Dogs chased me across the Nalanda Grounds this evening. And while I managed to escape by the skin of my calves, cursing my fatness from growl through terror to breathless pursuit, the incident has left me scarred. I have been thinking, chiefly on two counts. First, why do dogs rule my life? They eat my food, leap at my drinks and follow me whenever it catches their fancy. There is a bitch who has practically never left my trail for three years. (She once shadowed me from the Main Gate right up to my hostel. Go knows what twisted pleasure she derived, since I didn’t even have a chocolate muffin in hand.)
Which leads me to the second question — is total peace too much to ask for?
I have just come back from a walk to Lipton. The heat in my cell-cum-room finally managed to chase me away, force me to smoke down at the smoke-ledge in front of my hostel, and take a solitary walk across the campus. The air was reasonably cool and the stars were high and bright. I took care to avoid the Nalanda Grounds by a good hundred meters, taking the marginally safer road instead. My attitude set me thinking: what was I running from? Why, exactly, did I feel so calm walking alone when I could easily have had some company? I thought, and I thought, but no answer seemed good enough. And just then, while I was busy negotiating an overhanging branch on the sidewalk near the Juice Shop, it came to me. Just two words, supremely common in a place of science such as this – Parallel Universes.
In an instant the branch turned friend from foe. I tarried, picking a few crumply leaves, chewing on this surprising notion. No one knows if parallel universes exist, but I suddenly saw they do. Not in the way the String Theorists see it, not even in the manner of any other new-fangled hypotheses, but in my own little vision of things. I walked on to Lipton and ordered a squash, a non-veg puff and a hot dog (or whatever passes for it in the neo-Nesciless world of trickery). I was suddenly quite ravenous. Food for thought, as they say.
What is each person’s life, if not a universe in its own right? From the moment one is born, call it a big bang if you will, there is an explosion of newness, a daily addition of novelties — people, things, emotions, whatnot. There are also some deletions along the way —stars die, planets turn to dust— and old things make way for newer ones. Galaxies of acquaintances are created, and in them shine the brighter stars that are one’s closest. There are asteroids and meteors, remnants of things bygone; there is dust, like memories; and then there is black matter, that endless region of the unknown.
With all this swirling in my head, food arrived. For a good while I greedily ate, then guzzled my orange squash and set out homeward. On the way, I narrowly avoided being hit by a bicycle (thinking can turn me blind to the mundane), and that made me wonder: what place is really safe? Are you ever truly alone, truly at peace, truly untouched by people in their own parallel universes?
Well, I guess not. I could choose to isolate myself, pick my bits and tiptoe away. In a way that was exactly what I was doing with this solitary stroll in the night. I was saturated. I could take no more of alien universes, no more of the unneeded complications they brought. I could choose to go this way, to let only me matter to me. My parallel universe could be all by itself in a warm, safe corner that no foreign worry could invade. But would that be right? Am I not meant to drink now and then from rivers that flow alongside mine? Whatever I do, I shall need others to survive, and those selfsame others will need me back. How, then, can I run away even from the comets that orbit me, although they are nothing more than sights? I will need those sights when the last of my stars begin to die, when my false moons lose their light, and when the black holes of my life finally turn too large to escape.
I found myself walking across the Nalanda Grounds this time. There were dogs all right, plenty of them, but none that could hamper my peace. For this was a different peace. With every step I taught myself: I am at the center of my universe, and I know it intersects with myriad parallel others, many of which I loathe to death. But now I knew that each one of them will only add to mine, be it the stardust of joy or the dark matter of uncertainty. I might fear the dark, hate the dogs that chase me everywhere, but I had to believe that these were monsters of my own making, and memories I would someday cherish.
One final stride got me across the Grounds, and I ran into a friend. A parallel universe, it struck me, in his own happy right.
