Essay: On provincial time
A meditation on quieter ways of living in places away from the frenetic metropolis and on what could happen when the need for speed touches even these lives
This is perhaps the only time “slow” is a compliment. “Slow time.” I’d hear it occasionally as a child, from my father’s friends and colleagues who would come to visit us in Siliguri, the sub-Himalayan town in Bengal where I grew up: “The hands of the clock walk slowly here”. I didn’t like the phrasing, perhaps because I wasn’t sure of what it meant, whether it was praise or good-natured sarcasm. It felt like a defect – of our clock, of our town. I was too young to understand that it might have been this kind of time that we loved to experience while watching Malgudi Days on Doordarshan – of leaves falling and being pursued, ants walking, hair drying, an anticipation of the school bell ringing to mark the end of day.
I’d realise it only as an adult, that it was to experience this nature of time and not the mountains and the elements alone that tourists came to places like ours. Outside it, though, it was something like a surname – it was used to explain our inefficiency, how we were not quick to move or react, how dim-witted we were sometimes, to not laugh at the jokes immediately, how there seemed to be a queue in our heads, like cows returning home without hurry, that slowed down our understanding. Places like ours, protected by the lack of “development”, had, until the last millennium, managed to stay outside “rush hour”.
Even “examination time”, the speediest kind of time experience in our lives until then, sometimes seemed too long. Unlike test patterns today that have turned examinees into sprinters, we often waited for our teachers to allow us to submit our answer scripts before time. Other kinds of time, such as that on the playground, felt too short – we seemed to have developed some special power that allowed us to see the football and even the cricket ball in the dark when our parents couldn’t. The productive parts of the day – the noon and afternoon – seemed too long for us; the late afternoon and evening and even the night seemed too short – matches were left incomplete, the fate of quarrels undecided, like stories paused just before the climax. The comic books we read, particularly those in Bangla, of Hada and Bhoda and others like them created by Narayan Debnath, being set in provincial locations like ours, did not give us what Marvel Comics does to children in similar places today. It wasn’t speed that we found – or sought – in them but a heightened and condensed experience of our own so that it felt no less than a fantasy. This is perhaps how poetry comes into being, and it was perhaps to experience this character of poetic time that we read these borrowed comic books. Our most viscous experience of speed would have been pedalling fiercely on our hand-me-down bicycles down a sloping road or the night before an examination.
It is the other kind of time I remember with what might be characterised as a stale sense of wonder: how smoke emerged from the mouth and nostrils of smokers, as if in each smoke ring was the equivalent of a tree’s rings of time, and how time was idiosyncratic and unexpected, like the cigarette smoke rings themselves; or how an egret moved from my right eye to the left, as if in that tiny distance of my nose bridge was the speed of the bird. The speediest thing that we might have encountered in a town like ours at that time was perhaps the rain in July – it was also perhaps the most disobedient thing we had met. Was that why so many of us wanted to be like the rain? I think I am wrong – the speediest thing we would have met was the wind, unruly, a mix of the police and the dacoit, without any empathy.
The speed of the automobile – the bike and the car and cartoons – wasn’t common. Months could go by without any car passing through our neighbourhood. The words for speed – for hurrying up – that surrounded us were not coded with velocity like the monosyllabic “fast” and “swift” are. “Taratari”, “chhito chhito” – it seemed that my Bengali and Nepali neighbours did not really want to invoke speed when they used these words.
When does the desire for speed begin in our life? And when does speed become related to the ego? Why does the city feel like a space of speed when the village doesn’t? In Countless Hitlers, Vijaydan Detha’s Rajasthani short story, five “brothers, cousins of near about the same stock”, who “looked as if they had been born not of woman’s flesh but from the earth’s own womb”, come from a village to Jodhpur to buy a tractor. They are farmers, whom Omji, the owner of the tractor showroom, says are “big peasants [who] have become the new thakurs”, those “who have really taken advantage of Independence”. After the long wait and the payment and formalities, when the five brothers take the tractor to return to their village where their families are waiting to welcome them, as the victorious who returned from war once were, they suddenly notice a cyclist, who, noticing them, begins pedalling furiously. The youngest brother mutters “Fool! Pedal as fast as you like, you’ll never beat a tractor!” and gives “the throttle a little tug, and it roared even louder”.
The race between the cycle and the tractor – or the cyclist and the people on the tractor – continues. It is unexpected, hilarious at first like all such races are, but it soon turns violent. Competitiveness from both sides makes the cyclist and the tractor drivers force speed out of their bodies and the machines. But the farmers, on the “foreign tractor worth sixty thousand rupees” bought from the city, who believe that they have bought speed and efficiency from a city-created machine, rejecting as they are of the plough, for instance, cannot take it anymore: “the tractor’s rear tyre passed over his bare head, mashing it into chutney”.
Detha contrasts the cyclist’s corpse with the wars in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Vietnam and Bangladesh: “Brain-white smudges on a blood-red background. Shards of broken glass. A man’s dead body. White shorts. Bloodied sky-blue undershirt. Mashed dreams… Compared to this one, those are so much more refined, so much more complex and nuanced. This one doesn’t compare. Still, considering it was done by a band of rustics, it wasn’t so bad”.
“Rustics.” Is this – the violence that Detha calls “art” – what happens when rustics carry the speed of the city to the provinces?
Sumana Roy is a poet and writer. Her latest book is Provincials; Postcards from the Peripheries.