Note.

It was a couple of hours before the noon on a Sunday. It was like any other bourgeois Sunday, filled with the smell of the Indian middle class, in particular, that one readily gets used to. There were laughters and naggings from the neighbourhood, a closely huddled universe of adjoining houses and lanes. The Sharmas, owing to the extra-ordinary amplitude that god had apparently blessed them with, were bickering as usual about the crisis that three lanes of the 'mohalla' now knew by heart. There was buzzing of seemingly a dozen thousand washing machines in the background, and sometimes the short-lived continuous beating of the bat on a cloth being washed. She could smell parathas and chai from every direction, a familiar smell that now was almost indistinguishable from normal air. All of this, all of these mundane rituals, she knew by rote. 

She stood in her balcony gazing at the giant mesh of cables and wires at the end of the street, tied on a pole that leaned dangerously on one side of the road. It was like a small colony of invertebrates, spreading in straight black serpentine lines in the middle of the air. Khemu, the newspaper guy, was delivering newspaper by hand today. He looked odd, because she could never imagine Khemu and not see him riding the symbol of the common man, his black Hero bicycle. Maybe the roughness of the road got to it, or maybe someone stole it from him. The day seemed to have become so much longer for him. She looked at the old green wrist watch she's been wearing for as long as she could remember, and something seemed to bother her so much that for a fraction of a moment she thought her spine froze but time had started to move so fast. In that fraction of a moment, a straight gush of wind broke her brittle skeletal structure and its pieces just seemed to scatter all over the floor. She did not know what sent that chill in her nerves, making the sparse hair on her un-waxed arm stand erect in the fright of that moment that seemed to linger on for an eternity. The fleeting horror made her realize that time was moving too fast and she wasn't. She doubted if she was moving at all.

The ticking of the lousy blue seconds hand became as audible as Mrs. Sharma's rants on her mother-in-law. Not just audible, she could see time running away beneath the scratched round glass of the flowery green dial. It was 15 years ago that her father had bought her the wrist watch from the little shop under the tree, and yet it felt like it was just yesterday. 

Time was moving too fast.