A tryst with fate...

As I sniffed away my tears at the emotional memorial of the King of Pop and missed him more than ever on hearing others perform on his trademark songs...and dedicated the next day to him by hearing all my favorite Michael Jackson numbers...the vulnerability of human life once again occupied my thoughts...

Untimely deaths, sudden onslaught of incurable ailments, accidents, mishaps, unbearable circumstances....I am not a fatalist...but what else can you blame all of this on, if not on fate..?

Karma is another thing...which people swear by...and say...you shall reap what you sow...but having seen many instances of innocent, good, moralistic, and pious people being caught in tragedies and pain...I don't think it really has much a say in our lives...!

So that gets us back to Fate...

As I climbed the steep staircase of my imagination...I saw a big, heavy oak door ...the likes of what you see in Harry Potter movies...labelled FATE.

With an ominous feeling I stared at the four-lettered label and slowly raised my hand to push the door open... Expecting the door to open with a loud creek...I was surprised to feel the door giving away smoothly.

The sudden light almost blinded me as I stepped inside...but then in a minute...it was gone..my eyes returned to normal...and I could clearly see in the dimly lit hall.
Looking around...I was taken aback!

The hall looked straight out of a Hollywood techno movie! The walls were filled with little screens, each with a stylish analogue watch in the corner and a small hanging pendulum that shined like gold. As I moved in front of a screen, it sprang to life...and one could watch a movie with full sound effects.

Getting bewildered by the minute, I moved forward ...watching the action...which was more thrilling than any Hollywood or Bollywood movie combined together...I knew ...that these were real lives...each second of which was captured by a greater camera and a higher resolution lens than anything we could think of.

Stopping at one of the screens, a young girl fiercely typing on a laptop in a well-lit high-rise office caught my attention. She was chatting with someone and her eyes were filled with tears...The screen split in two and I could see a young man chatting with her, sitting in the balcony of an old house in the middle of the night. They seemed on the verge of splitting up...after years of togetherness...

As I looked on...the pendulum suddenly starting swinging...and the screen changed into two still images...one was of them standing arm-in-arm, in a church getting married...and the other was of the girl sitting alone at a beach and the guy happily looking at another girl sitting beside him!

The pendulum kept swinging as their fingers flew on their respective keyboards...As I waited for them to make their choice, there was a loud shriek from the small analogue clock in the corner...making me jump!

The next moment, to my horror.... I saw the girl's huge office exploding and shattering into little pieces of glass and cement!

The TV headlines of 9/11 flashed in my mind!!

Putting a break on the wild wings of my imagination, I came back to reality with a thud!!

Fate or not...I REALLY don't want to know anymore...