RETURAL FROM MARS

Kunal looked out the window of the spacecraft—a black mass of darkness seemed to be overwhelming the environment outside. He gazed dully at it for a while before averting his eyes; after all, the journey wasn’t as pleasant as he’d imagined while on Earth.

- SREELEKHA CHATTERJEE

But the decision to undertake the expedition from Earth to Mars was his own and he couldn’t blame anyone for that. After the Mars Orbiter Mission, popularly known as Mangalyaan, was successfully launched by ISRO into the Mars orbit on September 24th, 2014, the scientists invited applications from healthy citizens to volunteer for the first-ever manned mission to Mars.

“It’d take only 30 hours to reach the red planet.” A senior scientist had assured before the takeoff, dismissing the notion that it took 300 days to travel there.

The ride seemed to be never-ending ever since he had boarded the spacecraft and gradually moved out of the Earth’s atmosphere.

He decided to sleep for a while to kill the time. In his dreams was the news that occupied the newspapers, and TV channels—the devaluation of the rupee, crime against women, theft, terrorism, increasing rate of unemployment, illiteracy… The faces of humans being carried along with the floodwater horrified him to the core, and he woke up in cold perspiration, whimpering. He considered himself fortunate that he’d left Earth, which was no longer habitable, where humanity was on the verge of extinction, and to add to the turmoil, nature bestowed its catastrophic action in the form of floods, earthquakes, tsunami, and volcanic eruptions.