Once there lived a boy in Anantnag District of Kashmir and his name was Asrar. He was interested in mathematical problems and equations in physics. He spent a lot of time solving such problems and to derive equations. He was called a “bookworm” by his friends and he often studied till late night. As a result, almost every day at school he yawned in every class. His classmates and teachers had given him a specific name, “Nindri-Mout”. His teachers used to say him that he would never achieve anything in his life; he would be a fruit vendor or something else of that type.
“But who knows what fate has in store?,” he usually thought in his mind after the teachers had insulted him. His grades were poor; he created his own answers, which were short and concise, in his exams. Once he went on an adventure tour with his school to Gulmarg where experienced enjoyment for the first time.
He used science everywhere and was never proud of his intelligence. He was of the thought that every individual that exists has their own talent in the field they were gifted with. In the last two days of the adventure tour, he visited the forests with his friend Aarif to enjoy the breath-taking scenery of Gulmarg. It was almost 7:05 PM when the clouds grew upon their heads and it started raining heavily with sounds of thunder and lighting. His friend urged him to return to their camping site as he was a bit of a coward.
Consequently, at 7:30 PM they decided to return. When they covered almost a kilometre back to the camping site, a tree branch crashed on Aarif’s shoulder. Aarif told him to head back to the camp alone and come back with the teacher and a first-aid kit to take him to hospital. He listened to his friend. As he hurried away from his friend, Asrar went straight to his camp rushing and nervous. But after an hour, he realised that he was lost in the deep woods. Fortunately he had a torch in his pocket. As he went searching for his path, he reached the foot of a mountain. There, he saw a cave and in order to save himself from the rain and cold, he went inside it.
There he lit a fire and warmed himself. After all this, he was tired and went to sleep but what he saw when he went to sleep took his sleep away. It was a room in which there was a little room much like a telephone booth. It was a ‘Time Machine’. He went inside it and started the engines, and took himself to 150 years in future but when he saw the technology had advanced there he thought, “I will go back and tell the world about it and no one will believe me until they come here.”
This was awesome and it was mind-bogglingly insane for him. As he planned to return, he accidentally went into space with his time machine. He now explored the cosmos. He saw a planet other than Earth where life existed. The planet also had intelligent life forms. They were the ‘aliens’. When he landed there he was arrested by the alien army. This planet had a specific name called “Thanos Ultra-Cosmos”. The planet was roughly about five times the size of our Earth and it was orbiting a super massive star DPS-1374, which was large enough to swallow our entire solar system.
He was put in a jail, not of that type we have here but much like a physics lab. There he applied the physics, chemistry and mathematics he had learned and tried to make something by which he could escape and return back home. He tried every day and the duration of one day on the Thanos Ultra-Cosmos was equal to 42 Earth hours due to the slow rotation of the planet around its own axis. He also had a compass with him but it didn’t work there, so he broke it and regretted it afterwards as it had been the best gift given to him by his mother. It reminded him of his family and out of sadness from being so far away from them, he wept for that whole day.
In the jail-cum-lab he tried to make nitro-glycerine to explode its walls and get away, but he failed. He used to pray to God to save his life. One day the alien jailer saw him and was confused by his body movements as he used to offer Salah without ablution. After five days when he was again trying to make nitro-glycerine, he went through a bowl of HCl which he thought was H2O. As he started drinking it, a few drops fell on his hand and the bowl slipped and broke away. After sometime he realised that it was HCl and not H2O. Wherever he applied the laws of physics that we use to govern the natural phenomena, he failed. He was more astonished than afraid. He found that the value of ‘g’ in
g=G M/R^2 was not 9.8 ms-2 but 5.3 ms-2.
He wondered what laws governed the natural phenomena there. After living there for ten days, he finally succeeded in making the nitro-glycerine. He was extremely happy, but he had no idea where his time machine would be, so he went into deep thought. He saw a computer there on the guard’s table. He killed the guard and got excess to his computer and saw the map of jail-cum-lab and he located his time machine in the back of the jail.
He had written down the formula of nitro-glycerine, so he started once again to make it. After finishing his work he blasted the wall of the room and got inside his time machine and returned to Earth. He was insanely astonished when he went back to Earth because ten years has passed there and he was confused as to how ten days on Thanos Ultra-Cosmos was equal ten years on Earth, but then he accepted the great leap in time and once again lived his happy life as a ‘book-worm’ with his parents. As for the time machine, it was broken and he didn’t know how it was made, so he couldn’t travel anywhere again. May be he had gone ten years in future. Who knows?
Even though ten years had passed, he was happy to be back. All of a sudden, he remembered that he had left his injured friend in the forest on the camping trip. He immediately panicked and felt guilty about having forgotten Aarif. A heavy wave of shame came down upon him and he felt uneasy, drenched in the stench of remorse. Aarif must have been waiting all this time, out there in between the trees, with the rain falling down and the cold chilling into his bones, soaked with the heavy downpour.
Who knows what tragedy must have fallen upon him out there all alone? May be a wild animal had gotten hold of him, smelling the pouring blood from his shoulder injured by the falling branch. Asrar could not feel any worse about the turn he had taken by getting into the time machine, and he was about to burst into tears. Out of nowhere, he felt a solid pat on the back of his head, and Aarif’s voice whispering aggressively “Hey Asrar! Wake up! The teacher is going to kill you for falling asleep in class!” As he opened his eyes, he realised it was all a dream, and his yawns had drawn him to sleep, and that too in the chemistry class.
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