Time

Sachintha Arunodani Lokuarachchi

It was a bleak, dull night. A thick fog hung in the air. Thunder rolled and lightening flashed overhead. It looked as if a pouring rain would start any moment.

The wind was wailing loudly and the yellow flames of the torches fluttered dimly through the mist, giving out a feeble glow.

Suddenly, a faint silhouette of a man in a long coat emerged from the fog. The sound of footsteps on the paved stone road could be heard very clearly. He walked on, as if oblivious to everything around him.

Suddenly, lightening flashed, followed by a deafening clap of thunder. The torches flickered once, and went out, drowning everything in darkness.

Everything seemed to have stilled. The only sound of liveliness was the monotonous sound of footsteps, echoing and re-echoing through the night, till they died down. Some place elsewhere, in a cheerful, sunlit room, a 20 year old Engineering student, Marlen was working on some kind of a weird instrument.

He was one of those people who lived for science, and was considered a true genius, by most people who knew him. But some others said that he was just a guy who didn't know how to have fun.

Ah! But he was having fun. He enjoyed his work, and that's where his happiness was. Being an orphan, the only family he had was his work.

He understood things that most of his colleagues would never be able to, even in a billion years. Maybe, calling him the rebirth of Einstein wouldn't be far from the truth! He shared his room with Kishan, a friend who was in the Art Faculty. Once the fried had asked him what he was working on with such enthusiasm.

Everything his friend had seen were wires, bulbs and a lot of funny looking gadgets he didn't even recognise. I guess we can't really blame him really, since he was studying ancient world history, which had hardly anything to do with science.

"I think I've found the 4th Dimension" was the answer he got. Not even trying to understand, the friend just said "Uh-huh", and went out. Marlen didn't even hear his friend leave. He was too absorbed in his work.

He had dedicated the last five years of his life for this. And, he was willing to sacrifice even more, if needed. It was his brilliance, and the love for science that had won him a scholarship to the University of Peradeniya, when he was just 16.

Even as a kid, he had always been fascinated by the scientifically impossible. It was that interest that had opened his eyes, and given him a new sight, to another world. Another dimension.

"The 4th Dimension", as he called it.

"Time", as we call it.

Five years ago, he had begun to make his breakthrough. He saw a side no one else could see. A way to defy one of the most powerful laws of nature. The possibilities were endless. That was just the beginning. And now, after five years of hard work, he was at the end. He picked up the instrument he had been working on. He pushed a white square shaped button, on the flat, oval shaped, small object he held in his hands. A green digital light flashed on.

It was complete.

He had finished his Time Machine. Of course it was nothing like the one H. G. Wells had described in his novel, but still, it was a time machine. A more advanced one I think. He had achieved the impossible! The self satisfaction of completing the ultimate task was exhilarating. He could feel icicles running up and down his spine.

"Any luck yet?" Kishan asked. For a moment, Marlen was tempted to tell about his invention, but then changed his mind. He thought some things were better unknown.

"Nope. Not yet" he replied, not meeting Kishan's eyes. Obviously not noticing anything out of the ordinary, Kishan flopped on to his bed and fell asleep instantly, leaving the other to dream about his work.

It was around 3.00 a.m., when Marlen finally finished inspecting his beloved masterpiece. Everything was quiet. The only sound he heard was sound of his own rapidly beating heart. It was beating with excitement, anticipation, and maybe fear as well.

In a few seconds, he would be taking the bigger step the Human race had ever taken. Compared to this, landing on the moon was like a walk in the park. All he had to do was, choose the time frame, the destination and push the red button on his machine.

He programmed his machine, and checked and re-checked carefully, determined not to make any mistakes.

Everything was perfect. He clutched it with his shaking hands, and slowly pressed the red button, squeezing his eyes shut. A whooshing sound was heard, and a chilly wind circled inside the room.

Feeling the chills, Kishan awoke, lifted his head up and called out to Marlen drowsily. But of course, there was no one else in the room! Thinking that his friend must have gone to the bathroom or something, he pulled the covers over his head and drifted back to sleep.

Ah, but where was Marlen? Meanwhile, he found himself on a stone paved road. The whole place was covered with fog, and the flames of the torches hanging by the roadside, fluttered lazily.

The wind was howling, lightening flashed, and thunder rolled. It would be a lie to say that he wasn't scared. He was petrified. At first he thought he must have arrived at a wrong place, at a wrong time. "But at least the machine works" he thought to himself, as he finally emerged from the fog.

As a deafening clap of thunder rolled, the torches went out. The darkness was thick enough to be cut in to pieces. Not knowing what else to do, he hugged his long overcoat around him more tightly, and walked on, not knowing where or "when" he was! the next time he opened his eyes, he found himself greeted by the morning sun. It was the dawn of the next day. It took him a while to figure out where he was, but when he did, he quickly got to his feet from where he was sleeping, and started to look around. He was at the right place, and at the right time. The machine had worked beautifully!

