8 o' Clock or 9 o' Clock

A Piece from Collection of Short Stories…………………………

By

Sadaf Fayyaz

The darkness prevailed all over the city and the night started growing darker. Aelia looked at piece of paper and started planning about her next day’s assignments and tasks. She was kind of a person who used to plan their tasks one day before. The clocks and watches had been forwarded.

“I will have to alter my breakfast timings by one hour now.”

She always hated changing her timings of doing certain things. She thought naively,

“Are we trying to play with the time and people? Time::that has been created by God and can never be stopped, even if we break our clocks and watches”.

“Clocks are just a tool to measure it, can’t stop it.”

She was a firm believer in the importance of time and its significance too. Always being a regular person, she didn’t like this forwarding of clocks by one hour. She had heard so many economic and political justifications on this issue, but never believed them. Even after so many theories, nothing got improved.

“All I know is that I will have to change my activity timings and shift to the new ones now.”

She could not understand how this saving was possible. She belonged to a nation where one hour was a negligible amount of time for people. She remembered the words of her instructor, when he was working in Japan.

“One day, I asked a business person to come and visit me at 11am or 12am. The man insulted me so much: “You know the importance of one hour? We can make some much machinery in one hour. We will lose our productivity if we do not believe in the value of time.””

Her instructor got so much embarrassed that he never got late, ever in his life.

She remembered some friends of her mother who planned to visit them at 12 am, and came at 3pm. They never had a regard for time. Her mother had already planned her tasks and day activities. The late coming guests usually arrived three hours later than the assigned time, thus making their work pending and kept them waiting for hours. Upon arrival, the justification a lady would always give,

“Bhabhi, CO ki begum aa gai then.” (The CO’s wife had come). It was always the case with so many guests and business clients even. They were not illiterate people, but habitual late comers. She often remembered her family marriage functions where the specified time for “Arrival of Barat” was mentioned 8 pm, food at 9 pm and departure at 10 pm. She was never shocked but rather bored to see the Barat coming at 11 p.m, food being served at 1 a.m and departure taking place at 2 a.m. The DST was fine for saving, but the kind of people she was living in, would never care about reversing or forwarding of time. There were countless examples of being late cases in her life and she never praised them.

“Who cares, whether it is 8 o’clock or 9 o’clock, economically may be, but in social terms, one hour is nothing for us”.