Rainfall

On those late afternoons when you see R sitting in her swanky glass-paned office on the 35th floor, with earphones plugged in, typing away on her silver white laptop, she is also whiling away time with her younger brother in the orange orchards of her village, just playing with the golden sun entangled in her brown hair. And on those nights when she is busy drinking and laughing with her friends in a loud bar, she is also on a beach, naked under the half moon, making love to a stranger with nothing to hear but sound of the waves.

Maybe if I was a physicist, I could have given you a satisfactory explanation of this phenomenon but as I am just a history teacher all that I will be able to tell you is what is happening to R. And it is this: R splits involuntarily, at times, into two or more complete selves and wanders off in different directions. No, not psychologically or metaphorically. She actually physically disintegrates into copies of herself.

“How many of you are there right now?”, was my first question when she told me about this. And after I had asked her innumerable follow-up questions, only half of which she answered, she had permitted me one last question.     

“Which one of you survives when you recombine?” “Both,”, she said, “until I split again, into two new halves”. “But which is the correct version of your history, then?”.  She waited for a moment and took a long drag of her cigarette. “World wasn’t designed keeping ease of documentation in mind. All that I can tell you is that the walls that limit possibilities are more permeable than we allow ourselves to believe”

Obviously this wasn’t a spontaneous answer but it did shut me up then. In the following days, I coaxed her into letting me study her in all possible ways. I even installed more than a hundred cameras over different places that she frequented, to capture her decompositions and recombinations. And, with all my effort and research, I had just three observations.

First was that R was not lying but that she was understating her condition. She didn’t just split into two but multiple entities - once I observed her simultaneously in as many as 42 videos. Second was that no existence of her had any connection with any other existence but they all smoothly transitioned into each other. While in one she would be crying inconsolably, in some other she would be laughing her ass off. And when in one she would be shopping for gold and diamond jewelry, in another she would be begging from door to door.

And, thirdly, that even with all those varied possibilities, R did nothing but be R. While she could have gotten away with murder, she, in all her incarnations, mostly just sat around looking out of the window wondering, for example, why was the beautiful rainfall making her sad.