There is something odd about Ghodbunder Road

Last Diwali my mother-in-law was applying tika on my forehead. “You have so much more grey hair now as compared to last year!”, she observed. It was one of those profound moments-of-truth kind of moments.

Is it age catching up? Or stress? There were other signs too. Back pain and knee pain. Taking the elevator instead of the stairs. Kids in their late teens calling me “Uncle”. Yeah, all the signs were there. But, how could all this have happened within a year? Its like, going to bed in your mid twenties, and waking up in your late thirties.

And then I saw Interstellar.

As you probably know, Interstellar is about space-time fabric warping, worm holes and black holes and time travel — not the-going-back-in-time type but the traveling-very-fast-to-some-other-point-in-space-and-then-returning-equally-fast-to-where-you-started-but-only-to-realize-that-the-others-are-much-older type.

Putting it simply, black holes bend space time fabric, due to gravity. For a remote observer, time appears to slow down near black holes, so a traveler traveling near a black hole will age slower than one far away. Sometimes, when space time fabric is bent so much (almost like a hair pin) that you can jump from one point on the fabric to another, or travel through a connecting tunnel called a worm hole. In Interstellar (if I heard it right), somebody had placed a wormhole near Saturn. Why Saturn? I don’t know. I guess it was as good a place as any other.

When I travel to office, I take a bus from home to Thane railway station, and then a train from there to Vashi. The bus goes via a road called Ghodbunder Road. Its a wonderful road that winds its way through foresty hilly terrain (very picturesque during monsoon) before straightening out into a wide highway road. There are no pot holes anywhere. You can drive above 40km/hr for most part of the day.



Those last two points are sufficient for anybody in Mumbai to smell a rat. How come this oasis in a desert?



There is another peculiar thing at play — when I am traveling on this road, time passes by rather slowly for me. It feels never-ending, like a slow motion movie. But for others, like my wife, waiting for me to get back home, time seems to be passing by fast enough. Sometimes when we are talking on the phone, and I mention that I am near so and so place on the way, she’s like — yeah, so you’ll be here in 25 minutes. For me, the 25 minutes always seem like 45 minutes. To add to the confusion, there is a bus AS-700 which actually is a slow-motion bus — there are stretches where it struggles to reach 20 kmph. The bus is probably a red herring — to throw people off the scent. Or maybe, whatever is impacting me, is impacting the bus too. Its aging prematurely as well, poor thing, gasping for breath and trundling along every day.



Before Interstellar, I thought I was going crazy. But now, I am not so sure. There is something odd about the road. People and stuff get old on this road, sooner. Some kind of reverse worm hole, some anti black hole or something. On the road, time ticks faster for the traveler and therefore seems slower (25 minutes seems like 45), while its ticking at normal pace for the people at the two ends of the road.



Ghodbunder Road must have been built by aliens or advanced humans returning from the future. They must have built it and then reprogrammed the memories of the contractors and laborers and the municipal authorities to make them think that they built it. One of the junctions is even called Teen Haath Naka (Three Handed Junction). If thats not a clue to alien origins I dont know what is.

I guess, I am one of the few people who knows what it would be like to travel through a worm-hole. Reverse worm-hole actually — you feel all energetic and full of life when you enter it and then you start feeling drowsy but cant sleep and then you start getting a headache and your eyes start to water and then your body starts aching but you cant stretch or anything and then you reach the other end looking like a wrung-out towel.



Yeah. That’s the reverse worm-hole experience. Worm-hole must be the opposite of that. You get in all drowsy and lethargic and as you go through it life becomes enjoyable and great and you are jumping up and down and all about and then you are out at the other end looking all normal and young and wondering why everybody around you is complaining so much about everything.

I am not getting prematurely old. I am not going crazy. ITS THE ROAD!