbed in their usual popping sounds.
The parking lot on the ground floor was always packed and the cars were neatly parked. A clean road ran in the middle of it and a small park with a trail for joggers on the other side of the road. Kids were playing on the rusted swings, which squeaked as if in pain. The breeze was comforting but it also stank. An old stone wall was the only thing between all this organized mess and the river bank on the other side. There were many old trees touching the skies within the compound walls.
The security guard was staring at me
“Yaar pa nee? Engayo patha mathiri eruku” (Who are you? Feels like I’ve seen you somewhere.)
41 minutes!
I walked towards the rusted gates. Contorted faces and suspicious stares welcomed me as I stepped into the street. I realized that something was amiss. I looked at myself and realized what a mess I was. I didn’t look like someone from the future, but like a fish that just hopped out of a dumpster.
Panting hard and smelling like pigeon droppings, dirt, and garbage, I ran looking for my younger self – a thin fellow with a sort of thick, rectangular specs and a blue notebook always in his hand like a shadow. He was supposed to be munching snacks in a nearby coffee shop according to a diary entry but I just can’t seem to find him there. It was perplexing. The clock was ticking down. I did not want to be trapped in my past.
33 minutes!
As I kept looking, I found a person walking out of an ice-cream shop and heading for an auto-rickshaw.
There! The thin man in specs with that blue notebook! Yes, I remember myself. oh, how much hair I had lost the last many years.
“Why is he walking towards the auto. He’s not supposed to. Did he… did he write the wrong date in his diary?”
I froze where I was and yelled before he fled anywhere… “hey! hey Sam!” and started running towards him waving my hands in the air.
He did turn around, but I was loud, a bit too loud… and was running in the middle of a busy road. A startled cyclist lost his balance and changed his path by 15 degrees, changing the past as well as my future. The cyclist fell on the road and a speeding car dodged him carefully but missed the dirt-filled being standing and screaming aghast on the road.
Thud!
19 minutes!
“Who are you?” he lifted my broken self from the tar road. There were people all around.
I looked around and found the notebook caught in the crossfire and lay in shreds before me, suffocating in dirt and dyed an unfortunate red by the accident.
I looked up and whispered in his ears… “If you ever travel back in time… take a cab stupid!”
Bonus: Photos from the past!
A Lonely Fish BLog 