The Account of a Girl who Lost Time

“It’s been very long since I started working on this. Now, that luck has changed its ally, it’s time to swap my future with the past. Surprised? Yes, I’m travelling into the past... 21st-century India, and believe me, you won’t miss a thing for I’m carrying this mini-recorder with me. Now, keep watching…ONCE UPON A TIME IN MY FUTURE…

My god! I can’t tell how excited I’m. Can you believe this? I’m in the past!!! An alien to this time… but people, like rats caught in Pied Piper’s music, hardly notice. It’s refreshing to see canvases painted with different colours of faiths, whiter, though the time isn’t as peaceful as ours. There’re people everywhere…vying with time, ignorant of the ‘twin pandemics’ that’re to come and cut down them into half unless they control lust and pollution. Thanks to zero-point energy… we’re safe. Oh No! I broke my camera...”

“The voice-recorder turned off in between that I’ll tell you now, what just happened. I saw a crowd listening to a stand-up and was surprised to see all laugh except one. I asked him why, but he left without a word.

“Didn’t you hear what the comedian said?” A woman in the crowd asked me. “This guy who just left is a gay. His feelings were badly hurt.”

I obviously didn’t get it. Our comedians too make fun of people… gays, for their fashion sense in everything… but we laugh it off.

“Why does it hurt?” I asked her.

“Why? He’s laughing at the very existence of my friend…he too has a right to live.” 

I’ve read that this time treated such gender differently…but at times, memory hides… to remind how important she is.

I left them and went to savour some old-Indian cuisine, spices lavished upon them… tastes mixed like colours, when I overheard two men talking.

“This Muslim lady drives cycle-rickshaw nowadays… to show how equal men and women are.”

“This will end once her legs start aching.” They said and laughed.

Though I knew, education in 21st-century India was commercialized enough to neglect values, forgetting the talk was difficult. I started a conversation with the lady and she took me to her tent-like house where I saw a man lying paralysed, a baby girl playing with rags and an old woman sleeping. Poverty and commitment to relationships hardly exists so strong in our time. I told her what I heard.

“Nobody judges after listening to stories.” She said. “A woman with a will can do what men has done but a man hardly does what women do for he has had the privilege of being a man.””

I paused the recording and said: “Now you must trust me, sir. I did time-travel to 21st-century India.”

“Where’s your invention then?” He asked.

“It stopped working that I sold its parts for money.”

“Look dear…you must acknowledge this.”

“What?”

“That you are living in 21st-century.”