Between the clock and the story

Guest edited by Mirza Waheed

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."

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.”

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.”

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.”

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."

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.”

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.”

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.”
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