A Ten Years Gap

It was 1998. I was sitting in front of the TV and watching Dexter’s Lab. Suddenly the power was cut, I cursed the electricity board with great enthusiasm and lied down on the bed still in darkness. There was no one in the room. My newly bought radium watch showed me the time was 9:30 at night. The main door was closed and I could see a faint moonlight creeping through the crevices of the door. The light pulled me towards it, and within a moment, I slid towards its birthplace : The Moon.

“I saw myself hanging in between the earth and the moon, being closer to the moon. I found several dark craters and numerous volcanoes scattered on its bright surface. My imagination took me to its surface which was a conglomeration of everything I saw in the cartoons, discovery channel and of course my imagery. I, being still dressed in my favorite trousers, saw beneath my feet impenetrable depth of light, so radiant that it dazzled my eyes. I looked at the sky and found the most beautiful thing I had ever seen : I saw my earth, all of its continents in perfect balance and my motherland India looking as if it had been crafted deliberately yet most beautifully by the Master Craftsman.
"My imagination instantly moved me to a rocket(much like Dexter‘s) which was traveling at limitless speed. Vicariously, I toured the whole solar system. I could see the Jupiter and its four moons dancing around it in circular orbits and I saw Pluto, looking much as a purple colored ‘Cadbury Gems’. I could see myself amazed by the deep blue colour of the Neptune. Within a moment, my super fast thoughts arranged my exit from the solar system. My thoughts unknowingly drifted from the zigzag motion of the planets, crossed the milky way and steered towards the periphery of the universe. The end of the universe was much like the horizon on the sea, as it drifted farther the more I tried to reach it. My mind gave up but my imagination didn’t(it had no bounds), it kept moving away from the universe to finally find a vantage point. And to my utter amazement, from the vantage point I observed that the universe was contained in a small seed and millions of such seeds were contained in an urn in a familiar seed shop in a remote village in northern India...(a sudden ‘wow‘ feeling came at my imagination)"

Sudden bright lights from the bulbs dissolved the dim moonlight from the crevices. The ‘noise’ in the TV brought me back to the world and I was still in awe. After two minutes, I came back to my senses and found that Dexter’s Lab was over, but that time it didn’t hurt.

Ten years later(21st June, 2008), summer holidays on. I was watching TV and this time not a cartoon but a movie. Suddenly, grains struck the TV screen with great intensity and lights flickered, I realized that power got cut and the inverter had taken charge(times have changed, you know). My newly bought watch showed me the time : 12 o’ clock in the night(My matured mind grew up for the radium watch this time). Nature could not interfere my thoughts this time because the moonlight became much less bright for me to notice. I shut down the TV, lay down on the bed and switched off the lights. My thoughts started to wander(not wonder).

“I thought about my school, where the very first thing that struck my mind was how badly my chemistry teacher once ridiculed me in the class. I tried to move my thoughts to my college whose insurmountable academic pressure punched me hard. I consciously tried to think of my future but, to my shock, I could find numerous doubts and dilemmas. My self-belief started to tremble. I heard a wailing sound of a child from somewhere in the neighborhood and this carried me back to my childhood days - where dreams were always meant to come true, where the whole universe was in my fist and I could twist and turn it in my own wish, where I could drive rockets with saucers, where the word “limitation” was never in my dictionary, where every morning was brand new and filled with enormous energy, where I was like ‘wind’ with enough power to smash every obstacle that stood my way. My thoughts soon merged with my dreams and simultaneously my childhood merged with my present scenarios. The tough realities haunted me with their true face and I realized how time had changed. I had matured but somewhere on the way I lost that innocence and that freedom. I longed for the same blithe of my childhood.”

A sudden call early in the morning from my aunt woke me up the next day. She asked me to come and teach her 5th grade son some Mathematics when I wondered, “Is it he or me who needs to be taught?”