So the whole idea is: "What if, maybe just for an instant, I could reverse the arrow of time?"I know the idea seems strange, even absurd, but I cannot help myself thinking about it. Over and over again. There are days when all I do is think and rethink, playing everything in my mind like playing an old movie, watching everything, even the most mundane of details. Sometimes I even go on to the extent of questioning the facts, the universal truths.
"What if I could start this all over again?"
"What if I could start life anew in a fresh place?"
"What if...?"
This barrage of questions, these seemingly endless 'what ifs', are going on and on, in a vortex, over and over again inside my mind, like a cyclone.
It was the newness, the strange kind of change that I liked the most. Reversing the time brings a certain kind of excitement. The warm smell of the coffee brewing, and the sight of my mother (young and healthy), and a little me walking through the dusty trails on the way to my village, and so many other things...I am filled with such tenderness that I cannot feel my senses reaching out to embrace at the present time. My father came at six, faintly smelling of lentils and grocery items, and once in a while he brought me 'Muna' – the magazine I treasured the most. They published short, interesting poems, and stories of animals. I felt that my father had brought the mystery of the outside world into our apartment with each copy of the children's magazine.
I learnt from the age of two or three that I was only doing two things—either burying my nose in a book, or my head in the clouds. There were so many places to read in. I read everywhere in the house. In the bedroom in the mornings, where the clock was always ticking; in the living room in the afternoons, where the TV was constantly on; in the kitchen in the evenings, where my mother was too busy chopping potatoes. Then, there was thinking. Thinking all over the place, all over again. In the verandah, where I sat vacantly gazing at the sky, or the distant mountains, and ruminating over something – even trivial things. It was the trivial things that attracted me the most.
Now I see faces, smirks and derisive laughter all around. Eyes that seem to see the darkness within me try to see through my soul. I see mockery, isolation and déjà-vu.
But the sense of going back, of reversing things, and again putting them in order levitates me. Like some conjuror's magic. And even these days, when I am supposed to be doing math for my exams, I keep wandering in the past – the empty sheet of paper remaining empty, the book open like forever. Instead of finding out the moment of resistances and shear forces in T-beams, I try to find a way in the labyrinths of my memories. Walking this way or that way, marking on the walls, and yet again coming back to the same place, making a zero displacement.
Living in the past is a "narcotic experience." The more you do it, the more you crave for it. And when there seems to be no way out, there is only one thing to do: Reversing the time. Replaying emotions. Watching the hubbub and hullabaloo turn into empty streets. And finding a solace in those forsaken, cold streets. But only one constant fear remains: "What if...?"
Again these 'what ifs'!
Well, what if I get bored? Wouldn't life be boring if one already knows what's going to happen next? Wouldn't all that playing and replaying of incidents be mere waste of time?
I am all for sure that even when one reverses the arrow of time and starts afresh, one can never be happy if one doesn't have the heart to accept things as they are.
Bibek studies at IOE, TU.
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