It is easy to fall in love with the notion of parallel universes and I am no exception. This love story began way before I had read ‘Dark Matter’ by Blake Crouch and thus my imagined multiverses never had much to with regrets. They were full of titillating stuff as vacuous as imagination can ever wish to be if it so chooses. But then without warning, the mind snarled and viciously snapped, ‘Choices anywhere are not choices if they are not chained.’
‘Chained?’ I asked helplessly, ‘are chained options really options?’
‘Chained to other choices,’ my mind said, ‘can you choose to drive a car in a place that has chosen to disallow cars? This example is too simplistic anyway because choosing to drive a car will be surrounded by an infinite number of other choices that you will make and they will all have to synchronise. One choice is every time a result of an infinite number of unexpressed choices.’
This made me think of choices.

There is always just one choice. One decision. One path. One past. One present. One future. We are piling one decision over another every moment of our life and are gingerly balanced on a tower of choices made. Our own customised version of Jenga, so to say, but removing even one choice at any point topples all others above it. The game ends. This may appear scary but isn’t. This is simply what life is. No parallel universes anywhere. Even if you have read Blake Crouch and believe that ‘the universe is infinite. The possibilities are endless. And somewhere, out there, there’s another version of you who made all the right choices.’ Time and existence do not go around serving parallel platters of different sets of goodies.
‘What if I had made a different choice? Chosen economics over mathematics…’ asked Specky, who wasn’t sure about the validity of simply one life, one choice.
‘You can choose to study economics now after retirement,’ I said, ‘no age bars exist in Indian universities.’ She agreed to this as we had read about people even in their sixties now opting to study medicine or engineering, if they wanted to and were accepted by the university. Wanting to hop over to one of the other universes, if they do exist, simply to see what could have happened had she chosen economics over mathematics seems bizarre. Unreal. Fiction.
Yes, parallel universes exist in our imagination like every other path not taken. Close your eyes and imagine where a different decision could have taken you and you could end up writing a story. One reason why I believe we are composites of an infinite number of distinctive stories. But then even the ‘what if’ path can easily spiral into something creepy, dense, and dangerous. Something tells me that the concept of parallel universe or multiverse is a game devised by our mind to keep our hyperactive selves away from endearing simplicity that defines life because… who really wants life to be simple? The mind yearns for and loves the fabric of life to be overloaded with shiny sequins stitched with golden thread. Simple explanations never impress anyone. This is why we thought of bringing in multiverses. They construct new palaces for imagination to float in and think, ‘Ah! This is so wonderful and now I am in a space that is beyond the reach of the mundane.’
This thought about thrashing multiverses seems poetic enough but… it is always tempting to slide away into the fuzzy world of other worlds. As a writer I wish I could go to parallel universes and live the life of a spy, a criminal, a woman, an actor, a chef, a sportsperson, an artist, a singer and everything else that I am not here in the world where I am.
.
.
.
Arvind Passey
Written on 01 February 2025