Non-Time

Last Sunday, my friends and I spent an hour waiting for a table at a cafe. Weekend breakfasts have become something of a ritual for us, and we gather in one of the many chic eateries in Bandra to spend a pleasant morning gobbling eggs and guzzling coffee. (Some of my friends prefer matcha, but I do not judge them. We all have our flaws. Besides, as you get older, it becomes harder to make new friends so you make allowances for the set you’ve been saddled with. Better to overlook their moral failings than hunting anew for company.)

At 9:25 AM, when we reached the cafe, the floor manager told us it’d be a ten-minute wait. A family had finished their meal and were halfway through dessert — as soon as they cleared the bill their table would be ours. Ten minutes didn’t sound too bad. We stood in the narrow vestibule, taking care not to elbow the other people crammed into that space. After fifteen minutes, we made polite enquiries of the manager. More dessert had been ordered, we were told. Diabetes was clearly not a concern with this lot, though you did worry about their coronary health.

When half an hour had passed, one of our party went inside to do a recce. With every table occupied, and over half a dozen hungry folks fidgeting in the foyer, you’d expect the patrons wouldn’t linger. But the family of six seated at our table — for in the name of justice and fairness, that table now belonged to us — seemed oblivious to their surroundings. They sat chatting and gave no indication that they ever intended to leave, as if they were cockroaches and even the nuclear winter after the apocalypse would find them still sitting there, glued to their chairs.

To his credit, the manager walked over to them and dropped a few polite hints. Not a single one worked. So, we took matters into our hands and decided to stare them into eviction. One after another, we walked in and locked eyes with the occupiers and tried to convey our annoyance through our glares. When it was my turn, a balding, middle-aged man met my gaze. I narrowed my eyes and let my lips form a grim line. With a dramatic flourish, I raised my wrist up to my face and glanced at my watch. Then, I looked at the man again. I was certain this mime act would leave him devastated and he would scurry away mumbling apologies. Instead, he regarded me without a flicker of emotion, staying true to the years of desensitization training he had received as a terrorist. I decided to try my luck with the elderly woman sitting next to him. She had a beverage in front of her, and given the family’s depravity I half expected it to be matcha. But I was wrong. It looked like a chocolate milkshake. (I imagine their cardiologist has a thriving business.) She was too busy sipping her drink to notice me, so I abandoned my vigil. Defeated, we could do little but wait.

It was nearing 10:30 AM, when that swarm of locusts finally left. As we settled around our table, and ordered everything on the menu, I wondered what proportion of our lives we spend in limbo, and how many hours are devoted to doing nothing except waiting to be somewhere or to do something.

In the 1990s, the French anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term ‘non-places’ to describe functional spaces we inhabit for a brief while, as we pass through them to go elsewhere. These are places we encounter as anonymous individuals and with which we do not share any intimate relationship. We enter these ‘non-places’, Augé wrote, ‘when we are driving down the motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sitting in an airport lounge’. In this framing, a non-place is defined by the attributes it does not possess: a historical connection to the identity of individuals, and communities, residing in one location.

This notion of the non-place made me wonder if there existed any sociological discourse around the time that we spend just, you know, waiting. Waiting at the Passport Seva Kendra. Waiting at a traffic junction for the light to turn green, unless you drive a Toyota Fortuner and are thus incapable of following rules. Or waiting in queue on a sweltering afternoon — perhaps because you were dropped on your head as a child — to eat benne dosa. Was there a theory accounting for all these lost hours?

I began rummaging around the internet to see what brighter minds than mine had to say on the subject. My research led me to Mark Fisher, the concept of ‘thick time’, and this nugget of sparkling prose in a journal article:

Through an appreciation of the dynamic nature of temporality, this essay charts a journey through the relative in/activities embodied through waiting and concludes that waiting as an event should be conceptualised not solely as an active achievement or passive acquiescence but as a variegated affective complex where experience folds through and emerges from a multitude of different planes.1

This single sentence was enough to make me abandon my inquiry, and I decided to use the term ‘non-time’ to describe those in-between periods we spend in suspension. I’m sure Monsieur Augé wouldn’t mind.

