there is a special kind of loneliness that only the punctual know. not the loneliness of being left out, or being misunderstood but the specific, stomach-growling loneliness of standing outside a banquet hall at 7:58 pm, watching the halwai scratch his stomach, wondering if the tomatoes for the salad have even been unboxed yet. you arrived on time. you are, by every metric that matters to a functioning civiliation, doing the right thing. and yet, here you are alone, hungry, and somehow the idiot.
welcome to my life.
i have been punctual my entire life, not out of discipline or virtue, but because something in my brain treats every time commitment like a blood oath. and it started embarrassingly early.
right from childhood my parents have been obsessed with being punctual and they trained me and my brother around the same throughout.
to attend my college I would wake up at 6 am sometimes earlier, the kind of earlier that doesn’t have a good reason, then change three modes of transport, walk a stretch that no one who valued their knees would voluntarily walk, and arrive at college before half my classmates had turned off their alarms. these were people who lived ten minutes away. ten minutes. i had crossed rivers, negotiated with autowalas, and power-walked through crowded railway stations, and i still beat them there. every single morning. like a man possessed.
but here is the thing and this is the only part of the story where punctuality actually pays — the canteen uncle made bread pakoda in batches. fresh, hot, straight from the kadhai, the kind that burns your fingers and your tongue but even your burnt taste buds will cry out of happiness before getting a second degree burn. that first batch was mine. every morning, without fail, i got the bread pakoda while it was still making crackling sounds. the latecomers got the sad, slightly limp, second-batch ones that had been sitting out long enough to contemplate their existence. i never said anything about it. i didn’t need to. i just ate my fresh pakoda in the quiet dignity of a man who had earned something real.
the rest of college, though, was a different kind of arithmetic. my friends would make plans — “let’s hang after class, grab something, maybe catch a movie” and I would calculate, as I always did, backwards from the last local train home. I had what I now, having spent years in corporate life, can only call limited bandwidth. there was a hard stop. a non-negotiable deadline. the train did not care about your dinner plans. the train did not offer extensions. and so i missed things. dinners that turned into long evenings. spontaneous outings that happened just after I’d left. the kind of unplanned memories that don’t announce themselves. I’d get the WhatsApp recap the next morning. the photos, the inside jokes I wasn’t there for and I felt a specific kind of missing out that had no one to blame. I had different priorities back then. you win some, you lose some. the bread pakoda was worth it. mostly.
and there are people who are chronically, cheerfully, almost professionally late. they would say ‘let’s meet at 5’ with the confidence of people who had absolutely no intention of being there at 5. they would arrive at 5:40 looking like nothing had happened, because for them, nothing had. the plan was always ‘5’ the way a movie says U/A i.e. more of a guideline than a strict instruction. and when they finally showed up, glowing with the energy of people who had clearly not rushed, they would look at me already seated, slightly glazed, three sips into a nimbu paani and say ‘arre tu toh pehle hi aa gaya.’ (Hey! You arrived early) not as an apology. as an observation. the way you’d note the weather. and because I had a fixed time to go back, I ended up spending less time with them. not sure who was at loss in this scenario.
years have passed since college. I now pay taxes and watch geopolitical videos on YouTube thinking maybe that will help me predict what happens next. but some people with too much power always throw in a blinder. so maybe you’d think I would have learned. I have not.
the Indian wedding is where punctuality goes to be publicly humiliated. I know this. I have lived this. so this time, I told myself, I would be different. I did the mental work. I sat with the discomfort. I let the clock tick past the point where my left eye normally starts twitching. I did breathing exercises. I reminded myself that the card says 7 pm and the card is a work of ambitious fiction. I left twenty minutes late by my own standards, which meant I arrived at 7:20 pm, which I genuinely believed would mean the party would be in full swing.
and, the venue was empty. I was being naive.
not a few early arrivals empty. hauntingly, acoustically, photographically empty. a child was running in circles for no reason. the DJ was testing a bass frequency designed to rearrange internal organs. the flower arrangement people were still arguing about centerpieces. the chaat counter existed only in spirit — the physical chaat was nowhere. the paneer tikka was a rumour. the host saw me from across the lawn with an expression that said arre yaar, which is the north Indian way of saying why are you the way that you are. I did laps. I assessed every stall in the venue with the grim thoroughness of a man who has given up. I made extended eye contact with the mocktail guy, who was also just standing there, also staring into the middle distance, also wondering what had led to this moment. somewhere around my fourth lap, I found the halwai — actually sitting down, not even pretending to be ready gently massaging his own stomach, perhaps preparing himself spiritually for the evening ahead. the tomatoes were not cut. I knew this because I had watched them arrive in a bag fifteen minutes ago. eventually my people showed up, in the way that everyone in India always arrives — together, loud, impossibly energized for people who are an hour late and saw me standing there like a museum exhibit. bhai tu bhi na, they said, laughing, and somehow I was the odd one out. I, who had done breathing exercises. I, who had tried.
