The Manuscipt

I never thought a bundle of brittle papers in the IIT Khargapur archive would change the course of my career. Truth be told, I had gone there with the simple purpose of avoiding a faculty meeting on “Mess Menu Reform”—a subject about which my colleague Dr. Rukhsar Khan has strong feelings, mostly centred around the absence of proper biryani on Fridays.

But destiny, like quantum particles, is never where you expect it to be.

That morning, the Vice-Chancellor himself summoned us—me, Dr. Shrabanti Sen, physicist by training and compulsive doodler of equations on any flat surface; Dr. Meera Subramaniam, geneticist and pickle enthusiast; and of course, Dr. Rukhsar, bioinformatician, part-time foodie, full-time mischief-maker.

The Vice-Chancellor, a tall man with a permanent frown that could terrify even the bravest Ph.D. student, placed a crumbling manuscript on the table.

“Found in the old Hijli archive,” he said. “Your names came up as the… er… only ones eccentric enough to make sense of it.”

I reached for the bundle. The pages were yellow with age, edges darkened as though they had survived more than one monsoon. On the first page was a neat Bengali hand, signed J.C. Bose.

Meera squinted. “Don’t tell me this is genuine? Bose writing about… wait, is that a DNA helix?”

I looked closer. The diagrams were indeed uncanny—double spirals entangled with something that looked suspiciously like quantum wavefunctions. A hybrid of biology and physics far ahead of its time.

Rukhsar leaned in, balancing a half-eaten samosa on his notebook. “Maybe it’s a prank by a student. New batch is clever, no? Last week someone hacked the seminar projector to play cricket highlights during a lecture.”

But the equations weren’t a prank. They had a logic, a rhythm. I felt it in my bones the way a musician senses the hidden key of a raga.

As I flipped to the last page, I noticed something even stranger—three words scrawled in fading ink, almost as an afterthought:

“Gene 2085. Beware.”

 

The Night of the Monkey

It is one thing to run an experiment past midnight in IIT Khargapur — quite another to have your experimental subject insult you in Bengali.

Let me explain.

That evening, the three of us had decided to test the equations in Bose’s manuscript. Meera insisted we combine it with a DNA fragment she had been sequencing from what she called a “forgotten rice variety.” Rukhsar, predictably, was more interested in the packet of samosas he had smuggled into the lab.

“Quantum entanglement is delicate,” I warned. “Grease on the keyboard could ruin the trial.”

Rukhsar licked his fingers and replied, “Entropy, madam. The second law will take care of it.”

At precisely 12:17 a.m., the entanglement simulator hummed, the gene sequencer blinked, and the manuscript equations on the board seemed to glow faintly. I had just scribbled down the output wavefunction when it happened.

A shimmer in the air. A faint outline. Then, to our collective disbelief, a monkey made of light leapt onto the lab table.

Not flesh and bone, but hologram. Its edges flickered like bad television reception. Its eyes glowed an unsettling green.

And then it spoke.

“কুৎসিত বুদ্ধিমানরা!” (“Ugly wise people!”)

I nearly dropped my chalk.

Meera gasped. Rukhsar dropped a samosa.

The monkey bowed theatrically, then launched into a tirade. Half the words were in Bengali proverbs, the rest in streams of binary digits.

“বানর যা দেখে, মানুষ তা করে না। 010110!Beware of the Corporation!Time folds like পাতার খাম! Gene 2085!”

It punctuated its warning by scribbling on our blackboard with a finger of light. To my horror — and slight admiration — it drew a perfect double helix twisted with a quantum interference pattern.

“Hallucination,” I muttered, though my voice was unconvincing even to myself. “We’ve inhaled too much ethanol from the lab store.”

The monkey turned toward me, its eyes narrowing.“অপরিণত কণিকা!” it said, wagging a glowing finger. “Uncollapsed wavefunction!”

Meera, never one to tolerate mockery, advanced with a steel scale as though to swat it away.“Out!” she commanded. “Labs are for researchers, not apparitions!”

