It was a sweltering summer afternoon decaying in Kolkata, and I was making my way through the cluttered alleyways of a northern slum near the international airport, searching for a place to rest. But what I stumbled upon instead would stay with me forever. It was a creature, unlike anything I had ever seen before, sitting inside a municipality dumpster with three heads, each one with its own voice and vice, self-absorbed in a soliloquy.
As I approached, I could hear the raucous laughter of the first head, a weird man with greasy hair and a thick stubble, who was regaling the others with tales of his misadventures, animated and acrimonious. The second head, a scrawny chap with a raspy voice, was cackling with delight at each story, and the third head, a macabre protrusion from the back, with a stern look, was trying to calm the others with little success.
I felt a sense of unease as I realized what I was witnessing, the reality of the madness, eitherI was mad or everything else was. These were the quintessential characters of this corrupt and lazy society, drunk on their vices and belligerent in their pontifications. And as I peered inside the dumpster, I saw that they were surrounded by empty bottles of cheap liquor and stubbed out beedis.
The first head noticed me and offered me a drink, but I declined. Undeterred, he poured me a shot anyway and pushed it towards me. The second head then offered me a beedi, but I declined again. The third head, sensing my discomfort, spoke up in a voice that was almost reassuring. "Leave him be," it said, "he's not like us."
Despite the creature's clearly inebriated state, I found myself drawn to the haunting charisma. Its drunken rants and philosophies were equal parts amusing and terrifying, and I wanted to either know more, or wake up. So, I listened as the first head rambled on about his experiences, the second head boasted of its exploits, and the third head spoke of the meaning of life, and at the same time. The simultaneity was disconcerting.
Then, the chimera offered me a strange and pungent herb, claiming it would enhance my experience. I hesitated, but the first and second heads were insistent, shoving the herb into my hand. I took a small puff, and suddenly the world around me shifted. The three heads became one, their voices merging into a multidimensional solution to a chorus equation that was equal parts menacing and mesmerizing.
As the creature smoked the herb, its eyes closing in ecstasy, it spoke of things beyond my realm of reasonable experience. It spoke of a great cosmic phantasmagoria that we were all a part of, and I felt a chill run down my spine as I realized that I was in the presence of something that defies rationalization. Then there was a flash.
I stumbled away from the emerging shifting blur of an explosion, toddling back towards the dumpster lid, my mind reeling from what I had just witnessed. This alien, with its three heads and multiple personalities, was a reflection of the dark and degenerate underbelly of this society, and I knew that it was the god brahma talking to me, the creator of this instance of quantum fluctuations that manufactured the low entropy of what spurred the big bang.
Years have passed since that fateful night, but the memory of that strange and frightening apparition still haunts me. I cannot help but wonder what other horrors exist in my mind, or invisible in the structure of the visible, waiting to be discovered. And though I may never find out the reason why a three-headed boltzmann brain made me realize I had the madness that's needed to save reality from decaying into a meaningless high entropy drift and the thought of it is enough to send shivers down my spine to realize how little of me, of the darkness around me, that lurks in the shadows of our everyday ordinary.
