Clocks, Calendars and the Passing of Time

A story of a family drifting from cosmic time to clock time, and an old man who chooses his final hour by the Panchangam.

There were clocks everywhere in the house, but none showed the correct time after the old man died. The clocks had been under his care. He wound those that needed winding and changed the batteries of the rest. Most hung within his reach, and for those he could not reach, he had a small stool on which, even when frail with age, he climbed to tend to them.

Time dictated the old man’s life. If the clocks reminded him of the hour, the Hindu calendar he bought every year from a shop in Scott Road in Brickfields, reminded him of time’s location in the day, the month and the year. The Panchangam, which arrived annually by post from India with a declaration it was cleared by Customs, informed him of cosmic time, mapped against the movements of stars and planets.

For him, a day was not just hours of light and darkness. Each hour was shaped by celestial movements visible only in the Panchangam. Its pages divided time according to its terrestrial influence. There were good periods and bad periods, and he managed the affairs of his family according to these times. He was the conductor of their collective movements. “Not now,” he would say, looking up from the curled pages of the almanack. “Wait until 10:30. The Kalam is not right.”

And his children, raised under his authority, waited. They accepted his injunctions not merely out of obedience but out of an understanding that forces existed beyond their knowledge. If they must not walk into the rain without an umbrella, there must also be reasons for not stepping out at a certain hour that their father understood. If he said the haircut must happen on a Tuesday or a journey must begin before the sun hit a certain angle, they adjusted their lives to fit the cosmic slot he identified.

But as time progressed, the Panchangam began to lose its grip. Life was no longer shaped by celestial rhythms but by the schedules imposed by the state—bus and train timetables, office hours, school bells, payment deadlines, and the fixed times of public events. Time was no longer something to be interpreted; it was something to be obeyed. When it came to knowledge, no one turned to the Panchangam anymore, nor to books or a teacher’s notes. It was everywhere now, scattered into the digital ether. Turn on a computer, type a few words, and a hundred responses appear, maybe thousands.

The children of his children practised a form of polite resistance. They smiled and nodded when he warned them of an inauspicious hour, then quietly checked their wristwatches, calculating whether they could leave just early enough to beat the traffic but late enough to satisfy his ritual. They moved between two worlds: the ancient rhythms of the Panchangam and the frantic, linear demands of English‑medium schools, which started and ended on fixed times unaltered by anything the Panchangam said.

By the time the great‑grandchildren arrived, the resistance had turned into a scoff. To them, time was a digital print on a smartphone that was flat, soulless, indifferent. They were educated according to prescribed curricula that made no mention of the Panchangam and lived for holidays gazetted by the government and not decided by the phases of the moon. A “good time” was a Friday night at the mall, regardless of where the planets sat in the heavens.

As the years pressed on, the transformations in the lives of the old man’s family came not from changes predicted in the Panchangam but from the way life was ordered by employment, holidays and the mundane timetables of buses and trains. We are now untethered from time beyond the clock and calendar. Retirement, moving from government quarters to their own homes, the incessant need to renovate their abode, the upgrading of their cars and the pressure to educate the young through schools and universities ordered their lives. There was also the inevitable but quiet greying of the hair. These were changes dictated by biology and economics and not by any grander cosmic order. We were merely ageing in a line, moving further away from the ancestral script.

Then came the cancer.

To the doctors, the tumour in the old man’s pancreas was not foretold by any almanack but revealed by blood tests and x‑rays showing cells that no longer obeyed the body’s script. They spoke of prognosis, malignancy and palliative care, mapping out a timeline of inevitable decline. They looked at their charts and saw a man running out of time.

But the old man was looking at a different map.

While the clocks ticked on the walls, he spent his final weeks on the edge of the bed, his frail fingers marking dates on the Panchangam. He drew a red circle around two dates, thirty-five days apart. As the family learned after his death, the first was an inauspicious day, the day he was diagnosed with the disease. The other was the day he died, an auspicious day according to the Panchangam.

When the end came, it was a quiet rebellion against every medical textbook. There was no gasping for air, no thrashing against the predicted pain. He didn’t die according to the doctor’s timeline; he died according to his own. He had seen his location in the cosmos, found the right Tithi, and simply let go.

He left the family with a peace that made the doctor’s predictions irrelevant. While they were busy measuring time in seconds and minutes, he had been living in a version of time that foretold how he would live and die.

Now, with the old man gone, the clocks have surrendered. They no longer need to be wound because no one is worried about the “quality” of the hour. We are “educated,” we are “global,” and we are utterly lost. We know exactly what time it is, but we no longer have any idea where we are in the cosmos.