The monkey only laughed — a strange, metallic chuckle — and leapt onto the gene sequencer. The machine whirred, lights blinked, and to our astonishment, the lab rats in their cages began to glow faintly.

One by one, they rearranged themselves in their bedding into spirals matching the Fibonacci sequence.

Even Rukhsar, who had continued chewing despite the chaos, stopped mid-bite. 

“Professor,” he whispered, “either this is divine intervention, or someone has hacked biology itself.”

The monkey looked at him solemnly, tapped twice on the machine, and then — just as suddenly as it had arrived — fizzled into static, leaving the blackboard message behind:

“GENE 2085. BEWARE THE CORPORATION.”

I closed my notebook with trembling hands.

“Gentlemen,” I said gravely. “And Meera. I think we have just been recruited by the future.”

Intruders in the Lab

Two days after the monkey incident, we received visitors.Uninvited ones.

At 9:30 in the morning — a time when most of my students are still half-asleep in class — three men and one woman walked into our laboratory, flashing smiles that did not reach their eyes. Their accents were American, their ties were too shiny, and their shoes far too clean for IIT corridors.

“Dr. Sen, Dr. Subramaniam, Dr. Khan?” the tallest of them asked. “We are from Q-Gene International. We hear you’re doing… ground-breaking work in quantum biology. Perhaps we can collaborate.”

“Collaborate,” in my experience, is a word that usually means “steal first, publish later.”

Meera folded her arms. “And how did you hear that?”

The man smiled. “Oh, we have sources.”

Sources indeed. They had arrived too soon after the monkey’s cryptic message for coincidence. My suspicion turned into certainty when one of them — fumbling with his “presentation file” — accidentally let slip a diagram that looked suspiciously like our very own holographic monkey.

Rukhsar whispered to me, “Should I call security?”

“No,” I said quietly. “Security will take three hours to arrive, and another two to find the register.”

What followed can only be described as a farce worthy of Chaplin — if Chaplin had been interested in quantum espionage.

The visitors attempted subtlety. One pretended to admire our spectrometer while unscrewing its casing. Another opened Meera’s refrigerator, no doubt expecting gene samples — and received a whiff of mango pickle strong enough to stun a horse.

Meera pounced. “That,” she shouted, snatching the jar, “is for fermentation experiments! Not your breakfast!”

The man staggered, eyes watering. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

Meanwhile, Rukhsar had cleverly slipped the actual genome vial into an empty sandesh box from Flury’s, which he placed on the top shelf. The agents, unaware, kept searching drawers and cupboards, while our most precious sample sat disguised as a sweetmeat.

Things came to a head when the woman among them produced a laptop and declared, “We’ll just copy your data now. Standard protocol.”

I could not resist.“Madam,” I said, adjusting my spectacles, “your equation on that slide is wrong. You have entangled the eigenstate without normalizing the function. If you proceed, the only data you’ll extract is nonsense.”

She blinked at me. “What?”

I took the marker and corrected her math on the whiteboard. A neat √2 appeared where her denominator had been missing.

Meera groaned. “Shrabanti! Must you tutor our enemies?”

But I could not help myself. Bad quantum mechanics is intolerable, even in espionage.

At that moment, one of the men lunged for the sandesh box. Rukhsar reacted with uncharacteristic athleticism, hurling the entire thing out of the window. The box landed in a passing tea-stall cart. By sheer chance — or perhaps cosmic mischief — it was immediately buried under a fresh heap of jalebis.

The agents cursed. Meera raised her steel ruler threateningly. I grabbed the manuscript and shouted, “Out!”

And so, the visitors retreated, humiliated, pickle-stained, and sans genome.

That evening, over cups of watery canteen tea, we debated our next move.

“They’ll be back,” Meera warned.“Of course,” I said. “And next time, they’ll come with more than bad equations.”

Rukhsar, licking sugar off his fingers, said cheerfully, “In that case, we should follow the monkey’s advice. Beware the Corporation. Maybe even… run.”

For once, I agreed with him.

Geneva Detour

I have never trusted official invitations that arrive by courier, printed on glossy paper, and signed with too much flourish.

This one came from CERN.

