Page 202 - Musings 2020

35

Adventure of a Lifetime

Swati Taparia 2017B2A31034P and Damanjot Singh 2016A1PS537P

As Alex woke up from his long sleep, he wondered where he currently was. His mind raced
back to the last thing he remembered- the car crash which had brutally injured him. He
looked around but could only see blurry faces, their lips moving with shock and surprise. He
opened his mouth to ask where he was but he couldn’t hear his own voice. As he further
examined his surroundings, he realised that he was in an unknown street surrounded by
strangers. He tried to talk but again, neither was he able to hear his own voice nor could he
make out what he others were speaking. He grabbed his glasses from the side table and to his
surprise he saw moving symbols and letters over everybody’s heads. His whole world was
now filled with these crazy moving figures.

He was extremely startled and confused. He pushed everyone aside and quickly raced out of
the room. He looked at himself in a car window and to his surprise, everything about him had
completely changed. From his face to his body to his clothes, nothing was the same anymore.
He found himself looking at a handsome old man with big twinkling eyes and thinning grey
hair. Suddenly, a vivid mandala appeared before his eyes and started disappearing as it floated
away. He went to the nearest shop to ask for a bottle of water. The shopkeeper had a dollar
symbol over his head. He couldn’t make out what that meant. He asked for water but still, he
couldn’t hear what he spoke. So he just grabbed a juice from the counter, quickly paid for it
and opened it. As he was opening the bottle, he saw something that shook him to the core.
The expiry date read 12/10/2109, which was 100 years from what he remembered. He
quickly raced to the nearest newspaper stand and checked the date on the newspaper and he
was shocked to see that he had not only lost his ability to hear due to an accident but also
swapped bodies with someone 100 years ahead in time, and gained some special vision to
witness hidden secrets about everyone he saw.

He went back to the last place he remembered- the place of the accident and decided to
investigate further. Everything had changed about the place. The then isolated road was now
a well-built busy street. His eye suddenly caught a vivid mandala floating right in front of his
eyes, the same one he’d seen before. He decided to follow that mandala. The symbol took
him to a hidden corner of the street and went through a manhole inside the busy road. Alex,
as startled as he could be, decided to run to the manhole and he was suddenly pushed inside it
through the manhole cover by some invisible force. When he opened his eyes, he found
himself in a dark room dimly lit. As he tried to look in the dim light, he felt a tap on his
shoulder. And there he saw a man looking exactly like him, with maybe a few extra wrinkles
and grey hair.

He was astonished to see an exact replica of himself, just a bit older. He saw a heart floating
over this man. When the man began to speak, Alex was taken aback as he could hear
everything the man had to say. The man told him that he was the one on the other side of the
accident that took place on this street. He had finally invented a time-machine and was
traveling 100 years backward in time when he crashed into Alex. The magic of this place had
resulted in their bodies being swapped physically as well as through time and he had been
waiting for a 100 years for Alex to arrive and free him from this cursed life. He also

202