How to build a time machine...

...in 7 easy steps. Spoiler Alert: You can only travel back in time and return. Period.

This flash essay is part of a collaborative, constrained-writing challenge undertaken by some members of the Bangalore Substack Writers Group. This month, we used the prompt, ‘MUSIC’. At the bottom of this snippet, you’ll find links to other essays by fellow writers.

I recently saw time come to a stand still when I had to get some photocopies done and there was a power cut in that street I was wandering. I was walking down a partly busy suburb marketplace near the bank in search of a stationery store. From a distance I could spot, a board hanging, around the bend which read ‘XEROX’. On the way, I saw a welding shop with its shutter half down. Next to it was the flour mill with a lady sitting outside basking in the morning sun, cleaning wheat through a sieve. Then adjacent to it was the electricals store with dust laden gadgets like old mixers, table fans, a flatscreen tv laid facedown along with a toolkit on the table. This was between the stationery shop I had to visit and the flour mill I just passed. Something made me stop for a few more seconds. The store owner sat there staring at the road ahead. The empty stare where the eyes point ahead but the vision peers into a memory somewhere within. The outlet was barely lit up except for a shaft of light piercing through a tiny opening in the asbestos sheet above. Motes of dust moved up and down a light beam escalator. I walked past but his eyes didn’t blink. He peered through me and into nothingness. In the background, an old Kannada song crooned from a palm sized speaker. Perhaps, the songs were pre-loaded on a SD card and that’s what played. A popular classic followed by another. That’s when it hit me, it was a playlist or collection of songs from the late 1970s/80s. That instant, I was transported back to #24, Old Mission Compound — my grandmother’s place where these songs would play on the radio in the mornings through a National stereo tape recorder with built in radio aka Two-in-one.

There’s this one scene/song sequence in the movie Begin Again (2013), where Dan (Mark Ruffalo) spots Greta (Keira Knightley) at a bar as she performs a song. While the song begins with just her vocals and a guitar, Dan who plays the role of a producer, envisions how the song could be embellished with more instruments and better arrangement. I would do the scene injustice if I were to explain it all, I request you view it here.

Likewise, I was there, waiting between the electrical shop and a stationery store amid a power cut. And as the songs played, I had traveled back in time. In an instant, I was under the madras roof, reclined on a foldable sofa, with feet rested on a cool red oxide floor. Twin doors beside facing the portico partly open. I could almost see a moringa tree sparsely spreading over the kanakambara flowers (Firecracker flower or Crossandra) shrub at its feet. A 1970s Vespa in pale yellow tint, parked on its center stand inside the living room near the wall. An old square Seiko wall clock with a sakura design on its face — the second hand moved clockwise without making any ticking noise. Then as the song faded, the sound of a photocopier kicked in from somewhere behind startling me for a split-second, just before the prelude to the next song began. Simultaneously, the electrician snapped back as the tube light in the shop flickered on. And We both had travelled back from ‘then’ to ‘now’.
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Created by Pieter De Hooch, a Dutch Golden Age painter, the artwork features a man who appears to be holding a smartphone. Named “Young Woman with a Letter and a Messenger in an Interior “, the painting was created in 1670. Courtesy: news18.com

As promised, here’s one way to build a time machine*.
*Spoiler alert: This is devised to only take you back in time, briefly.

1. Pick a streaming / music platform.
(if this was a decade or two ago, I would have suggested a mix tape or CD)

2. Name that playlist after the place or season or phase of your lifetime
you wish to travel back to.

3. Add the songs from that time one after another (chronology doesn’t matter.)

4. Find a place where you won’t be interrupted.
Setting your phone on airplane mode is optional.

5. Get a good pair of earphones or headphones.

6. Fasten your imaginary seatbelts.

7. Close your eyes (if you may).

Godspeed! Have a safe journey.

Read on for other Essays based on the same theme from my fellow members of the Bangalore Substack Writers Group:

DhvaniTaranga by Shwetha Harsha , Chutneymix

Music for Mental Health by Shruti Soumya, Same Here

The Singing Neighbour by Rakhi Kurup, Rakhi’s Substack

#18: On Music by Siddhesh Raut, Shana, Ded Shana

Growing Up a Metalhead in Small-Town India by Rajat Gururaj, I came, I saw, I floundered

Morning Raaga by Nidhishree Venugopal General in Her Labyrinth

#acnotes