Prema Jayakumar

Time is so amorphous. Beside all the clichés of time stretching if you are waiting for someone, passing in a flash if you are with a beloved and so on, very often it does not appear to have the same meaning at all at different times. It has often seemed to me that the days have been long in this pandemic age but the weeks and months have rushed by. Yes, the day to day business of living has been demanding, taking up a lot of time, everything not being available for the asking, help not being forthcoming when you are used to help in your tasks. But it is not just that. Of course, a lot of it is because we are living in a state of suspension, not moving forward or backward, waiting for something, we don’t really know what. It could be that we wait for a vaccine, we wait for the pandemic to die a natural death, we wait for something other than this way of life. Time seems to have become limitless, stretching endlessly forward, possibly because you do not know when this unnatural state of living will end. And yet each time you look around, a lot of time has passed and you have hardly noticed that the month has ended. It is probably because dates have lost their meaning, you have no appointments to keep, no places to go to on a particular day, no visitors to expect on this or that day. Oh yes, there are the Zoom meetings and the webinars and the deadlines to meet. But they lack a sense of reality.
It was reading an old article by Dr Oliver Sacks that really underlined this feeling for me. Dr Sacks in discussing a terrible accident when he was alone on the mountainside, where he broke his leg, and from the site of which he crawled down to the village. Being athletic and fit, he had climbed up the mountainside with ease, but the broken leg and the pain made him really slow coming down. He found himself reliving a lot of the past memories as a drowning man is supposed to, not in a rush, but slowly, one by one. He says he realised that the time he was experiencing was not the time that one ordinarily speaks of, the time kept by watches and calendars, ‘The watch’s time, abstract, impersonal, chronological, had no relation to my time – my time which consisted solely of personal moments, life moments, crucial moments.’
It is a similar feeling that we appear to be experiencing now. Regular time has lost much of its meaning and another sort of time, a time that is palpable and yet shapeless, seems to have taken over. Time is no longer something that moves forward, but something that eddies and curves around one. This time, as I said earlier, is condensed and yet without limits. Since places have lost their ability to attract and excite, time has become the enticer – ‘for time is the longest distance between places.’
It makes one realise that even for someone as housebound normally as I am, rarely going out, contact with the outside world was what divided the day into different pieces, gave it shape and measured it. Once that was taken away, time stretches infinitely and yet is consumed by the tasks of the day. It is a very contradictory feeling – this feeling of having time and yet losing time rapidly. You have a lot of time because there is nothing much to do and yet there you were in March and already October is ending. So, where did all the intervening days, weeks and months vanish without marking themselves in your life? Or, is it that the overwhelming reality of the pandemic has leached the colour from all the other realities around you as Dr Sacks’s broken leg took away the meaning of chronological time?
Whatever else is true, time does steal your minutes and hours, eat away at your days and years, leaving you suddenly aware of the fact that weeks, months, a year, have passed in a way that left you unaware. Time does swallow the world as the sage Sankara recognized long back – ‘Kalo jagadbhakshaka.’