Time started and it continued, never to stop or wait for anyone. People enter at a point and exit from another, never seeing what lies before or beyond. Someone has said, “There is the known and the unknown, and in between are the doors.” These are doors that one can neither enter nor exit from at will. These are doors that shut out all answers.
But what if someone travelled across these cosmic gateways?
Shivering, I stood atop the top of the world. The snowy mountains and the cold wind always help me clear my thoughts. But today the lonely mountains provide me little consolation. A kaleidoscope of thoughts haunt me, and the stars gaze at me pitifully. Desperation clutches me in its hard grasp. I wish tomorrow would never come. I wish I had the power to freeze time. Then I could be with Jane forever!
Tears filled my eyes and my heart ached, unable to restrain the pain inside. I stood up brushing away the snow from my hair. The wind was rushing all around. As I walked, I left small footprints behind me on the snow like tiny echoes. I must save Jane. I will have to find a way.
•••
With hair white as snow and wrinkles which seemed like endless streams, I recognised him immediately. He was so engrossed in scribbling something on a few sheets of paper that he did not look up even when I crashed right in front of him. This was the person I had known to be a creator of ideas since I’d been in the first grade. The paper lying before him on the table was scrawled with signs and algebraic expressions. They seemed familiar. He was rubbing his temple with his fingers; it seemed he was stuck on something.
He was the mastermind, the genius, who had discovered the laws of gravitation, the laws of motion, the laws of restitution and a host of other such laws which govern physics. He was Sir Issac Newton!
I rapped on the table and he finally looked up.
The presence of a stranger in the room did not startle him. He said calmly, “Who are you, and how did you get through the locked door?” His confidence was overpowering.
“Mr Newton, I can get through more than wooden doors,” I replied.
“I have come to you to ask for a favour. Please listen carefully to what I have to tell you.”
I told him everything as slowly and clearly as I possibly could. “Well,” he said scrunching his eyebrows, “I don’t believe a single word you just said.”
This was desperate.
“What if I disappear right in front of you?” I challenged.
“Then you are a figment of my imagination,” he replied warily.
I was here with a genius, one of the few people ever born who could possibly help me. But I just couldn’t come up with a way of convincing him. At one point I was even tempted to yell out, “Einstein is a better scientist than you!” But that probably would have sounded meaningless to him. Moreover, it would not serve my purpose.
He said, “You travelled through time? You came from 2011 AD, right? I have a better explanation. You want a peek at one of my papers. Admit it. Someone sent you.” He was clearly unimpressed. He was full of doubts.
Suddenly an idea struck me. “Give me that paper you are working on. What if I integrate that expression for you?” I said to him pointing at the papers on the table. “Just give
me a chance to prove that I come from the future.”
“I never disclose my unfinished papers to strangers. But this seems a different case. However, if you fail, then you are going to regret ever coming here.”
Integration by parts! We were already dealing with problems more complicated than that. I scribbled, quickly explaining how the technique was derived from the differentiation
of products.
Teaching Newton! Can you imagine that?
He gazed at me solemnly. He probably thought differently now.
I explained more desperately, “I have tried to change what happens.
But it does not work. It has never worked,” I told him miserably. “I can travel through time but cannot influence it. Jane is in a bus on a highway. It is night, and it is pitch dark.
The bus turns round one of the bends and crashes in a dazzling light. And I am in the bus, a helpless spectator. You may find this difficult to believe. But this is true and I am
desperate.”
After a silence that seemed to last for an eternity, he spoke, “The way the world is designed is perfect. Even you, a time traveller, an anomaly of the universe, have not been given the authority to influence the past and the present and there are reasons for it. What if someone was to bring a dinosaur egg here to the present? What if someone from the future like you burned all my papers? What if someone went back to the past and killed your grandfather? Chaos would reign. Death is but a part of the cosmic grand design. Nothing and no one can change it. Not even science, nor you who has extraordinary powers.”
I had assumed him to be a man of science. But here he was, babbling like a bishop. Furious, I pushed him back. He stumbled and hit his head against the sharp edge of a table and started bleeding. Bleeding! How was this possible?
This was the first time I had caused something to happen beyond the present. Had God listened to my prayers? Could I now save Jane?
I looked at my watch. Only a few minutes remained before the bus would crash in that blinding flash. I closed my eyes to disapparate and everything seemed to be constricting me. I departed, leaving Issac Newton doubled over on the floor pressing his hand against the bleeding cut on his forehead.
•••
The next moment, I was inside the bus. Wind whistled into the darkness inside through the open windows. I yelled out loud to the bus driver to stop. Jane should be in the first seat. As the bus screeched to a halt, I moved towards Jane and said, “No questions! Just come out with me.”
As I led her outside, I found it strange that she did not resist at all. She had not even inquired who I was. She had just trailed after me in the darkness like a zombie. But it mattered little to me because I had succeeded in saving her. I was overwhelmed as the bus drove away. Jane was safely with me. I had saved her! Right at that moment, I was the happiest person in the world.
Suddenly a truck whistled past on the road and there was a blinding flash of headlights. I jolted back and slumped down on my knees suddenly weak and drained out. It was not Jane’s face. It was Isaac Newton!
“We time travellers have the ability to see things but can’t change them. The revelation of time is not under our control. We can interact with our kind even across time. That’s why you could hurt me. But we can’t do so with humans. Jane’s death was embedded in God’s grand design. If you had remained on the bus, you would have lost your life in vain. But I could never have convinced you of this. I knew you would not have come out of the bus without her. So I set up everything. I am sorry…….”
I sat down on the cold tarmac gazing up listlessly at the multitude of stars, numb and stricken with grief while the voice continued in the darkness.
“There are others: Da Vinci, Einstein, Michelangelo, Jim Morrison, Beethoven, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs and a countless other prodigies, all excelling in their respective fields. You are one of these gifted ones. It is difficult in the beginning, to see your time fade away into sepia photographs, photographs that will never reclaim their original colours. But we gradually learn to live with them. My boy, there is the known and the unknown, and in between them are the doors. And to keep the cosmic design in equilibrium, God keeps some of them closed forever.”
- Roshan Thapaliya
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