Karma Police

Parked adjacent to us, in a parallel Earth, the city of Dhaka was an alien land. Skies were green and water bodies orange. Clouds of myriad shapes and outlandish colours trailed ropes of pure energy which tied onto the people living underneath. Everyone walked with these ropes attached to their shoulders, towing clouds that were a part of them. It was not a relationship without perks: the clouds functioned as communications systems as well.
In that Dhaka lived the boy Soup Can, who was very much smitten with the girl next door. His crush on her went back to when he was 13, and she 14. Her family had just moved in. He remembered coming back from football, when his mother announced there were new neighbours. That he needed to accompany her there with fresh brownies.

As it happens with stories like this, the Girl Next Door secretly adored Soup Can as well. The problem lay in their shyness, their inability to approach the other. Girl Next Door by now had stopped wondering when he'd get the guts and take her out for a movie or something. Maybe she needed to take matters into her own hands.

Back in our Dhaka, Soup Can's parallel self - Parallel Soup Can, if you will – had just started noticing the girl who lived in the next apartment. She was in the same grade as he, and he sometimes saw her at school. Her hair was dyed auburn. She had a blunt nose, green eyes, and laughter that was like exit music for a film.

Parallel Girl Next Door, unlike her counterpart, didn't like our Soup Can at first at all. She found him aloof and awkward; he gawked at her which made her furious. She wanted to confront him, ask him what his business was. That what he was doing was obvious. That it wouldn't work.

It worked. Two months later, they were officially together, doing all the things their parallel selves were only dreaming of. If only the barricade of introversion could be broken.

Then one bright green day in that Dhaka, Soup Can got a text on his cloud from Girl Next Door. She was free for the evening. Would he like to hang out with her?

Soup Can was ecstatic. He'd like that very much. And there he was: in front of her house on time. He knocked twice and waited, cleaning his specs at regular intervals.

Around that same time, Parallel Soup Can was outside Parallel Girl Next Door's house as well. He had come to pick her up. They were going to a friend's party. He knocked twice and waited, cleaning his specs at regular intervals.

Now at the other end of reality: two balding middle-aged officers, on duty to guard the many holes and leakages between worlds, were taking a coffee break. They had been taking coffee breaks quite frequently these days. New company policy. Employees had to be happy. The controls were left in the hands of the uptight humanoid from accounts whom they nicknamed 'The Paranoid Android.'

Paranoid Android wasn't an android. He didn't know why they teased him like that. It made him confused and angry. He never liked those two. They could be so mean sometimes.

With such angry sentiments in his head, Paranoid Android, in a bid to finally get his co-workers fired, lifted the plugs off some two hundred leakage channels: one of them being between Girl Next Door and her parallel self's front doors. He then went back to reading his comics.

Soup Can and Parallel Soup Can impatiently waited for the door to open but when it did and they stepped in, they both ended up switching worlds and found themselves stranded forever in a Dhaka that wasn't their Dhaka, with a beautiful Girl Next Door that wasn't their beautiful Girl Next Door, and where the presence (or absence) of bonding clouds made it clear that nothing was in its right place.