Cups stained with the black coffee line your desk. Neon yellow from the highlighter ink paints your aching fingers. Moonlight sneaks into your room through the thick window glass and embraces your fear. You splash water on your face and prop open your eyes, reminding yourself that this is the last night that you have to do this.
Your eyes gaze towards the gold-lined peach wall clock. Your mind wanders to the time your older sister accidentally cracked its glass while changing its battery. You had asked her to bribe you with expensive chocolates to keep your mouth shut in front of your parents, but you ratted on her anyway. You snap back to reality as the rhythmic ticking of the second's hand reminds you of how close your last board exam is. This is not the time to daydream about asking your crush for an extra protractor or ponder over strategies to convince your parents for the post-exam Goa trip. This is the time to finish the syllabus and attempt to get at least an hour of sleep.
As sunshine glistens and pierces through your shut eyelids, you wake up to the screams of your alarm ringing inside your eardrums. You wear your lucky watch. The metallic silver band injects strengths through your veins since it is laced with love. Your father didn’t know how to tell you he loves you. He cut it up and served equal parts to you and your sister when he bought dragon fruits after you told him that you loved them. He wrapped it in a shiny red package and left it on your side table when your school started allowing students to wear watches in 6th grade.
The ticking of the watch helps you sit through your exam. Your mind sprints around the room while you tap your leg on the wooden floor and click your pen. You try to appear like you know what you are writing. Your eyes take a break when you glance at the watch to check the time left for which you have to continue to put on this act.
You come home to the rusted swinging pendulum from the vintage clock in the living room. You hate it. Your sister hates it. Your father can’t bear the sight of it. Your mother loves it like the long-lost lover of her last life. All of you pretend to understand the intricacies of vintage designs while she sings the glorious tale of the times that the clock has seen- how he bore witness to India’s independence; how he takes pride in himself as he swung at the stroke of the midnight hour when the world slept, and India was awake to life and freedom.
You lay down on your bed after noticing that your sister changed your bed-sheet to a fresh one while you are at school. You spot a shiny red package on your side table with a letter attached.
My grandfather gifted me this watch when I was the first to complete secondary school in our family. I remember my mother baking cake in a rice steamer. I can hear my grandfather’s cracking, low-pitched voice as told me that he found it under a fruit stand when he was a little boy. He had never seen a watch before. It was peculiar, complicated, and confusing. He asked his father about the weird object he found that day. His father chuckled and told him that it tells time. When he questioned the way to do so, his father explained the ticking sound
and the hour’s, minute’s, and second’s hands moving little by little. When he tried to implement this newfound knowledge, he was disheartened to know that the watch was stuck at 2.32 am. His father broke into laughter and said, “Well, this one doesn’t tell time, it stops time.”
They never fixed the watch. It has been stopping and storing little moments of love in your family since 1953.
We have grown up hearing stories of how time stops for no one. And maybe it doesn’t. Yet, we live. And breathe. In the moments that we have. We stop and store them in the form of a dried rose in the corner of our drawer. We store it when we take the slightly longer route just to walk past our school and cook pasta the way our childhood best friend likes. And we share this stored time when a random stranger comes up to us on a crowded train station and asks,
“Could you tell me the time, please?”
Comments