“Dr. Sen, Dr. Subramaniam, Dr. Khan,We invite you to present your pioneering work on quantum-genome entanglement at the Geneva Symposium on Future Biology.”

Future Biology indeed. Considering we had summoned a talking holographic monkey, perhaps it was the only honest title.

Meera was suspicious at once.“They know too much,” she said. “This is bait.”“Then let us take the bait,” I replied. “Sometimes the only way to test a hypothesis is to walk into the experiment.”

And so, three eccentric professors from Khargapur boarded a flight to Switzerland.

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At Zurich airport, the customs officer eyed Meera’s suitcase. “Anything to declare?”

“Pickles,” Meera said calmly.

The officer frowned. “Explosives?”

“Fermented mango,” she corrected.

He unscrewed one lid to sniff. His eyes watered instantly. He staggered back, muttering something in Swiss-German that I suspect was unprintable.

Meera crossed her arms, triumphant. “Scientific samples,” she explained.

By the time we reached Geneva, half the customs hall knew of “the Indian professor with radioactive achar.”

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CERN, with its spotless corridors and gleaming machinery, had all the charm of a spaceship married to a Swiss bank vault.

Our host, a pale man with a smile like a power cut, ushered us into the underground collider tunnel. “Here,” he whispered, “we are exploring the interface of particles and life itself.”

I noticed immediately that their so-called experiment bore uncomfortable resemblance to our monkey incident: entangled DNA, quantum fields, interference patterns.

Only here, the goal was far less academic.

They were trying to create weaponized genomes—designer organisms whose traits could be switched on and off like software.

Meera was outraged. “Do you mean to tell me you’re turning biology into an arms race?”

The host smiled. “Isn’t that the future of research? Funded, efficient, profitable?”

I nearly quoted Bose’s manuscript at him but restrained myself.

It was then that a tall Indian physicist approached us quietly in the cafeteria. His nametag read Dr. Vasant Rao.

“You are being watched,” he murmured. “These people want your genome sequence. But it is not what you think. The DNA you hold— it is not from the past. It is from the future.”

Meera raised an eyebrow. “And how would you know that?”

Rao’s eyes flicked to the security cameras above. “Because I’ve seen the hologram before. In this very tunnel, five years ago.”

 

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That night, in our hotel room overlooking placid Lake Geneva, we debated furiously.

Meera wanted to go public: “We expose them now. Call the press.”Rukhsar wanted fondue.I wanted time to think.

If Rao was telling the truth, then the genome was a message sent backward — a warning coded in flesh and time.

I wrote in my diary before bed:“Physics teaches us the past and future are not absolute. But it is one thing to say it in equations, another to meet a monkey from 2085.”

The Riddle of the Forest

There are moments in science when one is not guided by data alone but by a strange combination of instinct, absurd coincidence, and irritation at unsolved riddles. Our departure from Switzerland was one such moment.

After Rao’s hushed warning at CERN — that the genome was not of the past but of the future — I could not sleep. Meera spent the night pacing the hotel balcony, furious that “genomes are being turned into bombs instead of cures.” Rukhsar, less philosophical, simply complained that Swiss fondue lacked the sharpness of Kolkata street chaap. I envied his simplicity.

The next morning, over bitter coffee, I noticed something peculiar. The manuscript we had carried from Khargapur — the one signed by Bose — now displayed faint new ink marks, as though invisible text had bled through overnight. When tilted against the light, the Bengali words rearranged themselves into a couplet.

"Ganer majhe jiboner shur,Baner hridoye agamir shanket."

(“Within song lies the melody of life,In the heart of the forest beats the signal of tomorrow.”)

I blinked twice. Manuscripts do not generally edit themselves in hotel lobbies.

Meera was the first to seize it. “Forest. Song. This cannot be CERN. This is somewhere organic, alive. If the genome truly carries a message, we will not find it in sterile tunnels.”

Rukhsar chewed thoughtfully on a croissant. “Song of the forest,” he repeated. “Could be a folk tune. Could be a parrot. Could also be the hotel plumbing.”

