I take out the packet of biscuits and the banana chips from the container. There is a full bottle of water on the kitchen counter. I take all this stuff and walk towards the sofa in the hall. I dump the stuff onto the sofa and open the bag. As I open the bag I am welcomed by a bottle of water and a packet of savories. I had kept them inside yesterday when I left for the city but I never ate them. The bottle is half empty though. I am not drinking enough water. The urine I passed in the morning was dark yellowish in color. I am a little dehydrated. Since I realize I am dehydrated I go and drink some water from the jug right away. I should have been hydrating at regular intervals and I know that there is no point in trying to compensate for the loss of it by drinking a huge amount of water at once. But I ignore the compensation part and mentally visualize myself getting all hydrated and ready for the day.

The time is five minutes past seven. The small timepiece on the counter near the wash basin tells me this with its tiny green hands. It has an even tinnier yellow arm for the alarm. It is the first time keeper of this house. When she moved into this house, she brought it along with her. Since our house owner has forbidden us from drilling any holes in the walls or driving nails into them, she settled with this small timepiece. It was also perfect for her use. It is small but the white background and the dials can be seen from a distance.

We now have a clock on the wall right above it. When I moved it, I was given some clocks by my mom to hang in the house. We had a surplus of them from the time we gave a party for our new home. Most of the gifts we received were wall clocks. Our home doesn’t have that many walls to hang them all. So one of them was transferred to me. I used double-sided tape and stickers to stick the clock on the wall. Until now it has not fallen from the wall. I hope it doesn’t. I pray the battery lasts for a very long time. I will have to remove it from the sticky stuff. Once I do that I need to stick new tapes onto it as the old ones will not hold them once I remove them.

This location was specifically chosen by her because here the clock and the timepiece can be seen clearly from the kitchen. She needs this. She needs to have time under check whenever she is cooking in the morning. It is essential for her to stay on time and to leave home before it gets too late.

Also, it can be seen from almost anywhere in the hall yet it is not the first thing that comes across the opposite wall when you open the front door. There is some feng shui logic to it that was given by my mother. It has stuck with me. She read it only a few years back. When she did share it, I went back to all the homes I had stayed in and tried remembering the location of the clock in them. I was able to recollect most of them, all the way back to my childhood days. None of the wall clocks were facing the front door. None of them. Some of the homes were designed in such a way that there was no point in keeping a clock on the opposite wall to the entrance door. Thinking along those lines, it was somewhat the same situation in almost all the homes. The clock was placed in such a manner as to be seen from the kitchen or the hall or adjacent room. The clock was made to be functional whether it liked it or not. When I mentioned this to my mother, she took a while to think about them. When she returned from her thoughts I found the same surprise on her face that I had a couple of minutes ago.

Maybe it was this incident that somehow stuck this idea into my head. I never had to place a clock anywhere. This is the first house I find myself inhabiting without my parents. Even at my worksite we mostly stay in bunkers or makeshift houses. There is no permanence there. Things are very much temporary. They cannot be considered a house.

If it was a normal day I wouldn’t have noticed the timepiece. My gaze would have automatically gone to the clock for the time. Maybe it is her absence that is making me do things differently. Maybe it is her way of making her presence felt. Maybe she hasn’t gone anywhere. Just became invisible or something like that. Along with the rest of the population of this city or maybe even the world? It is not possible, but still. If the thought of having her here with me all along brings in a little bit of solace and comfort, I should entertain it.

It made me observe a thing that seems to slowly fade away in importance. It is making me see the world in a new light. If asked to trade this all to be with her, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. I would throw it away to be with her in an instant. I guess I shouldn’t entertain anything much. All these are a figment of my imagination. I am trying to find illogical explanations to stuff so as to keep myself in a fantasy world and away from reality, the reality of being all alone in this city and maybe this entire world.