It was even better than he had ever imagined. He watched, frozen to the spot with sheer amazement. He was at the top of the Sigiriya rock, and was standing on the stone pavement which went around the castle. The castle itself was towering majestically on the rock.

The rock, which was covered with earth, huge trees, green grass and so much beauty, didn't really look like the rock we see today. There were staircases leading down to the bottom, and down below he could see the beautiful gardens of the king. It looked like a scene from a movie!

The water in the many ponds below sparkled like blue diamonds. Flowers of many colours and fragrant with many fragrances, bloomed everywhere. The water sprays, ejected glittering sprays from time to time, like clock work.

The big ponds, which were used for bathing and water sports, had white Jasmines floating in them, to add more beauty.

The castle itself, was another beautiful wonder. The bejewelled walls and windows dazzled in the morning sun.

There were many pretty paintings that seemed to live, everywhere he looked. All in all, everything was beautiful! He couldn't help but think that his room mate would have loved to see what he was seeing now.

He heard many voices, laughter, and people exchanging stories, all around him. He saw many maidens whose hands were laden with flowers which magnified their beauty, walk in and out of the castle, gracing the place even more. There was so much going on; he could hardly take it all in. Taking care not to attract too much attention to himself, he slowly walked on, wishing he had a camera with him.

He was admiring the paintings, when he suddenly heard someone behind him. He turned around and almost collided head on with the king! With the crown resting on his head, and by the regal bearing, it wasn't hard to guess who it was.

Marlen quickly shuffled aside and knelt before the king. Not only because of respect, but also because he faintly remembered his room mate telling him about people being beheaded for being disrespectful to the ruler.

But the king took no notice, and just walked past him, and entered the castle. Two guards stood by the entrance of the castle, blocking the way to anyone who dared to enter without permission.

He listened to the guards talking to each other, and from what he gathered from them, he understood that the kingdom was at the verge of a war.

Not wanting to get caught in the middle of a war, and also not wanting to be suspected of spying, he decided to talk to the king, before they made any fatal assumptions about him. But before he even took a step, the guards were summoned inside by the king.

The guards then left, taking absolutely no notice of Marlen.

He was amazed that no one took any notice of him.

Especially considering the way he was dressed and showing up in places he was not supposed to, he had thought that his arrival would have caused a commotion. But they seemed to ignore him completely! That made him think that maybe others such as him had also arrived here from the future from time to time, and because of that people here were quite used to such things.

That was the only logical explanation he could think of, as to why they were behaving like this.

Finally, finding the courage, he talked to an old man sitting nearby. But he, like everyone else, completely ignored him. Thinking that the man must be deaf, Marlen tapped on his shoulder.

His hand went straight through the man, but the man didn't even flinch! At first he thought the man must be a ghost, and jumped back in fear. But, he finally understood the truth.

He didn't exist in this time, or in this place. He was merely a ghost from the future. He was solid only to himself.

Even though he could see and hear everything around him, no one could see or hear him. To them, he was no more different from the wind.

The realisation hit him like ice cold water. Seeing his hand penetrate that man's body, made him panic. He felt dizzy, and wanted to escape back to his own time, where he really existed.

He fumbled his hand in to his pocked, and took out the time machine, and programmed it back to his own time. As he pressed the white button, the weather began to change as it did when he first arrived here.

He was about to press the red button, and return, when a sudden clap of thunder made him jump, and drop the machine. His only means of escape now lay in pieces on the ground.

As he realized that he was going to be trapped in the past as a ghost, he knelt down and wept bitterly. It was only then he understood that no matter what anyone did to defy the laws of nature, nature was always a step ahead of them.

Even though he had managed to make a machine that brought him to the past, the nature had made it impossible for him to interfere and change the things that had already happened. He was merely a powerless audience.

Only he knew that he had made a machine that could travel back and forth in time, and he carried that secret with him to the end.

Meanwhile, back in his own time, Kishan had reported him missing after 3 days. The police sent out a search party, and had looked for him for about a week. But there was no trace of him.

After talking with the people who saw him regularly, they finally assumed that he must have run away, or committed suicide because he was too stressed over his work, and had no peace in his life. To them, he was just another ordinary guy, who had done nothing out of the ordinary, and a desperate runaway.

Though his friends had doubts about this theory, they kept them to themselves. After all, they couldn't think of anything logical that could have happened to Marlen either.

When Kishan told the police about what Marlen had told him about the 4th Dimension and everything, they just dismissed it as pure nonsense, which he must have used as a way to cover up his depression.

After about a month, everyone forgot about the mysterious disappearance of Marlen. Everyone went on with their own lives. No one ever knew what became of him. No one will ever know.

That was the end of one brilliant young life.

John Maxwell Coetzee:

His focus was South African reality
 

The violent history and politics of his native country, especially apartheid, has provided Coetzee much raw material for his work, but none of his books have been censored by the authorities.

