The Day My Clock Stopped Making Sense

The story behind Timekeeper.

This is the story of a twenty-one-year-old who had never stepped outside his home state, dragging a suitcase through five airports, watching the clock lie to him in three different time zones, and learning, in real time, that the world is bigger and stranger than anyone had bothered to explain.

That twenty-one-year-old was me.

The Year Was 2007

I had just finished my bachelor's degree in India. A Master's program was waiting for me in the United States. My cousin, the first in the family to make the journey, had already settled in Colorado Springs and was waiting on the other end.

There were two routes to choose from.

The first was Lufthansa. Hyderabad to Frankfurt to Denver. Clean. Two stops. Fifty-seven thousand rupees.

The second was longer. Hyderabad to Mumbai to Atlanta to Salt Lake City to Colorado Springs. Five legs. Thirty-six thousand rupees.

My mother wanted me to take Lufthansa. It's your first time, she said. Don't make it harder than it needs to be.

My cousin, who had walked this road before me, said something else. You are a student. Every rupee counts. You are young. Take the cheaper one.

I took the cheaper one.

The First Flight

My first flight was on Kingfisher Airlines, out of Begumpet Airport.

Neither of them exists today. The airline went bankrupt. The airport stopped flying commercial routes. It is strange to think that the very beginning of my story already belongs to a world that has disappeared.

I boarded the Delta flight in Mumbai with a single instruction in my head: this is a direct flight to Atlanta.

Hours passed. The cabin lights dimmed and brightened. Meals came and went. And then, as the plane began its descent, I looked out the window and saw something that made no sense at all.

The Statue of Liberty.

My chest tightened. Did we get hijacked? Why are we landing in New York? They said this was a direct flight.

The wall was something else. I had been raised in a culture where you did not bother strangers with your problems, did not interrupt the adults around you, did not raise your voice in a room full of people who seemed to know what they were doing. The fluency was in my mouth. The permission to use it was not.

So I sat in my seat and swallowed the question.

It turned out to be a technical stop at JFK. Everyone had to collect their luggage, clear immigration, recheck their bags, and reboard the same plane. Direct flight, it turned out, did not mean what I thought it meant.

I did as I was told. Cleared immigration. Picked up my suitcase. Rechecked it. Walked back through the gate. Sat down in the same seat I had just left.

Atlanta and a Clock That Lied

Atlanta arrived in the middle of my confusion about time.

My boarding pass said the flight to Salt Lake City was three hours and fifty-six minutes long. But the arrival time on the same piece of paper said I would land in an hour. The total trip read four hours.

I stared at it. Read it again. The numbers refused to make sense.

Nobody had explained time zones to me in a way that stuck. Or rather, my cousin had, but somewhere between the panic of the Statue of Liberty and the weight of the suitcase, I had forgotten everything.

I worked up the courage to ask a Delta agent how to get to the next terminal. Train, she said, pointing with her hand, already tired of the question. Train is that way.

A train. Inside an airport. I turned the sentence over in my head and could not find a place to put it.

Another woman, an Indian traveler who had clearly done this walk a thousand times, saw me standing there with an older Indian aunty who was also lost. She offered to walk us both to the train herself.

I remember thinking, watching her, one day I will help someone like this. Or I will lose my nerve and go home. Definitely the first one.

The train moved between terminals without stopping. I kept waiting for it to stop. I almost asked if it was taking us all the way to Salt Lake City. I did not. I stayed quiet, the way I had been raised to stay quiet, and watched the doors open and close at terminals that were not mine.

The Hour That Went Backward

On the Salt Lake leg, the clock ran backward.

Four hours in the air, and somehow I landed just two hours after taken off. I gave up trying to understand it. I just sat there and let the world rearrange itself around me.

The final flight to Colorado Springs was small. A two-by-two configuration. I had seat 1A. I was, as far as I could tell, the only brown person on the entire plane.

Next to me sat a middle-aged white woman. Kind face. Quiet.

I buckled my seatbelt, looked out the window, and that is when it finally hit me.

My mother. My father. The house I had grown up in. The kitchen. The street. The smell of monsoon. The voices I had heard every single morning of my life for twenty-one years.

All of it was on the other side of the planet now.

I had been awake and in motion for thirty-six hours.

The woman next to me noticed. She asked the flight attendant for a paper towel and handed it to me gently. Both of them asked if I was alright.

This is my first time, I told them. I left my family in India. I'm scared. I miss them.

The woman did not tell me to stop crying. She did not look away. She said, Colorado Springs is a beautiful place. Do you have family there?

My cousin, I said. He's coming to pick me up.

I closed my eyes. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I remember was the plane touching down, and the woman gathering her things, and her voice saying, gently, on her way out:

Good luck.

What I Carry From That Day

That was my first journey to America.

There are always firsts. First flight. First airport. First time the clock runs backward. First time a stranger hands you a paper towel and asks if you are okay. First time you realize that you can be terrified and held, at the same moment, by the same world.

Timekeeper is built from that day.

A mid-century clock face. Hands moving across hours that no longer mean what they used to. A quiet reminder that time, the thing we trust most, will bend on you the moment you cross enough of the map.

It belongs on the walls of people who keep time differently now. Travelers. Immigrants. The ones who always had the words, and are still learning to use them out loud.