Locating myself in the map of time

From an anthology of Time

 Image credits: Utsav Mamoria (Tumse Na Ho Paayega)

This flash essay is part of a collaborative, constrained-writing challenge undertaken by some members of the Bangalore Substack Writers Group. Each of us examined the concept of ‘TIME’ through our unique perspective, distilled into roughly 400 words. At the bottom of this snippet, you’ll find links to other essays by fellow writers.

When I was eight years old, I had two abiding passions: geology and history. Given that both were inextricably and inevitably intertwined with the passage of time, it was unsurprising that I spent hours pondering about what time meant.

Growing up in Oman, where my childhood playgrounds were rocky wadi beds and hills, I would constantly encounter visible, tangible performances of time. I studied the striated layers in hills sliced open, each layer, a geological snapshot of Earth over the course of its existence. I would pick up rocks and ponder about the forces that had shaped them millions of years ago. I was too young to fully grasp the meaning of time but I was already old enough to understand the vast scope of it. The earth that I stood upon was billions of years old; the universe that I gazed into at night was even older. How then was I to understand my place in this infinite map of time?

Nowadays, whenever I am in the throes of a crisis, I console myself: this too will pass. The present swiftly becomes yesterday; today leapfrogs into tomorrow. Time it seems is elastic, pliable, and collapsible. I imagine I unerringly remember my past only to discover that memory is an unreliable narrator, choosing only which it wishes to remember, eliding the rest. Time is a constantly shifting, dancing tributary, one river occasionally running its course into the earth while other flows into and merges with the sea. What then are we to make of the ghost rivers? Where do all their memories go?

Over the years, I have sought to collect and preserve time in multiple ways, in my ever present quest to render my memories tangible: rocks, shells, dried flowers, and leaves. Yet, even then, some will endure, some will disintegrate into nothingness, as if they were never there in the first place. And I find myself asking the recurring question as I did as a child: where am I in this giant map of time? And do I possibly matter?

I tell myself:

I am there, somewhere.

In the act of remembering and recording my memories, I am placing myself, one coordinate after another. 

I am simultaneously the sea and the river flowing into it.

For now, I hold onto that.

Please do read the other snippets as part of this exercise below

• “So… When will shit actually hit the fan?” by Sailee, sunny climate stormy climate

• Time: I Just Want to See It, Watch It Move by Abhishek Singh, The Comic Dreamer

• Timekeepers - Retracing the Universe’s Deep-Time Signatures by Devayani Khare, Geosophy

• Keeping Time by Reshma Apte, Fanciful Senorita

• The Thing We Pretend To Understand by Avinash Shenoy, OfftheWalls

• The lost intimacy with time by Siddharth Batra, Siddharth’s substack

• Lessons Time Taught Me by Aryan Kavan Gowda, Wonderings of a Wanderer

• A Time for Worship by Vaibhav Gupta, Thorough and Unkempt

• “Tata Mummy Tata” by Rakhi Anil, Rakhi’s Substack

• The vicious cycle of sixteen - A dancer’s take on keeping time by Eshna Benegal, The Deep Cut

• How long is twenty years? by Richa Vadini Singh, Here’s What I Think

• How mystery writers play with the clock by Gowri N Kishore, About Murder, She Wrote

• TIME INFLATED, JUSTICE DEFLATED. by Lavina G, The Nexus Terrain

• What keeps the fool in me delighted by Rahul Singh, Mehfil

• The endless ebb and flow of Time by Siddarth RG, Siddarth’s Newsletter

• Time, please! by Shaili Desai - Litcurry