But my mind was already working in parallel. The Amazon. A region where oral traditions carry entire histories, where chants preserve knowledge across centuries. If nature itself encoded memory, if a forest could hold a genome in rhythm — then perhaps the riddle was pointing us there.

By afternoon, Rao returned briefly, slipping a folded note beneath our door before vanishing as suddenly as he had appeared. The note contained a single coordinate, deep in the Amazon basin. No explanation, no signature. Just numbers.

Meera read it and said simply: “This is it. The monkey, the manuscript, Rao — all pointing the same way.”

I ought to have resisted. It was irrational, unscientific, and inconvenient. Yet, as I watched the fading ink on Bose’s manuscript and heard Meera humming the lines like a coded lullaby, I felt the same inevitability as when an experiment’s outcome is obvious long before the machine spits out its result.

And so we booked the next available flight to Manaus.

I wrote in my diary before we left Geneva:

“When logic bends to riddle, perhaps one must follow the absurd. If tomorrow hides in the forest, then into the forest we must go.”

 

  Amazon Adventure

If Europe was precision and order, the Amazon was chaos and abundance.I prefer chaos.

The monkey’s riddle from the blackboard had been bothering me for days:“Song of the forest, gene of the future.”

With Rao’s whisper still in our ears, we boarded a flight from Geneva to Manaus, Brazil.

Rukhsar, naturally, complained about the airline food. “Professor, this sandwich is worse than IIT mess bread.”I reminded him that food entropy was an inevitable law of nature.

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A local guide ferried us upriver in a narrow canoe. The forest closed in around us like a cathedral of green. At night, frogs croaked in polyphony, insects hummed in frequencies that would have impressed a sound engineer, and I swear the stars looked closer than in Khargapur.

We reached a small settlement where the people greeted us with rhythmic chants. Meera, with her sharp ears, froze.“These chants,” she whispered, “they repeat in exact triplets… codon-style.”

I scribbled in my notebook. The rhythm indeed matched the three-base structure of genetic coding.

To test it, I tapped Rukhsar’s laptop keys in rhythm with the chant. To our astonishment, the screen displayed valid nucleotide sequences.

Meera was delighted. “Oral tradition encoding genomes! Generations of memory as a biological archive.”

Rukhsar muttered, “Imagine if my grandmother had sung me the periodic table instead of lullabies. I might have passed chemistry faster.”

 

In my excitement, I wandered too close to the riverbank, thinking I saw a “quantum fluctuation” in the water. It turned out to be a capybara—the world’s largest rodent.

The creature, offended by my staring, chased me a good fifty meters through the undergrowth.Meera was too busy laughing to help.Rukhsar, ever loyal, shouted encouragement: “Run, professor! You are collapsing its wavefunction by observation!”

Eventually the animal lost interest, but my dignity did not recover so easily.

Back in the settlement, a scarlet parrot flew straight onto Rukhsar’s open keyboard and began pecking randomly at the keys. We laughed—until we saw the output. The bird had typed a sequence identical to the chant’s missing portion.It squawked once, as if satisfied with its work, and flew off into the night.

I do not believe in miracles. But I do believe in improbable coincidences. Piecing together the chants and the parrot’s accidental input, we reconstructed a full genome. The result was astounding.

This was no known species. It was human-like, yet modified: genes for UV resistance, enhanced lung capacity, metabolic efficiency far beyond ordinary Homo sapiens. Meera’s voice trembled. “This… this is not a relic. This is future design. A human engineered to survive collapse.”

I looked out at the forest canopy, lit silver by the moon.“So the monkey was right. We are not studying the past. We are deciphering a message from tomorrow.”

I close today’s entry with a single thought:

“If evolution is nature’s long experiment, then this genome is mankind’s impatient answer. The question is — who asked it?”

The Forest Gate

If logic had guided us so far, the forest quickly reminded us that logic is only a polite guest in this universe.

The chants of the tribe had already proven themselves extraordinary — genetic codons sung in rhythm, a biological library preserved in human memory. But what followed defied even our stretched expectations.