Often he has examined the effects of oppression within frameworks derived from postmodernist thought. Coetzee's reflective, unaffected and precise style cannot be characterized as experimental, but in his novels he has methodically broken the conventions of narration.

John Maxwell Coetzee, a descendant from 17th century Dutch settlers, was born in Cape Town. His father was a lawyer and his mother a schoolteacher.

In his memoir, Boyhood (1997), Coetzee portrayed himself as a sickly, bookish boy, who adored his freedom-loving mother: "I will not be a prisoner in this house, she says. I will be free." At home Coetzee spoke English and with other relatives Afrikaans - his parents wanted to be English.

Coetzee studied both mathematics and literature at the University of Cape Town. After graduating, he moved to England, where he worked as an applications programmer (1962-63) in London.

His evenings Coetzee spent in the British Museum, "reading Ford Madox Ford, and the rest of the time tramping the cold streets of London seeking the meaning of life," as he later said. From London he moved to Bracknell, Berkshire, where he worked as a systems programmer for a computer company.

In 1969 Coetzee received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas with aa dissertation on Beckett. From 1968 to 1971 he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo. While in Buffalo, Coetzee started to write his first book, Dusklands (1974), which consists of two closely related novel, one about America and Vietnam, the other, 'The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee', set in the 1760s. In 1972 he became a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, at that time an institution for whites, and was later appointed professor of literature.

From 2002 Coetzee has lived in Australia with his partner, Professor Dorothy Driver. In an interview he said, that "leaving a country is, in some respects, like the break-up of a marriage. It is an intimate matter."

Coetzee's works cannot be classified as belonging to any specific postmodernist intellectual current. His essays reveal interest in linguistics, generative grammar, stylistics, structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction.

The dilemmas of his novels are based on South African reality, but often presented in a timeless, metafictional form and carrying a plurality of meanings.

In the Heart of the Country (1977), in which the central character is a rebellious, sexually deprived daughter of a sheep farmer, Coetzee examined the conventions of the South African plaasroman, or farm novel.

The calmly written torture scenes of Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) questioned the voyeuristic nature of fiction. The title of the novel referred to a poem by Constantin Cavafy: "and now, what will become of us without/barbarians?/These people were a kind of solution."

Life and Times of Michael K (1983) won the Booker Prize, but Coetzee did not attend the ceremonies.

The protagonist of the story, set in a future Cape Town and Karoo, is a descendant of Franz Kafka's characters, who never find out the meaning of their suffering, like the victim of the execution machine in the short story 'In der Strafkolonie' (1919).

Michael K eventually ends up in a concentration camp. Cynthia Ozick wrote of the book: "Mr. Coetzee's subdued yet urgent lament is for the sadness of South Africa that has made dependents and parasites and prisoners of its own children, black and white."

Foe (1986) played with Defoe's classic novel Robinson Crusoe. In the story a woman, Susan Barton, shares the island with Robinson Cruso and Friday. "I am cast away. I am all alone," she says without getting any sympathy from Cruso, the cruel tyrant of his small empire.

After they are rescued, Susan meets Daniel Foe and becomes his muse, whom he forgets. Friday remains mute, his tongue is cut, and he is never allowed to tell his own tale.

In The Master of Petersburg (1994) the protagonist is the famous Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who tries to understand the death of his stepson, Pavel Alexandrovich Isaev. In his sorrow he takes the role of Orpheus: "He thinks of Orpheus walking backwards step by step, whispering the dead woman's name, coaxing her out of the entrails of hell; of the wife in graveclothes with he blind, dead eyes following him, holding out limp hands before her like a sleepwalker.

No flute, no lyre, just the word, the one word, over and over." Coetzee himself has lost his son. He died in a mysterious fall from a high balcony.

Before producing Age of Iron (1990) Coetzee also suffered from a personal tragedy - his ex-wife died of cancer. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) started Coetzee's semi-autobiographical series, which continued in Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002). Both works are written in the third person. "Boyhood and Youth, after all, aren't an objective record of Coetzee's young life," In Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) Coetzee invented his female alter ego, a famous writer, who travels all over the world and gives speeches and academic lectures.

In the United States she discusses and analyzes Kafka's monkey story 'A Report to the Academy' (lesson 1), in England at the fictional Appleton College she drew a parallel between gas chambers and the breeding of animals for slaughter (lesson 3), and in Amsterdam her subject is the problem of evil (lesson 6).

As a material Coetzee used his own academic lectures, but at the same time he strips bare Costello's intellectual lifestyle - although her arguments are always fresh and seductive, the result of all her theoretizing is that she starts resemble more and more the copy of Kafka's primate, whose basic predicletions and moral ideas are contrary to the real world.

Costello resurfaced in Slow Man (2005), about a misanthropic photographer, who has lost his leg in an accident and who falls in love with a married Croat woman.