Burglar of Time: Episode 2

1964

Next morning when he got up, he was in Berlin. This time, he was not imprisoned nor was he in shaggy, rugged clothes. Amar wore a chocolate brown flannel blazer, beige scarf and he had notepad and a pen in his hand. He was sitting on a window seat of a van driven by his father. Amar could recognise his father and was in an ecstatic moment.

“Appa.....” he screamed and hugged him. His father suddenly stopped the van and looked at Amar furiously.

“Are you insane?” he roared. “You could have killed us both”

“I am sorry paa” Amar apologized and turned his gaze down at his notepad. He didn’t understood what he’d written. He was surprisingly able to read, but the words didn’t make any sense to him. They just looked like random letters and numbers. He quickly shifted his focus on the nature outside and found the view completely mesmerizing. He’d never seen such beautiful sceneries back home and this was the most wonderful moment of his life.

“Where are we going Paa?” Amar started the conversation with his father. The tyres screeched again.

“Get out” his father said. “Take a look in the back of the van, and come back in”

It was Amar’s mother. Her body was being taken for funeral and Amar realized that he was sitting in the hearse, driven by his father.

Amar dropped his notepad on the ground and stood like a statue.

“Oh boy!” His father realized Amar’s moment of the frozen time travel and steps out of the van.

It was during the time when his mother was pregnant and his father stayed away, she developed an acute fear of the future where her child would live without the shadow of its parents. She dug deep in the books of science, studied astrophysics and developed mad theories of time travel which seemed nothing less than the fictional Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

“She’s gone schizophrenic” doctors declared. That was when the father abandoned her and moved to Berlin. He failed to convince her that he would provide a safe future to his family because she was already possessed with the idea of untimely loss in the uncertain future.

Amar was born with the poisonous idea of undoing the past and foreseeing the future; and this was his gift. All he needed was a cerebral shock and he had the ability to go back in time and switch events.

Amar was still standing behind the van. By the time his father reached, he was back in his house, sleeping in his mother’s arms. He never knew how his mother died, and when she died. He still had no control over his mind to make it literate enough.

1945

While he sobbed over the vulnerability of the moment, Amar found out a solution. He took a deep breath again, closed his eyes and went into a state of trance. When he opened his eyes, he was back in the prison, this time as a policeman. He controlled the time and this was not 1972. It was 1955 and Amar was 20. He managed to escape the prison and take a nice look at the surroundings. He realized he was in Berlin. The season was rainy and it was not war-time. He stole a notepad and a pen from a soldier’s pocket and moved out of town hitchhiking a truck. He didn’t know where to go, but he moved on. He didn’t know why he stole the notepad and a pen, but he kept them anyway. It reminded him of his mother’s death which he wasn’t aware of. While he rested silently in the back of the truck, the co-passengers tried to strike a conversation with this lad and he didn’t speak a word. He just held the notepad in his hands, staring at it with all the questions in his mind.

What should I write in this? What should I do with this? He wondered.

The companions in the truck noticed his foiled leather notepad and snatched it from his hands, just to play around. When they read the content, everyone started smiling at the boy. Including few of the buxom ladies, ready to base their paunches on the boy these bunch of people were spellbound in some way.

What’s wrong with these people? Amar looked startled.

He quickly got out of the truck and grabbed the notepad. He held on tight to the notepad and took a deep breath again.

1960

“Now what!” his father exclaimed while driving his truck. “Are you done peeing on the highway?”

“Get in quickly or we both will be jailed” his father sounded perturbed.

Amar quickly scanned the truck to confirm his mother was still alive and hopped into the front seat. For a moment, Amar felt the moment of déjà vu when his father uttered, we both will be jailed and he remembered the prison.

“How far is jail from here Paa?” Amar sounded very much interested.

“Why do you ask Amar?” his father asked with a baffled tone. “Did you have any of those prison dreams again?”

“What???” Amar was awestruck. “Was it a dream?”

Amar rolled back in his seat and closed his eyes tightly again. He tried to visualize the imagery of the prison, but all he got was raw broken footages of an unsettled barn covered in a puddle. He again tried to visualize the fat ladies groping over him for his strange notepad.

THUD! His father slapped him. “You are getting late for your exams.” He said with an alarming tone.

When did I start studying? Amar seemed to be surprised.

His father dropped him at his school and that was when Amar was able to connect all the dots. The school looked just like the prison he dreamt of, and the silent skinny inspector was his headmaster who hit him everyday for not completing his homework.

Amar got down from the truck, entered the school and went invisible. Nobody was able to see him. After sometime, the headmaster was found dead and Amar was still in the exile. While the whole city went gaga over the death of the future politician, Amar lost himself in the commotion. He realized that he’s no longer important, he stepped out of his classroom and rushed towards the bus station. His father stood there at the entrance, waiting for Amar. He slowly murmured in Amar’s ears,

“How many times do you have to kill the same old headmaster?”

Amar realized that he was stuck in an inevitable time loop. He saw the same things, did the same things and dreamt of same things time and time again. He was a prisoner of time. And he tried to steal the lost moments in life and relive them again and again.

The chronophobic mother was admitted to asylum for talking to her dead son 10 years ago.