Time seems to be passing by very slowly. I wish it sped up a bit. I know it does speed up when we are having a good time. It is a global phenomenon. That and time slowing down when we are waiting for something or when we are going through something bad or rough. Uggghhh. They are bad. Then there is the extreme case - when time stands still. It happens when you least expect it to. It is bad. It is never good. Time stands still when you are in an accident, or when something untoward happens. When it stands still a gazillion thoughts pass through your head. You feel like a million volts of electricity are passing through your tiny brain in a fraction of a second. It is overwhelming. Before you know it, it is done. Time has resumed, that too in the slowest of all manners. This is definitely going to be torturous for you. In this instance, you would have wished for it to never happen or for it to be reversed somehow. This is something you don’t want in your life, something that is not in the picture you have seen for yourself. And yet, here it is.

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I have had a couple of instances in my life that I can remember. It is something I don't want to remember. You want to forget it as soon as possible and get on with your life. One of them is fresh in my mind. It happened five years ago at my worksite. I will not get into much detail about it.

As I was finishing off the day's proceedings, I came upon an unexpected unwanted situation. As I gained composure to think about it, the only thought in my head was this question - how did it happen? I had foreseen the work being done and yet how did this happen? It was something that shouldn’t have happened. I had performed the process a couple of times earlier without any problems. Even if I hadn’t done it, there was a procedure to be followed. I had done the exact things. Well not in the exact manner as there was a constraint. We had to cut short one of the operations. As this constraint was encountered previously, we had always followed this set of operations. That is why I had done it in this situation too.

Panic took over my whole body. I had to leave for my home because my grandma was a bit serious. She was hospitalized. I decided to take the night bus and reach home. But now this incident put me in a very dicey situation. My boss was a chill man. He told me to go home and not worry about this when he came to me with the news. Actually, he had got the call from my mother. My phone was out of coverage area or was silent, something like that. My mother had called him when she couldn’t get me. I could see the tension on his face when he came to know of the situation. He would have to be answerable to it. And he did. He took it upon himself.

I think I had seen all this in the instant time froze. I saw how my boss would react, how his superior would react and the numerous phone calls and queries we all would have to undergo just because of the problem we had created. It was not intentional. But it was something that should never have happened.

Later on, when I became a little bit composed, I rewinded all that had happened leading to the event. I figured out what had gone wrong. All I can say about that incident is I wasn’t the one who made the mistake.

It is a closed chapter now. We did face a lot of backlash for it from our superiors and the higher management. I was summoned to the office to give explanations to it. It was a bit to take mentally. But I guess I handled it well. It is true that in the process I was looked down upon by my colleagues in the other projects. That's okay. I am fine with it. I know what had happened and why I stood by what I said afterward. I tried to remain neutral and see if it goes away without much trouble. But it didn’t. I finally had to own up to it and share my true thoughts on the events that took place. I made sense to the people who had done the job with their hands. For the others who couldn’t comprehend what had happened, I was looked upon with a guilty eye. As I said, I was ready for it. I have my reasons for it. I don't think anyone would understand it.

It taught me a big life lesson. Sometimes people do things no one would understand except the person himself. No matter how much you try to decipher the reason behind it, you will never get the true picture. You will always come across a version of it he wants you to see, not the true one. He is the narrator of his story. Only he knows what comes next, what is to be told, and what is to be concealed.

I am the narrator of my story, this story. I know what I am telling you and what I am not telling you. I am not telling you a lot of things. You are witnessing a fraction of the things I am going through from yesterday. Whatever I have told you is true though. It is something I had decided before I sat down to write. All of this is true. Nothing is false. But this is not everything. There are a lot of things I will probably never tell you.

Similarly, there are a lot of things my Anna would probably never learn about me. On my death bed, there will be thoughts deep inside my head that I have never shared with her. The same applies to her too. I will never know certain things about her. I will only know what she wishes to share with me.

We harbor in us things we will never share with anyone, no matter who it is. I think it is one other thing that makes us human. We carry with us all the things that cannot be shared with our graves. They weigh us down at times but we get used to them and learn to live with them.

Lucky are the ones that don't have many burdens to carry, the ones who have made peace with them and left them where they belonged. I don't think I am a lucky one. I will carry my burdens to my grave. There isn’t much though. I know it is less. I can’t compare because I don't know what others are carrying. I guess I am happy knowing this is all that I have to carry. In this, I have found a certain peace I wish to sustain for the rest of my life.