Between the clock and the story
Stories unfolding from memory both consist of and hold time. In this edition, writers explore how, in narrative literature, we hold time in our hands even as we see it pass.
Edited by: Mirza Waheed
Listen nowSpotify | Apple | YouTube
Between the story and the clock
Mirza Waheed
“My maternal grandmother, Mouj, measured time differently from everybody else. She’d wake up before dawn to pray, but time was neither solar nor lunar. Time was patriarchal.”
Novelist Mirza Waheed is interested in how writers treat narrative time, inhabit multiple times and conceptualise time.
The cusp
Aamer Hussein
“There’s a lot about death, about accidents and illness and old age, she writes. But you never seem to lament, though it’s all there, a kind of muffled grief. I remember my grandmother, who died at 96. She said that’s what age did: made us witnesses of loss.”
Aamer Hussein's auto-fictional short story shifts between time zones, retrieving moments of love, friendship and beauty.
Time is an egg
Tishani Doshi
“Time in a novel is rarely linear, even if it appears straightforward. There’s always some kind of archaeology beneath or overstory above at play; levels of living and hiding.”
Time is an Egg by poet and fiction writer Tishani Doshi, known for Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods and Small Days and Nights.
Time after time
Tahmima Anam
"They joked about getting very, very old. No teeth. Hearing aids. The inability to get to certain sexual positions. The inability to have sex at all. No! She cried. There are drugs for that."
Tahmina Anam's astutely crafted story turns linear time on its head, confronting the idea of the path not taken.
DOPE
Nikesh Shukla
“There is an arrogance in these types of death, where you pick apart through the embers of the years and work out what you could have done differently, and how that might have been enough to save a loved one.”
Nikesh Shukla's story is a poignant fusion of memoir and fiction, dwelling on what cannot be recovered.
A Prague minute
Kerry Hudson
“I saw time pass in my son. His first smile, first deep throaty chuckle. The first time he realised I was not part of him but a separate thing that could stay or leave. They do say when you have a child the days are slow and the years are fast.”
Kerry Hudson remembers the time of her early pregnancy in Prague, where the Covid-19 pandemic has just arrived.
The echo of my footprints
Jamal Mahjoub
"Close to the equator, day passed into night quickly and without fuss. The hours were ruled not by the hands of a clock, but by a much older tempo – the arc of the sun across the sky.”
Jamal Mahjoub delves in to cultural time as distinct from calendar time, remembering siestas in Khartoum as a time of voracious reading.