Non-time is nothing new, of course. It was a feature of my childhood too. There were the spells in clinic waiting-rooms, for instance, spent dreading the moment I’d be stabbed with a vaccine injection. I cannot remember what was worse: The finale when the doctor would daub the inside of my elbow with isopropyl alcohol, and aim a needle at veins that were throbbing in panic; or the anxious prelude in the anteroom, where I’d twitch in my seat and hear muffled cries from the doctor’s chamber. I often wondered during those visits if hepatitis was really all that terrible.

But not all waiting was harrowing. The hours devoted to queuing up outside Durga Pujo pandals never felt like a waste. In fact, they were part of the experience, something that added to the festive spirit. Every organiser knew that miles of bamboo barricades, radiating out from the pandal like a tangle of cobwebs, were de rigueur for a pujo that took itself seriously. Visitors had to be herded into these narrow lanes to lend gravitas to the enterprise. Why permit people to walk in comfort when you can make them jostle in a mosh pit? The Awards Committee that ranked the pujos in town took careful note of these things. You got extra points if your crowd management techniques made people faint.

And so, we would shuffle along as part of a heaving column, sweating through our new clothes and stepping on someone’s new shoes. Along the way, volunteers would stem our tide with ropes, and our cattle-like progress would pause for a while. To adolescents like us these pauses were a gift — they allowed us to scan our surroundings for cute girls we would never have the nerve to approach. Eventually, after an hour or so, we would enter the pandal, give the interiors a quick scan, do the pronaam, and exit — all in less than two minutes. This system meant we would visit five, maybe six, pandals before exhaustion forced us to tap out. The following night, though, we’d be back, ready to do it all over again. The idea of non-time never crossed my mind then, perhaps because I perceived time differently.

When I was a child, time never seemed to be in short supply. I was conscious of its passing, sure, but I didn’t think of it as an exhaustible resource. The future appeared to contain endless spools of time, so its use in the present did not merit prudent rationing. I could spend it any damn way I pleased, and that included daydreaming elaborate scenarios in which I had the ability to fly or turn invisible. (It’s the same with money, you’ll note. Once you have too much of it, you have to come up with novel ways to spend it — and the world ends up having to see Lionel Messi doing aarti.)

But as I got older, I discovered that time is frighteningly finite. It also seems to be passing at a faster rate, a feeling that studies have confirmed as a common experience among many people. According to one theory, this ‘misalignment’ between clock-time and our perception of it is owed to our brain’s declining ability to process images. Younger minds are able to create more mental images per unit of time, making memories of our childhood feel dense and expansive. As we age, however, our speed of processing visual information slows down, generating fewer ‘frames-per-second’ and creating the impression that time is moving more swiftly.

Whatever be the explanation, this perception is a lived reality. Our days have become a blur, one Zoom meeting bleeding into another. Weekends disappear in the blink of an eye and the months continue their relentless march like a column of pig-headed ants. Before you know it, you’re deep inside 2026 wondering what the fuck just happened.

We recognise this as a problem and are desperate to slow…. things…. down. We know we need to salvage the situation. So we sign up for meditation workshops and spend an hour stealing peeks to see if anyone else feels as restless. We resolve to be mindful, right after we’ve watched just one more reel. And after a tiring day, when sleep is all we crave, we force ourselves to stay awake to reclaim some me-time, so we can start the next morning not only with fatigue but also self-loathing.2

And yet, even as we tackle this crisis and strive to make better use of our days, non-time continues to occupy large chunks of our lives. With so little free time to spare, we keep frittering it away. Sometimes — say, with traffic jams — the loss of hours is not in our control. But when we line up in front of restaurants and cafes, the ones that have been blowing up on Instagram, we choose non-time. Perhaps we make this choice because we value the meal (and the pictures) more than the time we squander in a queue. Perhaps we figure that a ten-minute wait is tolerable. And perhaps we expect that the people seated inside will not take an hour to drink their bloody milkshake and leave the bloody table.