Tuesday Fiction: “Ratan Mirrors” by Geetanjali Dighe

Today’s Tuesday Fiction is by Geetanjali Dighe. Geetanjali lives in Mumbai. She publishes IndianSF (IndianSF.wordpress.com), a bi-monthly magazine that features science fiction and fantasy stories. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction and Muse India. On Twitter she is @GeetanjaliD.

This is the story’s first publication.

Ratan Mirrors

Geetanjali Dighe

I am dying, Manohar. It’s been a long, hard life without you, but at least I met you in this life. Will I meet you on the other side? Will you be waiting for me, as you promised? thought Ratan, half-asleep, on the edge of death, in the middle of the night. Her old and wrinkled body lay on her warm bed.

The fabric of Ratan’s life began to tear, and the glow behind it poured out in rays. The tear stretched softly, like an old paper coming apart at its fibers, and through it a heavenly Goddess appeared by Ratan’s death-side. A Goddess with a glowing face, a golden orb around her head, four arms; and clad in a beautiful red sari decked with golden borders.

“Remember, the wise see only the truth in the mirror, Ratan,” the Goddess said. Mirror? How odd, thought Ratan. “Seek the truth.” The Goddess smiled and beckoned her with outstretched hands.

A dream-like haze came over Ratan, and she barely felt the tug as she came apart, unglued from her body. She quietly died in her sleep. It was the year 2009. She was 95.

When she opened her eyes, she was sitting on a cot in her backyard, outside her house in the village. Manohar’s brown horse, Chetak, was lazily nibbling grass by the guava tree.

A policeman shimmered beside her. He smiled and said in the most gentle way, “Namaste, Ratan. I am your guide. I thought you might find it comfortable to meet me in this attire.”

“Namaste,” Ratan got up and smiled. “Yes. Manohar, my husband, was a Sub-Inspector. He was killed by a dacoit in the jungle when my children were very young.” She paused. “He is here, isn’t he?” she asked gingerly, looking around.

“Ratan,” the guide said, very lovingly, “Manohar as you remember him is not here with us.” Ratan gasped. “This cycle of life and death – it’s an illusion. It’s a kind of art that you have created and loved. Here, there is only Oneness. Many beings choose to discard their identities once they reach here and coalesce into this one truth – this Oneness.”

“No. No. You must be mistaken!” Ratan sat down stunned. “Manohar promised if anything ever happened to him, he would wait for me, meet me when I died. He said so to me himself that morning, when he rode off to catch that dacoit in the jungle. He never came back.” Ratan started sobbing. “I cried for him my whole life. I had to raise five children all on my own. He promised he’d be here.”

“Dear child, this sadness is just your memory. It’s not real,” said the guide.

“Oh! If I could get just one glimpse of him!” Ratan wept.

“Look around you, these surroundings – your body, your tears – they aren’t real.”

Ratan held up her hand. It started to become transparent. She could see Chetak through her hand, and as she watched, the horse started to dissolve. Bewildered, she wiped her tears, but she could not feel her face.

“Have I become a ghost?” she asked and looked for a mirror.

“I am afraid mirrors aren’t allowed in this realm,” the guide said. “Here there is only Oneness. When it is reflected, it creates some resonant infinities that are difficult to attenuate.”

“What?” Ratan remembered something about the Goddess and mirrors. “But I want to see myself.”

Pop! As if on command, her beautiful Burma wood dresser appeared beside them. It was intricately carved, her case of perfumes lay next to the bronze jewelry box; but in place of the full-length oval mirror was an impossibly deep hole.

The guide sighed, and waited. Ratan walked up to the dresser and looked at the mirror. It was a dark tunnel – a hole of nothingness. Puzzled, she peered into it.

It was as if she had dipped her head in an ocean, and was looking at underwater corals. Except that the coral and the seabed were a boiling burning mass, molten and heaving.

Ratan pulled her head quickly out of the mirror. “What happened? What was that?” she said. “Tell me the truth, was that hell?”

“No. It was Aldebaran. You peered into a star,” the guide said.

“What!”

“You are not in space-time now. You are in another plane – a plane of consciousness. It’s like a dimension… mirrors are gateways to different dimensions here. Let me explain,” said the strange guide. “You can now access any universe, any time, all lives and probabilities. They all exist, in all their possibilities, alongside, beside, below, and above each other. You can jump to any time, any space, any universe.”

“You mean there are parallel universes?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a universe where Manohar wasn’t killed?”

“Yes.”

“How do I find it?”

“You can look into the mirror and choose.”

“Choose?” Ratan was bewildered, but quickly put her head into the mirror. Sure enough, she saw herself at a function where Manohar was being made the Deputy Commissioner of Police. She saw them living their long life together, and felt all their moments strung out like pearls. She could wear them as an ornament. She pulled back out of the mirror.

“So, by going into the mirror, I can create any life for myself?” She asked.

“Yes, but all those worlds are an illusion – they are Maya. The truth is Oneness,” the guide said.

“But, then, if this is all Oneness, how am I still talking to you?”

“Are you really?”

“Am I talking to myself, then?”

Her voice seemed to echo in the silence.

“Did I create the guide and the Goddess? Is all this my own imagination? Who am I?”

Who wants to know? came her own reply.

Then Ratan looked at the self inside herself. She was now, never and forever, here, there, everywhere and nowhere. She was the reflection mirrored in myriad lives and worlds and times. She was the mirror reflecting herself. Ratan mirrored and saw Manohar. He was her. There were not two, was no other, only awareness. There was only Oneness.

But I can still choose. I can love Manohar, one more time. I can see Manohar come home, riding on Chetak, one more time. Just this once, Ratan thought, and with a quick step, walked through the mirror and plunged into the tunnel.

It was 1914. In the green, misty monsoon dawn, a group of people were on a morning walk in the village, singing patriotic songs, holding candles for the freedom movement. That morning, in that village, Ratan came kicking and crying into the world. Again.

THE END