The Boy in the Puddle
It was one of those Kerala evenings—the kind where the rain doesn’t pour, it hums. Not a roar, not a drizzle, just that steady rhythm that turns every rooftop into a tabla and every puddle into a mirror. I was standing near the edge of a gutter outside Ambili Chechi’s tea stall, sipping chai with one hand and watching the rain puddle shimmer like mercury with the other. And I swear—just for a second—I saw my younger self staring back at me.
Not metaphorically. I mean it. The boy I used to be—gangly, curious, still believing he’d build a time machine out of scrap metal and a bicycle wheel—looked up at me through the surface of the water like he was waiting for something. A signal? A sign?
And that’s when it hit me: Time travel isn’t something we build. It’s something we live.
Time, Like Rain, Doesn’t Fall in Straight Lines
We talk about time like it’s this linear thing. A sequence. T1 → T2 → T3. Cause, effect, repeat. But sit long enough with a cup of Ambili Chechi’s cardamom chai, and you realize time doesn’t move—it folds. It pools, like rain on a tin roof. It echoes.
Einstein cracked it first, sort of. Time isn’t constant; it stretches with gravity and speed. Clocks tick slower near black holes. GPS satellites have to adjust their time because they’re technically aging differently from us. We live in a world where time already bends—we’re just too busy running late to notice.
And then there’s this idea from physics called the block universe—where past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, like different pages in a book we haven’t finished reading yet. Maybe the future’s already there, just not flipped open.
But that brings me back to regret.
Regret Is the Ghost of a Parallel Timeline
There’s a particular ache to regret that feels different from other emotions. Anger is loud. Sadness is heavy. But regret? Regret is subtle. It’s a whisper. It’s the phantom limb of a choice you didn’t make. A life you didn’t live.
I used to think regret was just the brain’s way of saying, “Don’t do that again.” But now I wonder—what if regret is the emotional residue of a timeline that branched off without us? Like when you almost said something to someone you loved, but didn’t. Somewhere, some version of you did. And the you that didn’t? You’re haunted by the echo.
Rakesh—my semi-employed, perpetually coding friend—says this is classic many-worlds interpretation. Every decision we make splits the universe. Infinite timelines. Infinite Aaravs. Some who studied economics instead of physics. Some who kissed the girl at the train station. Some who never left their hometown.
So when I feel regret, maybe I’m not just mourning the past. Maybe I’m sensing the nearness of another me—living a life that mine peeled away from. Maybe that’s what I saw in the puddle. Not my younger self, but a nearby self. A could-have-been self.
But Then… Could You Ever Really Go Back?
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that time travel becomes possible. Wormholes, tachyons, closed timelike curves—pick your flavor of physics. Let’s say you could jump back to that one rainy day in 2017, when you didn’t show up for someone who needed you.
Would it help?
See, that’s the paradox. The moment you go back, you’re not fixing your timeline—you’re fracturing it again. You’re creating yet another branch. And maybe that you finds peace. But the you standing in the time machine? You still remember the original wound. The regret. It’s like trying to fix a dream by waking up. The version of you still dreaming doesn’t feel the resolution.
Which means: regret can’t be healed by erasing the past. It can only be softened by reshaping the future.
Sukumar, the fisherman with the world’s most poetic apathy, once told me, “You can cast your net again, but the fish that swam past already have their own stories now.” He says this every time I drop a parippuvada into the backwater by mistake. But maybe it applies to timelines too.
Every Puddle Is a Portal (Sort Of)
I once read that mirrors don’t reflect reality—they delay it. Because light takes time to bounce. A nanosecond, sure, but still. So technically, when you look into a mirror—or a rain puddle—you’re seeing a version of yourself that’s already in the past.
Which means we’re always slightly late to our own lives.
We look back. We try to decode what went wrong. We obsess. We fantasize. We replay. But maybe the answer isn’t to go back. Maybe the puddle isn’t a portal. Maybe it’s just a reminder: You are always both the traveler and the timeline.
Lachamms, our neighborhood vegetable vendor, once told me, “Monu, don’t stare too long into water. It remembers more than you do.” I thought she was being poetic, but now I wonder—what if memory isn’t just in the mind? What if the world around us remembers, too? Maybe the rain puddle reflected not just me, but my resonance—the sum of my choices, floating in that curved surface of spacetime.
So What Do We Do With Regret?
Here’s my theory. Regret isn’t a glitch. It’s the residue of your own emotional intelligence—evidence that you care about how your actions shaped the world.
But it shouldn’t paralyze you.
The puddle shows you where you’ve been. But your reflection is still here. You’re still here. Conscious. Choosing. Moving.
Regret, if held gently, becomes a compass. It tells you where your moral compass bent. Where the timeline fractured. And more importantly—what kind of traveler you want to be now.
Ambili Chechi says, “Monay, the second pour of chai always tastes better. Because the first pour teaches you patience.” That might be her way of talking about regret. Maybe the bitter cup helps us brew the sweeter one.
And If You Could Go Back?
Okay, okay—I’ll indulge the original fantasy. Say I had a real time machine. Say I could zip back to that moment when I ghosted a friend who was silently falling apart. What would I do differently?
I wouldn’t say something grand. I’d show up. I’d sit quietly. I’d say, “I don’t know how to fix it, but I’m here.”
And maybe that’s the message from all the puddles we peer into. That what we regret not doing isn’t some cinematic action. It’s usually the simplest thing we failed to offer: presence.
Final Thought (Before the Rain Ends)
Time travel isn’t about machines. It’s about meaning.
It’s when a smell catapults you to a childhood afternoon. It’s when you say something and realize it’s exactly what your father once said. It’s the moment you realize you’ve become someone you promised yourself you wouldn’t—and then change course.
So the next time it rains, and you find yourself staring into a puddle, ask:
What version of me is looking back?
What regrets am I still carrying?
And what timeline do I want to step into—starting now?
Because maybe, just maybe, we don’t need wormholes to time travel. We just need the courage to reflect.
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