It began with the parrot. After its miraculous contribution to our genome sequence, the bird refused to leave. It perched on Rukhsar’s shoulder as though he were a gaudy tree trunk, occasionally pecking his ear whenever he grew too complacent with his samosas. Then, one evening, it flew off suddenly, squawking in a rhythm that sounded uncannily like binary code.

We followed.

Deep within the forest, through vines and damp air, we came upon a clearing marked by colossal stones, arranged in spirals. Moss covered their surfaces, but beneath the green we discerned carvings. Double helices. Wave patterns. Equations far too precise to belong to chance.

In the centre stood a black monolith, smooth as obsidian. When I placed my notebook against it, the manuscript of Bose quivered, its fading words glowing once more. The monkey’s message rearranged itself across the page:

“Time folds like পাতার খাম. Gene 2085 opens the way.”

Meera whispered, half in awe, half in fury: “A portal. The genome is not just information — it is a key.”

Before I could protest, the sequencer in her bag beeped wildly. The stones pulsed with light, responding to the genome sequence as if the entire clearing had been wired into the very fabric of time.

And then — a distortion, like the shimmer of heat above asphalt. The air bent. The trees wavered. A circle of light opened before us, humming with both familiarity and terror.

Rukhsar muttered, “We’ve built a teleportation gate out of a folk song and a parrot. Please tell me this is a hallucination.”

But hallucinations rarely tug at your sleeves. This one did.

We stepped forward. Or perhaps we were pulled.

The jungle dissolved in an instant. Gravity twisted, then eased. When the light faded, we were standing not among trees, but within a gleaming corridor of metal and glass. Through a window, Earth hung in the black sky — distant, blue, serene.

When my vision steadied, we were no longer among trees but standing in a vast terminal hall — bright, metallic, filled with glass walls displaying Earth’s curve far below. A neon sign blinked:

“Welcome to Bharat Orbital Spaceport. Year: 2085.”

I admit, I nearly sat down on the floor.

To our greater astonishment, a woman in a silver uniform approached briskly, tablet in hand.

“Dr. Sen, Dr. Subramaniam, Dr. Khan,” she said, as though we had merely been delayed at baggage claim. “You are expected. The 1400-hours shuttle to Luna departs shortly. Two-hour journey. Please proceed to Gate Six.”

The Lunar Labyrinth

The shuttle resembled an elongated aircraft more than a rocket. Rows of reclining seats faced large viewports. Around us sat an assortment of passengers — engineers with toolkits, a pair of schoolchildren in blue uniforms, and what looked suspiciously like a honeymoon couple holding hands with great determination.

Rukhsar whispered, “Daily passengers? To the Moon? In two hours? Even my train to Howrah takes longer.”

Meera adjusted her saree sharply. “We adapt. Science waits for no timetable.”

As we strapped in, an announcement echoed:“Welcome aboard Chandrayaan Express. Flight time: one hour fifty-two minutes. Complimentary snacks provided.”

Rukhsar brightened. “Snacks! Civilization survives.”

One of the schoolchildren leaned forward, curious. “Are you really the professors from the past?”

I blinked. “What makes you think that?”

She giggled. “Because my teacher said three eccentrics would arrive through the Time Gate, looking confused. You do look confused.”

The honeymoon couple chuckled. The engineer beside me leaned over politely. “Don’t worry, professors. The Lunar Base is expecting you. Word is you’re here because of… that genome.”

I nodded, though inwardly I wondered: how many in 2085 knew of our mission already?

The shuttle hummed with a quiet steadiness. Through the viewport, Earth shrank behind us, its blues and greens soft against the black. The Moon grew larger, no longer a coin in the sky but a textured world of ridges and plains.

Two hours passed with surprising speed — Rukhsar sampled every snack packet on board, declaring the dehydrated rasgulla superior to its earthly cousin. Meera scribbled furious notes, muttering about “post-genomic ethics.” I simply stared, still trying to reconcile the absurdity: professors from 2025, traveling economy-class to the Moon in 2085.

At last, the intercom crackled:“Ladies and gentlemen, we are now approaching Lunar Quantum Observatory — Base One. Please fasten your restraints.”

