The Second Clock

Nikhil bought the second clock on the afternoon Meera's flight left, which was possibly the worst time to buy anything.

He had gone to the market for rice. He came home with rice, a bag of onions he did not need, and a cheap white wall clock with a plastic rim and a second hand that ticked loudly enough to be heard from the kitchen.

He hung it beside the old one, in the gap where a calendar had been.

Then he set it back by nine hours and thirty minutes, and sat down on the floor to watch two clocks disagree.

It was four in the afternoon in Pune. It was six thirty in the morning wherever Meera was, somewhere above an ocean, asleep with her head against a window.

The fellowship was eleven months. They had done the arithmetic together many times, at many hours, in the careful voices people use when they are trying not to frighten each other. Eleven months was not very long. Eleven months was four seasons and a birthday each and one Diwali.

Eleven months was three hundred and thirty-four days, which was a number Nikhil had worked out at two in the morning and then decided never to say aloud.

When she landed, she sent a photograph of a grey sky and a sign he could not read.

arrived. everything smells like cold.

He looked at the second clock. It said eight in the morning.

good morning, he wrote. it is almost dinner here. I have met your clock. it is loud.

The rule arrived by accident in the second week.

They had been trying to speak every day, and every day it had gone slightly wrong. He called while she was on a bus. She called while he was in a meeting he could not leave. They traded apologies like small coins until the apologies took up more room than the conversation.

On a Thursday, Meera wrote: can we stop trying to talk at good times. there aren't any.

then what.

bad times. on purpose. I'll call you at my eleven at night. that's your half past eight in the morning. you'll be on the balcony with tea. I'll be in bed with the lamp on.

Nikhil looked at the loud clock on his wall.

that is a very strange appointment.

that's why it'll work. nothing else happens at those hours.

So it began. Every night at eleven, Meera got into bed, switched on the small lamp, and called a man who was standing on a balcony in the morning light with a cup of tea going cold in his hand.

She told him about the day that had just finished. He told her about the day that had not yet started.

It should have felt like a mismatch. Instead it became the most orderly thing either of them had.

She fell asleep on the call more often than not. He learned the sound of it — the sentences getting longer and slower, the small shift of a pillow, the point where mm stopped meaning yes and started meaning nothing at all.

He never hung up first. He would stay on the line with his tea and the traffic starting below, listening to someone breathing nine and a half hours behind him, and then he would say, quietly, to a person who could not hear it: "Goodnight. It's a nice morning here. You'd like it."

Distance is not one long difficulty. It is a great many small ones, arriving separately.

There was the problem of the ordinary. Meera found she could describe the enormous things easily — the fellowship, the laboratory, the professor who spoke so fast she took notes phonetically — and could not describe the small ones at all. How do you tell someone that the bus shelter near your flat has a crack shaped like a bird? That you have started buying a particular biscuit because the packet is the same red as a packet from home?

These were the things she would have said in a kitchen without thinking. On a telephone they sounded like nothing. So she stopped saying them, and then she noticed she had stopped, and that frightened her more than the fellowship ever had.

There was also the problem of the two Nikhils. There was the one she spoke to at eleven, warm and reliable and always on a balcony. And there was the one who existed for the other twenty-three hours, doing things she knew nothing about, in a city that was carrying on without her.

In the fourth month she said, in a voice she had not planned: "I don't know what your Tuesdays are like any more."

There was a pause of the kind that telephone lines make worse.

"They're not very good," Nikhil said. "That's why I don't describe them."

"Tell me anyway."

So he told her about a Tuesday. All of it. The queue at the bank. A colleague who chewed ice. A dog that waited outside the office at lunchtime and had learned which people were weak. The rice he had cooked badly. The way the flat was quiet in a specific way that was different from being alone, because being alone had been fine before and now it had a shape.

When he finished she said, "That's better."

"It was a boring Tuesday."

"I know. That's what was better."

After that they made a second rule, which was that nothing was too small. The crack shaped like a bird. The red biscuit packet. The dog outside the office, who was eventually named Inspector and who was, by the seventh month, a recurring character they both worried about.

The hard week came in month eight, and it came the way hard weeks usually do, which is to say without any announcement.

