The Man Who Kept Time

He never wore a watch.

Didn’t own a cell phone. Didn’t have a wall clock in his living room. My grandfather, Abbas, was the only person I knew who lived without measuring time — and yet, somehow, he was never late.

Every day, like clockwork, he rose with the birds and sat on the porch with his tea. He knew when the postman would arrive, when the afternoon wind would sweep through the trees, and when the street dogs would start their evening patrol. He didn’t need numbers. He listened to the world instead.

As a child, I found this fascinating. “Dada,” I asked once, “how do you know what time it is if you don’t look at a clock?”

He smiled, pulled me close, and whispered, “Because time tells me.”

I laughed. I was only ten. I didn’t understand what he meant.

But over the years, I started to notice something.

When my parents rushed through traffic, horns blaring and tension mounting, he would sit calmly in the backseat, eyes half-closed, whispering verses under his breath. When the power went out, he lit a candle and continued reading without pause. He never worried about deadlines or delays. He was the slowest walker in the family — and yet, somehow, the first to arrive at every family gathering.

It wasn’t laziness. It was presence.

He had been a schoolteacher for 40 years. He taught Urdu literature and philosophy. But after retirement, he quietly withdrew into a life most people would call uneventful: tending a small garden, feeding crows, mending his own shoes. He wore the same three kurta pajamas, washed by hand and hung in the sun. He never owned anything new, but everything he had was clean, cared for, and precise.

Then one winter morning, he didn’t come out to the porch.

We waited. Hours passed. My father knocked gently, then entered. I remember the sound of my mother’s gasp when he came out with tears in his eyes. Dada had passed in his sleep — hands folded on his chest, a small book open beside him. He looked like he had simply drifted out of the moment.

Later, we found his notebook. Just one. Inside, pages and pages of handwritten notes: quotes, reflections, verses of poetry, even lists of people he had met and kind things they had done. There were no complaints. No regrets. Just soft observations about the world:

“Time is not in clocks. It is in footsteps.”

“Today, a child smiled at me in the market. I felt light for an hour.”

“We don’t lose people. They become part of the silence.”

That last line haunts me still.

It has been five years since he left us, and I still find myself checking the time the way he did — not by glancing at a screen, but by asking, how does the world feel right now? Is the sun warm? Are the birds quiet? Is it time to listen instead of speak?

My grandfather never rushed, but he never wasted a moment. He lived with the kind of awareness that most people only find after losing something. And maybe that was his secret: he treated every day as something already lost — and therefore, more precious.

I wear a watch now, but I don’t always check it. Some days, I leave my phone inside and sit on the porch like he did. The silence has its own rhythm. If you listen long enough, it tells you when to move. When to rest. When to simply be.

Dada never taught me how to chase time. He taught me how to keep it — in small moments, soft words, and the way sunlight slants through leaves at 4 p.m.

That’s how I remember him.

Not by the hour.

But by the quiet.