Science Fiction Afternoon
By: Karthik Iyer
Tags: Science Fiction, Magic, Personal

Afternoons are so absent in ones life unless one is a child or one is very old. Yet they play such an important role in our lives every day, month, year.. and this afternoon was not the usual one. May be the sun rose a couple of degrees on the west or maybe the wind was blowing slightly to the East , everything was out of character this afternoon. One could have easily missed it, maybe the out of character-ness saved it and made it a little more memorable. Lunch was in order and the daily ritual had to start, a walk down the stairs, asking fellow colleagues to join and then walking into the food court to choose in on one food joint. But I realized I wanted to recharge my mobile phone and this was maybe this was too ‘out of character’. With a steely resolve I broke the ritual that afternoon and took the road straight to the small kiosk 100 meters away from the office.

In situations like these of out of character-ness, the mind goes into an overdrive and literally assumes your life has turned into a Sci-fi movie. It thinks — anything could happen now, an earthquake can happen right there, you could meet a dear friend out of nowhere or it could start raining suddenly. What would you tell your mind when it started raining that time and I had to quickly take shelter in a bus stop. Life is indeed a hidden Sci-fi movie. The bus stop started attracting more Sci-Fi minded people and then somehow it all became normal, the mind had calmed as if something very expected happened. But then out of nowhere the rainbow came out — the sun, the rain and the people all now in a trance. The mind giggled as it quietly said — ‘Did not I tell you, its all SciFi out here’. The out of character afternoon, the LSD trip laden mind and the rainbow gazing people gave me little hope that all that was happening was leading to something more.

The spell had to break as the realization of the limitedness of time took over. Time is a funny thing, like one stick moving around a circle once and then once more and then once more and it just keeps doing that. We attach our emotions, ambitions, aspirations and hope to it that maybe on one fine circle things would change, everything would either be set right or everything would fall apart. As funny as it sounds, it’s the same mind playing its Sci-Fi game, isn’t it? This time though, I did not feed the monster and I respected the stick moving around the circle and indeed it had moved quite a lot of times than it should have -according to my wish. I ran to the shop and asked the shopkeeper to ‘load currency into my mobile phone’. Another sci-fi equivalence, another unexplained mystery of modern-day life — a physical exchange of goods resulting in a meta-physical activation of signals. The humans present on either side of the exchange being content on the non-physical fulfillment. What comes next is even more magical. I had to make a phone call to someone. That was the whole point you see of breaking the mold of the usual afternoon. Everything happening that moment was normal to a third person. For my mind, each small thing was Sci-Fi, each thing seemed out of character. As I consciously played this different afternoon in my head, I smiled. Such smiles are only found in such afternoons and that’s why afternoons are special.

I clicked on a name and the device know who I wanted to speak to, it did the rest. Made me wait for a while — it was like some milli seconds -it was kind of a silence followed by immediate sound maybe to not disappoint you, maybe to tell you it is there doing the work for you. After some tones and sounds the ring came in. How would have Alexander Graham Bell felt when he would have made the first phone call, when he would have had this moment of silence and anticipation and voila! You listen to someone on the other side. For the mind, the invention of the telephone would have been something like ‘discovery of wheel’ on drugs. All of it happens in split second but a whole lot of it is still hidden and mysterious. What would have Alexander Bell felt in this moment — a weird anxiety or a fulfilling contentment. I guess he would have felt the same as my mind felt — the whole fucking this is a Sci-Fi movie.

Every single time, you and I know it, the time you listen the ‘Hello’ from the other side, there is a small shiver down the spine, a small shock. Some just outgrow the curiosity and kill the whole enigma but that day when I heard the voice on the other side I just exactly felt the same quiver, slowly growing every milli second until the next word was spoken. I spoke for briefly 10 minutes and then I pressed the cancel button.

The whole trip had ended, the conversation was over, the magic had faded. I glanced towards my watch and realized I had only 10 minutes to eat and I rushed to get some sandwich which I wolfed it down. I was on my way back, glanced at the bus stop which was rather empty now. The sun was hidden in the clouds and the wind started blowing maybe a touch harder which made me cold. I came back to my desk, giggled with my colleagues and started work. This was the perfect work as usual. The mind was calm, was rather absent as I took over the daily routine. The Sci-Fi movie had ended some while ago. It was not afternoon anymore, the dawn of the evening had nicely started to settle in. Things had moved on as they should have, but the mind will once again yearn for that afternoon. The out of characterness, the magic, the science fiction, all of it.