1941
World War II had begun and many
countries were finding it difficult to answer the rebels with peace. For the
warriors of death, peace was not a considerable solution. However, somewhere in
a tiny village of India, a lover was born. His name was Amar. His father was a truck driver in Berlin and frequently travelled
to India to spend time with his family. Amar’s mother was a scientist and suffered
from chronophobia; the fear of time;
and this characteristic was flamboyantly adapted by Amar who further became a
master of Time Control.
Amar was a born lover. He inherited
romantic skills from his mother and the looks of his father. While the world
was at war; little Amar fell in love with flowing stream; the blowing wind and the
glowing sunshine. Gokarna, which
means cow’s ears in Kannada, was a small village on the coastal Karnataka, where
Amar lived his dreams and took pleasure in savouring the nature’s beauty. He never
read books because he was illiterate; he never made friends because he was too
busy admiring the solace in being alone. And most of all, Amar was a gifted
child. He never realized until this day.
1972
Amar wakes up from his bed and finds
himself in prison. The cell is filled with water and there is nobody around.
“Anobody there?” he screams. “HELP”
No
answer from anyone.
He looks at his reflection in the stagnant
water around him. His hair grown shaggy, his clothes all torn and rugged and he
was a fully grown adult.
“WHERE AM I” He shrieked, trying to
unsettle the prison bars with his wounded hands.
He receives a welcoming whip from a silent
skinny policeman.
Amar takes a while, to comprehend the
new surroundings. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. He tries to
imagine being back in his home with his mother eating rice and curry together. He
opens his eyes, but nothing changed. He is still in prison and the flies
started gathering in the gutter cell.
After an hour, the prison cells open
and the water is drained out. Amar quickly rushes towards the prison bars. He is
still unable to read the name of the location and manages to ask one of the
silent skinny policemen regarding his whereabouts. The policeman yet again
whips him with a wooden cane and aligns him in the queue for meals.
Amar stood clueless and kept
wondering how he arrived here and what wrong he might have possibly done. He quickly
finished his meal and rushes towards the wash basin. While he washed his hands,
he began weeping and that was when he remembered his mother.
“Where are you Ma? I want to see you”
and he splashes a handful of water on his face.
1945
When he opens his eyes again, he zoomed
back in Gokarna where he sat by the tiny
stream washing his hands. He was 10 again and there was a cat beside him that bathed
in a mud puddle and was coated with dirt. He called it Sandhya irrespective of its gender, because he’d found it in
twilight hours orphaned on the street. For a moment, Amar was flabbergasted
thinking of the fact that he was in a prison few minutes ago. And now he’s back
in his village playing with his girlfriend (the cat, of course).
“Come darling! Let’s go” he said and
carried Sandhya in his arms on the way back home.
That night, he held on tightly to his
mother and his cat and didn’t let anyone off his embrace. Amar laid scared and
cold on the floor mat, sleeping in fear of what he experienced. He didn’t know to
explain this matter to his mother, nor Sandhya could help anyways. He prayed
hard and slept with a thought that his father would know better.
Comments