Rajendra's explanation

Gaitonde tells his story to Rajendra Deshpande, a scientist, who tries to explain it with two scientific ideas.

Catastrophe theory: when opposing forces are evenly balanced, a small event can tip the result one way or the other. At Panipat, the two armies were evenly matched. In our world, Vishwasrao's death broke the Marathas' morale, and they lost. In the other world, his narrow escape lifted their spirits, and they won.

Quantum theory: the exact position of an electron can never be predicted; we can only say how likely it is to be in one place or another. Some scientists suggest that all the possible worlds actually exist, side by side, and an observer sees only one of them.

An electron can jump from one energy state to another when something acts on it. Perhaps Gaitonde made a similar jump, between two worlds. The two worlds split at Panipat. So Gaitonde did not travel back in time: he visited a different present, the present of a world where the battle had gone the other way.

What could have caused the jump? Perhaps his collision with a truck, which happened while he was deep in thought about Panipat and catastrophe theory. But Rajendra admits that he cannot say for certain: science offers a guess where history cannot.