the crime is not lateness. the crime is hope. and I keep committing it.
the office at least rewards the disease. in one of the organisations I worked, me being a minute early to meetings was seen as a divine act. because normally hop on a call at 3 meant someone will be fumbling with their audio at 3:07, sharing the wrong screen at 3:11, asking ‘can everyone hear me?’ at 3:14. all this, while you have been there since 2:58, muted, camera on, ready, like an obedient golden retriever who has been promised walkies. and slowly, quietly, without doing anything spectacular, you become the person the manager doesn’t have to chase. the one whose name doesn’t come up in passive-aggressive all-hands comments. you didn’t move mountains. you just showed up when you said you would. the bar was underground and you stepped over it, on schedule, every time. it doesn’t make you famous. but it keeps you out of trouble, which in most Indian offices is basically the same thing.
so now I am trying to change. genuinely. I have read things. I have been told to embrace being fashionably late. I do breathing exercises when i am deliberately trying to leave late. I negotiate with my own nervous system. I tell myself the world will not end if i arrive at 7:10 instead of 6:55. and then I do all of that, and I still end up being the first one at the venue.
last year we made plans to meet at a friend’s house party, 80 kms from my place and I was running super late. I also took 10 minutes extra to figure out the way to his building. I arrived half and hour late and yet the first one in the party.
why, God! why?
and if, by some miracle, i am actually running late. say, if the auto didn’t come and the uber surged and the universe conspired, I will tell you a revised ETA. and I will honour it. because that is the one thing I cannot bring myself to do, the one line I will not cross, the one behaviour that separates me from the chaos:
I will not, under any circumstances, say bhai bas do minit ruk, paanch minit mein aaya. (Bro, wait for 2 minutes, I’ll come in 5!)
दो मिनट रुक
पाँच मिनट में आया
आखिर जल्दी पहुँच कर
तू ने क्या ही पाया?
नए लोगों से मिलने से
कतराता है?
तो भला आठ बजे के कार्यक्रम
में आठ ही बजे क्यों
पहुँच जाता है?
क्यों उठायी इतनी ज़हमत
समय से तैयार होने की?
अभी तो पगड़ियां भी नहीं
आयी थी बारातियों की।
मूर्ख है तू
जो उम्मीद पालता है
अपने मनपसंद मूवी को
आधे में छोड़ कर
तू गंतव्य तक भागता है।
क्या ही फायदा हुआ
समय से निकल कर
न तो सलाद
के टमाटर कटे
न हो पायेगा तेरा
फलाहार
अभी तो बस
तू पेट सहलाते
हलवाई को निहार।
यह सब करते करते
हो गए हैं बोर
नहीं मिल रहा कुछ
खाने को
कर लिए सारे स्टाल
एक्स्प्लोर
तो अब कर अपने उस
दोस्त को फ़ोन
जो इस बार फ़िर
मौके से नदारद है
“क्या रे लम्पट,
किधर पहुँच पाया?”
जवाब आया
भाई बस दो मिनट रुक
पाँच मिनट में आया।
Translated version:
Wait two minutes,
I’ll be there in five.
Tell me honestly
by reaching early,
what did you even derive?
You say meeting new people
makes you hesitate,
then why for an 8 PM function
do you land there
exactly at eight?
Why all this effort
to be ready on time?
The wedding party’s turbans
haven’t even arrived in line.
Fool that you are,
still clinging to hope,
you left your favorite movie midway
just to sprint to the venue
and awkwardly mope.
And what was the gain
in leaving on time?
Not even the salad tomatoes
have met the knife.
Your falahaar won’t happen,
not anytime soon,
for now just stand there
watching halwai
rubbing his stomach
while staring at the spoon.
Doing all this,
you’re bored to the core,
nothing to eat,
you’ve already explored
every single stall on the floor.
So now call that friend of yours,
that artist of delay,
who this time too
has vanished away.
“Where are you, you menace?
How far have you got?”
The answer comes back:
Bro, wait two minutes,
I’ll be there in five.
p.s. I am happy to report that I now arrive later than the expected time because I am married to a doctor for whom the duty always comes in between our plans so we act as per the time at hand and add to it the tiny human with us who is oblivious to the concept of time and you have me who is now late to events and get-togethers. they are higher in my priority list than being punctual. so I now attend events based on their schedules and the thought that I don’t have to be on time because of very good reasons, is very liberating!
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