Rangoli

Rangu is a physicist. She has spent her entire life in a cave. In this cave, she has candles and torches but somehow she could only see black and white in the cave. Rangu dedicates her life to studying the physics and nature of light, color, and the visible electromagnetic spectrum to figure out the reason for the lack of color in her world. She learns about thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, astronomy, and every other physical science to know everything that humanity has learned about light and color. Yet, she never experienced it herself, until one day.

An earthquake rumbles the cave and causes her textbooks and experiments to fall and shatter. Afraid that this was the end, Rangu cowers in a corner and waits for her demise.

The shaking comes to a halt, and Rangu slowly opens her eyes. Blurry at first and slow to focus, she starts seeing something that she had never seen before. A large fissure has formed in the far side of the cave, large enough for Rangu to fit through the crevasse.

Something pours through the open rock, and floods the opened tomb. There is gradation, tone, shade, taste, reflectance, irradiance, shimmer, dark, and shadow. Rangu is utterly baffled by the new sensory information that is bombarding her.

She breaks down to her knees on the cave floor, and begins to cry tears of astonishment and splendor. She does not know what she sees, only that she has seen for the first time.

She follows the light like a rope pulling her to the world outside the cave. There’s no telling what may await her, and what other wonders may exist.

On unsteady legs, she slowly reaches out and follows the gentle warmth gracing her hand. The dust spirals and sparkles in the beam of sunlight.

That hand grasps the edge of the rift, and her body hunches behind it. Her finger tips are pouring with sweat and delicately tracing the bumps of the limestone.

This is the moment. This is the moment that she has been waiting for her entire life. She has studied her entire life to understand the physics of light. She has studied her entire life to see the truth.

Both eyes are shut, and the fingers on her left hand her guide out of the cave door. Now, her entire body is enveloped by warmth from her toes to the tip of her nose. Every muscle relaxes as she spreads out her arms and reaches as far as her shoulders will let her.

Crawling tears travel down to the edge of her chin, and she opens her eyess.

A flame in the shape of circle is center stage, and dwarfs over the broad expanse in front of her. Hues of delicious red, golden yellow, ripened greens, lilting blues, rich browns, luscious violets paint a canvas of unparalleled beauty before her. A bucolic valley bows before her.

The hands were grasping so tight before. Wavelengths and frequencies, photons and Planck lengths, diffusion and diffraction were so orderly, laid out in a rather grand design.

She had been searching for what had been missing from the equations and theorems.

The experiments were conclusive. The equations were replicable. The torch in her cave produced plenty of light. Her eyes were perfectly alright.

Yet, there was something missing the entire time. Not really missing, not even misplaced. But, merely unheard.

It was the sound of the universe, the cosmic microwave background, the sound of her heart beat.

Thirsty, Rangu finds her way to the banks of a river. She stares down into the clear water expecting to see her reflection. She had never seen her own reflection. She sees spiral galaxies, stellar nebula, and birds of paradise.

Trapped for so long in her cosmic egg, she dismissed the very thing that she had been looking for.

Only to reveal the endless expanse of her being.