by Ankur Barua
As the shadows of time fall thickly across the afternoon of my life, my mind often trails back to a damp winter evening on the banks of the Hooghly river. In the distance a boatman’s plaintive song was slowly rising towards the listless silence that shrouded the air. A goat’s sharp bleating punctuated the peace.
Ibrahim Khan stared pensively at the waves murmuring to each other some secret that had lain in the primordial heart of the river.
“Do you remember our first meeting, Amitabh?”
Calcutta: May 5, 1951
“Amit, you must not be late. Ibrahim Uncle is very fastidious about matters of time”, my mother had declared with a tone of rising exasperation.
Yet, I lost my way somewhere along the serpentine alleys of north Calcutta, and reached the small sooty shop fifteen minutes late.
Sweating profusely, I was about to burst into a litany of apologies, but I was promptly stopped.
“Don’t be like our English masters who were always looking for an excuse to apologise – I mean apologise to themselves, never to us. And especially don’t apologise to me. Time, my son, is not something I have created. If you must apologise, well, apologise to our common time-keeper. All time is from God, of God, with God. You and I are just momentary pearls on a subtle necklace that we can’t see”.
I stared at Ibrahim’s face heavy with the creases of age.
“Now, Amitabh, I have made a living by keeping time. Not my own time, though. I have never owned a watch. The muezzin’s music has been my rhythm”.
Much water has flowed down the Thames since that first day.
After three years with Ibrahim, I wound my way to Cambridge where I studied the physical cosmology of time – and yet, one half of my soul has remained slumbering inside that shop through all these decades. People would bring their watches to Ibrahim, and throughout the day he would lovingly restore these broken pieces. When the faint echoes of the muezzin’s call would nimbly step into the shop, he would pause – the bearable lightness of eternity would glow on his weary face.
“I didn’t intend to become a clockmaker, you know”, Ibrahim started slowly. “The profound labyrinths of the Arabian Quran and the crystalline light of our Indian commentators – that was the home of my youthful heart”.
The goat strayed towards us and nestled at his feet.
“But in my first year at Aligarh University, I fell under the spell of a friend who castigated Muslims for falling behind everyone else. Muslims have a fundamental problem with modernity, this friend declared. Look at how skilfully our neighbouring Hindus juggle time and eternity, while we are still disputing whether it is forbidden to dye our white beards”.
A chilly breeze rose from the middle of the river and encircled us.
“For weeks – no, months – my faith dithered, and slowly it began to wither. One day, when I had gone to my ancestral village, my granduncle asked me to go and meet a Hindu yogi.
“He is an old master who is never wrong about suffering”, he said. “But should I not first speak to our own Qazi?”, I protested.
He replied solemnly, “The Qazi may very well give you the right answer, but what if you don’t understand it? As for this Hindu yogi, he will at least give you an answer that will touch your soul”.
After walking along a bamboo-lined dusty path for half an hour, I reached his thatched hut.
“Oh, you are Brother Qamaruddin’s son! The gentleness of the autumn moon shines on your face too. Now regarding this business of modernity, how do you say it: “mo-dernity” or “moder-nity”? Anyway, take this shattered watch I used in those days when I was studying mathematics at Presidency College. Repair it with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and give it away to one of these Hindus in Calcutta who are so devoted to their modernity”.
A townhall clock began to strike the hours painfully.
“When you pour out your life to time, you begin to taste the timeless”, Ibrahim whispered, as if he were surreptitiously initiating me into a cosmic secret too profound for earthly ears.
The gentle echoes of temple bells wafted across the evening breeze from the other shore of the river.
A few days ago, an old friend came rushing to my seat at the edge of the lake at St. James’s Park.
“I am so sorry, I am …..”, she stopped abruptly.
We sat in silence gazing at the white swans that were gliding past us.
And when our watches reminded us that the cold night would soon descend on this island, we reluctantly returned to make time for the world in which we take place on the journey to the homeland.
Ankur Barua is University Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies at Cambridge University. He read Theology and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge. His primary research interests are Vedantic Hindu philosophical theology and Indo-Islamic styles of sociality. He researches the conceptual constellations and the social structures of Hindu traditions, both in premodern contexts in South Asia and in colonial milieus where multiple ideas of Hindu identity were configured along transnational circuits between India, Britain, France, Germany, and the US. He studies how these ideas continue to shape the subjectivities of British Hindus across multiethnic environments and of the wider British public.
Project Noon 