Walking Backwards

Ever since Ramah – that’s how I spell my name, he had said, saying that he had followed a numerologist’s suggestion and that it had worked wonders for him-  had convinced him about the merits of walking backwards, Narayan had been doing this. Ramah was a doctor of sorts, or so he claimed.  It was difficult to tell if he spoke the truth.

Some of his stories were pretty outrageous; but he had a cheerful air about him and wore a pleasant smile, most always . Ramah was a regular back-walker, and suggested that he should the same, for this backward walking had really improved his health.

This had happened about a year ago, and ever since, Narayan had taken up this practice and found it a good thing, too.

The location that he had chosen for this exercise was excellent – on the path around the floral clock in Lalbagh – you know the one with the Maharaja’s  statue and the garden of Disney gnomes that embroidered the floral clock. 

If you enter Lalbagh from the Siddapura gate and take the path immediately to the left, you climb up to the embankment of the lake. A small footbridge will take you across to the eastern end of the lake, and then you could walk a bit along the embankment and take the worn-out steps down to the rose garden. Continue walking straight along, with the rose-garden on your right, and you will come to the band-stand area. Keep walking a little further, past the sometimes functioning fountains, and you will come to the park that hosts the Maharaja’s statue, and the floral clock.

If you came early enough in the morning, the place was pretty much deserted. Narayan didn’t walk very fast when doing this backwards thing- for the path was not always clear of stones, and you could easily trip and fall.

His first round, around the clock, was always clock-wise, and done in the usual way that we walk, forwards . This was, he explained to some friends who had watched him walk this way, to get an idea of possible obstacles in his path. With the second round, he began his backward perambulation. His target was to complete at least twenty five such rounds. That much walking, he reckoned, was enough for a day’s exercise.

Most days, the clock maintained its regular movement, and he could check that he had walked for at least half-an-hour- if he did his twenty-five rounds, that is. 

That momentous  August morning he had come as usual to the floral clock garden, and begun his backward walk. It was on the tenth round that he began to sense something peculiar happening. The clock seemed to be slowing down- checking the time on his watch, he saw that the clock had already lost ten minutes. He was sure about this, for he had a habit of checking his watch against the time shown by the floral clock every day before he started his backward walk.

On his eleventh backward round of the clock, he found himself involuntarily slowing down. it was as if his pace had to match that of the clock , the hands of which now seemed to be moving slower than ever. By the eighteenth round , the secondhand of the clock moved agonisingly slowly, and his movement too seemed to match this. He was practically static, and every movement of his legs seemed to take an eternity. It wasn’t like as if his legs had become excessively heavy, it was more like as if he was participating in a dance, where the choreographer had called for super-slow movements .

Nothing had happened to his mind-he was still acutely conscious of the fact that this was his 18th round, and of the green grass around, and of distant conversations.

And now, he found his eyes closing automatically, and his feet giving way, and he slumped to the ground, completely immobile. But his mind hadn’t shut down and when, after what seemed a very long time, he managed to open his eyes, he found, to his great consternation that the statue of the late Maharaja had vanished, along with that of  the blindfolded 

woman holding the scales of  Justice, and of course, the clock wasn’t there either. 

His mind took in all this, and he wondered- had he moved ahead in time, or had he moved backwards? Or had Time stopped?

What does “now” mean? He had been thinking about this for quite a while now, for he fancied himself a physicist. Though all he really did was teach Physics at the undergraduate level to students completely uninterested in the subject and who had taken this course merely because they couldn’t get into an engineering college. Still, it was nice to speculate on various things, from black holes to quantum fields on his walk. 

Today, the topic for his idle speculations was Time, with a capital T. Is Time something linear? he thought, with that which we call the” past” moving into the “future” through the moment that we call “now” . What exactly do we mean when we talk of the “present” ? “You might say”, he thought, “that I am now in the park, looking at you walking backwards and wondering at your foolishness. But you are most probably not a physicist- maybe you are a trader, selling cloth, and have the least idea of Physics. But I, on the other hand, know that light has a speed, and that therefore, the light that leads me to think that you are looking at me, has actually travelled for a pico-second or whatever, before actually striking my eyes, and moving into my brain, activating all those neurones that make me think that you are looking at me. So, whats’ “now” for you is actually not what’s “now for me. Which is why astronomers when they observe the sky are actually looking into the” past”, and not seeing things as they are “now” , from the observer’s point of view. Which leads onto the question of whether Time actually exists, apart from the brain, for what is the “past” but a series of “events” that have been, and the future nothing but a series of “events” to be.”

It was this profound conclusion that he had reached in his speculations, when his backward walk had spiralled to a stop, just as the floral clock had stopped and vanished from his gaze.

Narayan, to his consternation, found an Englishman, dressed in the style of a Victorian gentleman, looking down at him. His name, he said, was Lear, and he asked Narayan, very politely, and in an accent that he could barely comprehend, about where he could find New from Kew. This was completely beyond Narayan’s comprehension – all he could blabber was, “I am Narayan. And everything’s new!”. Evidently Lear didn’t understand this, for he immediately began walking away rapidly from him, and soon, even as he watched him, disappeared from view.

Narayan’s collapse had been seen by other walkers nearby – including Ramah – and now, as they rushed to help him, they heard him talking about someone called Lear, and repeatedly saying, “Everything’s new!”.  

Ramah, like many others of his generation, had been taught Charles Lamb’s “Tales of Shakespeare’, and thought that Narayan was talking about that old king of England, whose tragic tale had brought forth many splendid lines from Shakespeare. A quote from that play came to Ramah’s mind, which was well-stocked with ‘pearls of wisdom’, as he liked to think of them,  “I fear I am not in my perfect mind”, as he pulled up Narayan from the ground.

Ramah spoke soothingly to Narayan, whose eyes were bulging now, and whose voice, from being robust had now turned tremulous. Narayan kept saying, “Lear was here, and everything’s new!”. Ramah helped Narayan get home, and told him, “Maybe, walking backwards isn’t for you!”.

It took many months for Narayan to recover from this incident, and it was quite some time before he could walk in Lalbagh again. And never again, did he walk backwards.

Years later, when this incident had long been buried in Narayan’s mind, he had been looking idly at what Google had to say about Lalbagh. And there, he discovered to his amazement, that Edward Lear had indeed visited Lalbagh, in the year 1874, in a dog-cart, and that the person in charge of Lalbagh then was a man named New, who had once worked in the famous Kew Gardens of London. 

And, so, it was true then, he had not been knocked out that day in Lalbagh, he had merely walked backwards in Time, and somehow he had met up with Lear. The physicist in him was excited beyond measure – time travel did exist after all, he thought, and what a discovery this would be.

He would tell Ramah about this, first thing in the morning, he thought. But would he believe him, or would he merely put it down to a recurrence of what he thought of as that ‘nervous breakdown’.

Only Time would tell, he smiled to himself. And maybe he should resume his backward walks… Who knows whom he might meet next?