Meera's results would not reproduce. She ran the same procedure six times and got six different answers, and on the sixth evening she sat in a stairwell for forty minutes because it was the only place in the building where nobody would ask if she was all right.

She missed the eleven o'clock call.

Nikhil stood on the balcony with his tea and watched the loud clock through the doorway. Eleven became eleven twenty. Eleven twenty became midnight, her time, which was half past two in the afternoon for him, and he had long since stopped pretending to work.

He did not call. He had a theory, which he had never tested, that a missed call at the wrong moment was one more thing to fail to answer.

Instead he wrote: Inspector was at the office today. He has learned a new trick. He now lies down in front of people instead of begging. It is much more effective. I will tell you about it whenever you want. There is no hurry.

She read it in the stairwell.

She called at one in the morning, her time, and said nothing for a while, and he said nothing back, and the line carried the hum of a building in another country.

"I'm not going to be good at this," she finally said. "The work. I think I've been pretending."

"Six different answers," Nikhil said. "That's not pretending. That's six honest attempts."

"That is a very generous way to describe failing."

"It's half past three in the afternoon here," he said. "I have been awake a long time and I am not feeling generous. I'm being accurate."

She laughed, which was the thing he had been trying for.

"Tell me about the dog," she said.

He told her about the dog. He took a long time about it, adding details he was fairly sure he had invented, until he heard the sentences on her end get slower, and then stop.

He stayed on the line while the afternoon went on around him.

In the tenth month, Meera asked him not to come to the airport.

"I'll be unbearable," she said. "I'll have been awake for twenty hours and I'll cry in a public building."

"I would like to see that."

"You absolutely would not."

He went to the airport.

She was unbearable. She had been awake for twenty-two hours, not twenty, and she cried in a public building, and she was still wearing the scarf she had bought in the first week because the cold had been a genuine surprise.

In the taxi she fell asleep against his shoulder before they reached the highway, which was not romantic, because her head was heavy and his arm went numb almost immediately and he did not move it for forty minutes.

At the flat she stopped in the doorway.

Two clocks on the wall. One showing a quarter past two in the morning. The other, the loud one with the plastic rim, showing a quarter to five in the afternoon.

"You kept it."

"It was four hundred rupees," Nikhil said. "It would be wasteful."

"Nikhil."

"I kept it."

She stood and looked at it for a while, swaying slightly from tiredness.

"Eleven months," she said, "and every night I knew exactly what you were doing. I think that's the only reason it worked."

"You didn't, though," he said. "Half the time I was asleep on the sofa and I ran to the balcony so you'd hear the traffic."

"I knew that too."

"You did not."

"You were always out of breath," Meera said. "Every single night. I thought it was very kind of you to keep running."

They have been in the same city for some years now.

The clocks are still both on the wall, which visitors find confusing and which neither of them has ever bothered to explain properly. The loud one is still nine and a half hours behind. Nikhil has replaced its battery four times.

Sometimes, late in the evening, one of them will glance at it without meaning to and work out what they would have been doing — her in bed with the small lamp on, him on a balcony with tea going cold — and the ordinary Tuesday they are currently having will seem like an extraordinary piece of luck.

They still tell each other the small things. The crack shaped like a bird. A new dog, outside a different office, who has not yet learned any tricks.

Inspector, for the record, was eventually adopted by a man from the bank. Meera asked about this for three years.

If you are reading this to someone who is far away tonight, in a different hour, with a different sky outside the window, here is the only part that matters:

The distance is not the thing that decides it. The distance is only weather. What decides it is whether somebody keeps the appointment — eleven o'clock, or whatever hour you have agreed on — and tells you about the dog, and the queue at the bank, and the biscuit packet that is exactly the right red.

Somebody is awake in your hour right now, doing the arithmetic, knowing precisely where you are.

So you can close your eyes. The second clock is still running.

More bedtime stories to tell your girlfriend

If she is still awake, these are written for reading aloud too:

• The House with One Light On — a long, quiet romance across a courtyard, about eight minutes
• The Cake with the Wrong Name — a cute bakery romance, about nine minutes
• Three short bedtime stories — shorter reads for when she is nearly asleep