Miracle

Satyam liked fiction. He liked it so much that he was never satisfied with reality. He mostly lived in his own made-up worlds, not wanting to come out. People around him were also not bothered much. But what was striking was that the worlds in which Satyam would get lost were not fantastical. There were no magical creatures or fairies, nor did they involve aliens and outer space. The worlds he would get lost in were rather different versions of the same world that he inhabited.

And, as if it were destined to happen, Satyam faced a menacing problem.

No one exactly remembers how it started. Some say it started when Satyam lost his father. Some say it started when he fell in love for the first time. Some say the problem was always there, but the world came to know about it later. As no one knows for sure, let’s say that it began when he started writing for the first time.

Mostly, he wrote about the worlds in his mind. This would mean him writing about different variations of his own reality. Initially, he used to change many things to make it seem like a different world; mainly the names of people and places. It was easier for him to express that way, without feeling the pressure of judgment from reality. Although deep down, he always knew what he was doing. But still, it gave him a good perspective, and all was fine until he was aware of that. But what he was completely oblivious to was that this path posed a deadly problem ahead.

As he wrote more and more, he began to realize newer things about himself. He understood his dead father more properly when he talked to him in a parallel world. He felt love and heartbreak differently when he tried to understand them in a fictional world. In a blissful unawareness, Satyam kept wandering into the shapeless land.

His childlike astonishments took him farther from reality. Initially, he was aware of what was happening and was able to maintain his sense of reality, but only until a certain point. No one knows when that certain point expanded itself into multiple points. Slowly, Satyam started indulging more and more in fiction. Those several potential points of return exponentially expanded themselves into several more until they became so many and so minuscule that they were non-existent. In hindsight, it was merely a unidirectional line that started in reality and ended in fiction, where its name kept changing, as that was what fiction was about.

At first, everyone thought that this was the real problem. That Satyam had completely travelled to the fictional land, beyond the point of return, was the whole situation. Little did they know, all was still curable until it was separable, as this was just a build-up to a more puzzling scenario.

As he wrote more and more, he realized that he liked fiction because it made him understand reality better. And as he became aware of this, he made the costly mistake of thinking of it as an absolute way forward.

In a mind-bending high of self-awareness (which he thought of as self-actualization), he started mixing the fiction with the real. Projections of multiple realities started colliding in a mythical, wild dance of perspectives. Turquoise, Teal, and Cobalt were no longer shades of blue. Defiled by a disruptive Scarlet, they lost their reality, and so did the Scarlet. Sometimes he would change names, sometimes he wouldn’t. Neither the day remained the day nor the night, night. Fiction became a palpable reality, and reality was no longer a scientific notion of time and space.

It was the death of both fiction and reality, as they were perceived.

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But unbeknownst to him, Satyam was actually onto something beautiful. The Blues and the Scarlet started creating a beautiful shade of purple. Inexplicable as it was, it matched with the culmination of a day and a night. Something completely and marvelously new took form as fiction and reality merged. A glimpse. A moment. A sliver of truth.

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To this date, no one knows how it started or what happened to Satyam after that. All they could find as proof of his reality, as well as fiction, is his writings. Even after so much time, reading his writings, some think that it was a disease from which Satyam was never cured. Others still think of it as a mystery that will never be solved. Only Satyam, alive through his writings, knows that it was, indeed, a miracle.