Time gives each of us the same twenty-four hours. It does not follow that we live them in the same way.
Dr. Akhtar Purvez
The twenty-fifth hour does exist.
I have been living in it for years. Mine begins when the rest of my world goes to sleep.
It has no place on a clock. It usually begins when I have been awake long enough to know that sleep is not returning soon. Careful not to disturb anyone, I leave the bedroom and walk a few steps into the study next door. On the sofa and across the table are books, manuscripts, papers, handwritten notes, unfinished poems. Sometimes three books I am writing are open at once, beside a poem in Urdu, another in Kashmiri, and something taking shape in English. Looking at the table, I occasionally have the strange feeling that I am not looking at my work at all. I am looking at a projection of my mind.
I choose whatever seems most interesting or most difficult and begin. I may stay with it for twenty minutes or leave it after five because a sentence has suddenly opened a door into something else. A thought that resists me in English may become clearer in Urdu or Kashmiri. An idea from medicine may wander into a poem; a line of poetry may change something I have been trying to say in prose. I know this is not the orderly method usually recommended for serious work. Several unfinished things are harder to keep track of than one, and occasionally something gets lost between them. Yet over the past few years I have discovered that my mind seems most alive when several doors remain open. What looks like distraction can sometimes be conversation.
I was not always this way. Earlier in life, I was more inclined to accept the sensible sequence: begin something, concentrate on it, finish it, then proceed to the next. Increasingly, I enjoy the movement itself—the quick crossing between subjects, forms and languages, the possibility that one unfinished thought may illuminate another. I cannot say exactly why this has changed. Perhaps age has made me more willing to trust associations that once seemed like interruptions. Or perhaps, as time becomes more noticeable, the mind becomes less willing to tell an interesting thought to wait politely for its turn.
Perhaps there was something inherited in this restlessness of mind. My father, Muzaffar Aazim, moved among poetry, literary criticism, translation and linguistics, and even created a font for the Kashmiri language. I do not know whether he kept all these worlds open before him at once, as I tend to do. I only know that he, too, lived in more than one room of thought.
Nighttime wakefulness, however, did not always feel like additional time. I have had difficulty sleeping as much as I would like for many years, and initially I approached it as a problem that could surely be solved if I found the correct adjustment. I avoided coffee later in the day, changed the timing of meals and exercise, and paid attention to the familiar recommendations about sleep. My medical reading and research only reinforced what I already knew: adequate sleep matters. There is a peculiar disadvantage in knowing this while lying awake. You do not merely count the hours you are losing. You begin calculating what their loss may be doing to you.
Eventually I consulted a sleep counselor. Much of what we discussed was already familiar from my reading, but one recommendation changed my nights: if I had been awake for a while, I should stop lying in bed trying to force sleep. I could get up and return when sleepiness came back. What I did during that interval was supposed to be quiet and unstimulating—certainly not the kind of concentrated thinking likely to make the mind more alert.
I followed the first half of the advice.
That is how I began walking into the study. I did not decide that insomnia was useful, and I would never choose wakefulness over the sleep my body needs. I simply stopped spending every sleepless minute fighting the fact that I was awake. Instead, I would sit on the sofa, reach for whatever on the table interested me most, and begin. Sometimes I moved among several projects before tiredness returned. An hour might pass. Something that was unfinished became a little less unfinished. Then I would return to bed and, quite often, sleep better—not necessarily longer, but without having spent the previous hour worrying about not sleeping.
Medicine had already shown me that sixty minutes can occupy remarkably different amounts of human life. I have seen an hour become almost unbearable for someone in severe pain, wanting nothing more than for it to pass. I have seen the opposite around serious illness and loss: someone sitting beside a person they love, wishing the same hour would somehow refuse to end. The clock gives both of them sixty minutes. It cannot tell us what those minutes contain.
Memory is equally indifferent to the clock. I can be sitting in Virginia when a song, a word, a smell, or a certain quality of light suddenly places me in Kashmir. A winter morning in Srinagar from decades ago may feel nearer than something I did last week. As a child, I imagined time as a straight road: yesterday behind me, tomorrow ahead, today the small piece of ground beneath my feet. I am less certain of that road now. My body has continued moving forward. Memory has not always come with me.
One of my favorite films, Interstellar, makes this strangeness literal. Hours for one person can become years for someone he loves. The physics fascinates me, but it is the human consequence that has remained with me: a father and daughter discover that affection does not protect them from time. Ordinary life offers no such dramatic distortion, yet sometimes we recognize its echo. We look at a child who has become an adult, meet a friend after decades, or suddenly hear the voice of someone long gone inside an old memory, and the arithmetic of years seems inadequate.
I used to think my wish for another hour was mostly evidence that I had organized the first twenty-four badly. There was probably some truth in that. Yet even a well-used day could end with something I was reluctant to leave: a book open near the middle, a conversation that had not exhausted itself, a walk that could have continued, a sentence that had finally begun to reveal where it wanted to go. The clock and I were often finished at different times.
That difference has become more noticeable as I have grown older. Not necessarily more frightening—simply more visible. There are things I once postponed easily that I am less inclined to postpone now. A thought worth following, a person worth listening to, a page worth reading, a few minutes outdoors before the light changes: none is particularly dramatic. Yet increasingly these are the things by which a day seems to acquire its size. Some days containing many hours leave almost nothing behind. A few minutes from another day may remain with us for the rest of our lives.
Late at night, however, none of this feels philosophical. The house is quiet. The books and papers are still where I left them. I sit down and pick up one of them. A paragraph may become another paragraph; a book may give way to a poem; English may yield to Urdu or Kashmiri and then circle back. For a while, I forget to ask what time it is.
Eventually my eyes become heavy.
I stop, even if the sentence does not.
Careful again not to wake anyone, I rise from the sofa and walk the few steps back toward the bedroom. Before leaving, I turn off the light. For a moment the study, the books, the papers, the poems and all the unfinished sentences disappear into darkness.
On the table, something is always left open.
The author is a Kashmir-born physician, poet and clinical researcher based in Virginia, United States. His writing brings together science, philosophy, literature and memory in exploring questions of human experience and the human condition. He can be reached at mansbal@yahoo.com.