As the silver domes of the base glinted against the grey dust below, I opened my diary and wrote:

“We left the forest, and entered the future. The genome has carried us not only through science, but through time itself. The monkey was right: tomorrow is waiting, and apparently, it runs on a strict schedule.”

The Ambush in Plain Sight

It is one thing to land in Mumbai airport after a delayed flight; quite another to disembark at a lunar terminal after a two-hour shuttle. Yet the absurdity felt strangely similar. There were queues, announcements about lost luggage, and one child crying for ice cream — the only difference being that through the glass dome, grey craters stretched into the horizon.

We had arrived at Lunar Quantum Observatory — Base One.

From the observation deck, Earth glowed behind us, a fragile ornament in black space. The sight stirred Meera to rare silence. Even Rukhsar, usually preoccupied with food, stared with his mouth open — though only until the stewardess handed him a packet of “lunar masala chips.”

At the immigration counter, a holographic officer scanned our retinas. “Dr. Sen. Dr. Subramaniam. Dr. Khan. Expected delegates.”

Expected. The word rang louder than the announcement. Who, in 2085, had prepared for us?

 Our question was answered sooner than I wished. As we collected our badges, a familiar chill swept my spine. The Q-Gene Corporation was here too — no longer shadowy intruders in polished shoes, but registered contractors with official insignia.

One representative approached, grinning as if we were old colleagues.“Professors, how efficient of you to deliver the genome across sixty years. Truly commendable. We’ll take it from here.”

Meera’s hand tightened on her achar jar. “Over my achar,” she said flatly.

The representative’s smile widened. “You misunderstand. The Observatory requires your assistance. After all, you opened the Gate. Only you can stabilise the final sequence.”

I resisted the urge to correct his terminology on “stabilisation.” Instead, I noted quietly: “You have again overlooked the epigenetic switches.”

His smirk faltered. For a brief moment, I savoured the small victory.

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The Q-Gene agents, confident in their shortcuts, wasted no time. Within hours, they had prepared injections of the Gene 2085 sequence — convinced it would transform them into the first “post-humans,” resistant to climate collapse, masters of tomorrow.

They administered the shots with theatrical pride. For a moment, silence. Then the side effects arrived.

One agent’s hair blazed neon-blue and stood rigid, like a row of antennae.

Another hiccupped every three seconds, perfectly synchronised with the Observatory clock.

The lone woman broke into rhyme:

“A genius I tried to become,By injecting the code in my thumb.Now I rhyme night and noon,To a ridiculous tune,And my colleagues all think I am dumb.”

Rukhsar fell off his chair laughing. Meera muttered darkly, “Serves them right. Bad science always punishes itself.”

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Just as chaos threatened to overwhelm the laboratory, the air shimmered. Our spectral companion — the holographic monkey — appeared one final time. Its eyes glowed with fierce intensity, and it bounded onto the Observatory console.

Screens across the base flickered to life with a single message:

“KNOWLEDGE BELONGS TO ALL.”

The genome sequence poured into the open-source quantum blockchain, spreading instantly across networks in 2085. Not even Q-Gene could monopolise it now.

The monkey turned to us, bowed low, and whispered in perfect Bengali:“See you in 2085.”

Then it dissolved into static, leaving behind only ozone and silence.

Later, as Earth rotated outside the dome, Meera sat cross-legged with her reclaimed pickles, Rukhsar crunched on freeze-dried samosas, and I wrote these words.

We had not merely safeguarded a genome. We had carried it through decades, into a world that already half-expected us.

I cannot say if the future is ready for the knowledge it now holds. I cannot say if we were ready.

But I do know this: for one improbable stretch of time, three professors from Khargapur became couriers of tomorrow. And tomorrow, as usual, arrived with terrible timing.

 Return to Khargapur 

  

I am back in my quarters at IIT Khargapur. The ceiling fan groans in familiar rhythm, a hostel peacock screams outside with all the menace of a banshee, and the mess continues to serve dal with the consistency of wet cement. After the silence of the Moon, I confess, this chaos feels oddly comforting.

