Unravelling Time by Richa Mehta

The passage of time, and the way we mark it, is what sets apart humans from all other life on earth. No other form of life yearns to capture the essence of time – to try and put a garb on it that contains it and gives it a defining form that applies to all fields of study – and no other form of life fails as spectacularly at coming to that definition as we do.

Though it is not for lack of trying.

Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann once said, “Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.” And he was right. At every stage, we are mere humans governed by the passage of time, trying to conquer it and our mortality at the same time.

Over the years, people have searched and experimented and tried to find a way to beat time. Scientists and philosophers, inventors and adventurers have all romanced the notion of time travel. Tales of fantasy and mythology tell us of people who played with time, often with catastrophic consequences. When no explanation for time could be found, mere mortals deemed it a plaything of the gods. Ancient Indian philosophy dealt with the nature of time and the universe by assigning a cyclical definition to it – an eternal system. Cycles within cycles, and each one has its own collection of stories that gather and evolve over years of retelling, much like our memories and our stories that take on our personalities over years of recollection and rendition.

One of my favourite memories from when I was a little girl is of my grandmother’s Pomeranian. I was maybe eight or nine, and the dog was older, maybe ten years old at the time. I had just been given a bar of chocolate and we raced around the house, the dog at my heels begging for a piece, till we were both out of breath and then we sat down and shared that bar, the dog and I. I remember her yipping at my when I first raced away from her with that bar in my hand, and I remember running around in circles through the hallway, in through one door, our through the other, round and round. I remember the grownups laughing at our antics and I remember the look of pure pleasure on the dog’s face when she finally got a piece of that bar.

Or do I?

To be honest, today, more than two decades after that incident, I no longer really remember.