We returned not by shuttle, not by rocket, but the same way we left — through the Gate in the Amazon forest. Time folded, like the manuscript said, “পাতার খাম” — like an envelope. One blink, and the year 2085 dissolved into the year 2025.

My watch, which had stopped during the portal transit, now insists only three days have passed since we left Khargapur. I do not trust it, but nor do I argue.

Reports already spread in whispers among certain circles. The Gene 2085 sequence — once encrypted — is now free, open to all. Scientists debate its authenticity, governments debate its danger, and journalists debate everything else.

One newspaper headline read: “Indian Professors Accidentally Save Future.” I continue to dislike the word “accidentally.”

Next afternoon, Meera and I presented ourselves before the Head of Department, with half a dozen curious students in attendance. Rukhsar brought a bag of our collected souvenirs, which he handled with the solemnity of a priest carrying relics.

I began gently: “What you are about to see is proof that science, time, and destiny crossed in our lives. Treat these not as trifles but as artifacts of a journey across decades.”

Our students greeted us with the indifference typical of youth. “Ma’am, did you bring back chocolates from duty-free?” one asked. I bit back the reply that I had instead brought the assurance of mankind’s genetic freedom. I was not sure if that would impress him more than mint or caramel.

Rukhsar reached in and produced the first item: the lunar boarding pass, still glowing faintly. The Head peered at it through his spectacles. “Indian Railways has started holographic tickets too,” he said dryly. “Why travel to the Moon when you can go to Howrah in equal discomfort?”

The students snickered.

Next came the tribal necklace from the Amazon, its beads carved into double helices. “Observe,” Meera said, her eyes glittering, “the genome itself encoded in craft. Oral tradition preserved in design!”

A boy from the back row whispered: “Looks like something sold outside Puri Jagannath temple for fifty rupees.” The laughter grew.

Rukhsar tried the packet of freeze-dried rasgullas.He opened one reverently, offering it like a sacrament. 

The Head sniffed. “This is nothing but sponge-sandesh left in the hostel fridge for a week. I am not impressed.” 

One of the students piped up: “Sir, my roommate’s tiffin looks more advanced.”

Meera’s face darkened.

Finally, with trembling hands, I revealed the coin from Bharat Orbital Spaceport — stamped 2085, etched with an orbiting Earth. 

The Head rolled it between his fingers, then flicked it on the table. 

“A token from some science exhibition in Salt Lake. You three were clearly fooled by street magicians.”

The students nodded sagely, one even suggesting we had returned from a “faculty picnic” and concocted this tale to avoid teaching hours.

Closing Note

We returned to our quarters humiliated. Rukhsar sulked, muttering that even the parrot’s feather — which he had preserved like a relic — had been mistaken for “mess hall chicken leftovers.”

Meera stormed about declaring she would never share knowledge with philistines again. 

I, however, felt strangely calm. For now, the manuscripts, souvenirs, and memories lie hidden in our cluttered laboratory. Life insists on trivialities once more:

Meera demands I sign requisition forms. 

Rukhsar has mistakenly booked the seminar hall while trying to order samosas.  

I face the worst ordeal of all — grading 120 papers on “Quantum Entanglement in Everyday Life.” 

Most of them confidently compare it to WhatsApp call drops. One quotes Tagore.

We professors have always fought on two fronts: ignorance, and bureaucracy. Now, apparently, against the future as well.

But tomorrow at 8 a.m., I must invigilate an exam. And that, I suspect, will be more terrifying than any holographic monkey.

“Perhaps it is better this way. No one believes us, so no one can misuse what we brought. Tomorrow will laugh at us today — as it always has. Abinash Babu would have said it best: ‘Shonku’s Mars is my Magrahaat!’ And so, the Monkey of 2085 becomes a joke about achar jars. In 2025”

And yet, the coin still glows faintly in the dark.

Yesterday, as I switched on my computer, a line of code flickered across the screen. Just one word:

“অপেক্ষা” — Wait.

Was it a farewell? A warning? Or an invitation? Perhaps, in 2085, we shall know.

— Dr. Shrabanti Sen, IIT Khargapur

✨ End of Journal ✨