Time for Time 

My friend Dhritvan goes to sleep every day after our class ends at 1:30 pm.

“It’s time for my afternoon nap!”, he exclaims. 

“This won’t work in corporate”, the rest of us tell him, as we squeeze around a tiny table, plates balanced on laps and elbows in each other’s food. 

I look forward to this ritual. A crowded cafeteria, thirteen of us squeezed onto one table. Every few minutes, we scootch to the left to make room for one more person. A couple of hands are always stealing something from my plate, as mine are from theirs. This quiet intimacy sustains me —Yes, of course you can take some cucumber. Please get me another roti. We have little to spare, a spoonful of achaar and these few minutes together. Of course, I’ll share them with you. 

The university-sanctioned break between classes did not always exist. We often would run across campus for a 1:40 pm class that would go on until 6:20 pm. This meant no lunch, no snacks, and no afternoon naps for Dhritvan. Time was out of our hands, and it continues to be, despite the tiny break. On the verge of graduating, I am still thinking about our jabs at the poor boy. How he “won’t survive the 9-to-5”. I wonder, though, will any of us? Meals like this one — slow and shared, are already a rarity. Time is slipping out from under me, from all of us. 

It is now 1:30am. The boys have left us to ourselves, off to get into their beds and sleep in another hostel building far far away. We forget they were ever here. Bottles cleared and cigarettes stubbed out; the dim lights melt on our skin like honey. Someone asks if we want to get crispy chicken momos from the bhaiya outside the hostel. Kriti’s laugh reverberates through the room and collective “shhhh”s are whispered to her. We have entered “quiet hours” in the hostel forms. It is silent until my eyes meet Kriti’s across the floor and we burst out laughing again. We have forgotten our deadlines, the pressures of work, and the 9-5’s that await us two weeks from now. For now it is just us and sweet honey lights on our skin. 

“Thoughts on crispy chicken momos?” Arayna tries again. Quiet hours are long forgotten. We squeal and jump and shout at the thought of warm food in our mouths. 

“Yes, yes, yes!”. Hungry girls are hard to keep quiet. 

We are bent over each other, holding our stomachs with joy and hunger. And time seems to stretch out – not forever – but at least till sunrise. My hand finds Neeru’s and we skip into the elevator and out of it too, skipping across the lawns to the momos bhaiya. He has probably heard us coming from a mile away, giggling and shouting. He knows just what these hungry girls need. 

I was not always a hungry girl. I remember not understanding hunger. Food was an annoyance at worst and sustenance at best. Why must we have to feed ourselves three times a day? And especially when there’s a submission tomorrow, who needs those last four hours of sleep? What a chore. This is a thought I come across often in college too, my fellow classmates are lost in submissions, deadlines, and projects. Bland lunches, saltless dinners and cheap coffee lend themselves to this mindset. But sometimes, someone still asks for extra chutney with her momos. Sometimes, someone insists on an afternoon nap. 

I stand next to the momo stall scrolling through Instagram. 

“How to optimize your mornings”. 

“5 hacks to fix your sleep cycle”. 

Scroll. Scroll. Do not suggest reels like this. Scroll. 

American art critic, Jonathan Crary, wrote in 2013 that sleep was capitalism’s final frontier—one of the few things we can’t buy or sell. “Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism”, he wrote. More than a decade later, things are shifting. Mouth tape, collagen masks, REM trackers—sleep is becoming a performance, a metric. Just like hunger. Just like friendship. Just like us. This is the burden we’ve inherited, down a long chain of generations that have struggled in order to afford this in the first place. 

But not tonight. Tonight, the oil from the momo stall is hot and the fury of the gas burns my eyes. I can already feel the crunch in my mouth and the heat that will immediately burn my tongue. The cold, dark air of the night makes us jumpy. A tapping foot, a rub on the back, everyone hugging their layers close to their chests. We blow out into the sky, bubbles of cold smoke, amused like children at the miracle of nature. 

For my birthday, the girls get me ramen packets and an egg. It is my favourite meal to eat in college — something I have survived on for four years on cold, hard nights when it comes as a much needed break. For theirs, I have decided I will gift them time too. Protein powder for Kriti, headphones for Amu, books for Neeru and sketchpens for Arayna. This is how I know you, this is how you want to spend your time. 

We live under the quiet pressure to maximise and optimise. And it’s not so quiet anymore. I find it haunting almost everything: our reels, our resumes, our relationships. We’ve become increasingly trained to produce and perform constantly — it’s hard not to find JEE terror stories at every turn and tales of mental health crises across colleges in India. Out here, in our final year of college, Amu’s teeth are chattering as she paces around, cold but beautiful. I take her into a hug, as tight and warm as possible. She tells me she can’t breathe and I reluctantly let go. The warmth helped me too. A hot plate arrives in our hands and we drool around it, waiting for the crispy tenderness to be passed around. The hungry girls are finally silent. 

Do you like it spicy?” Kriti asks Amu. She dips it into a hot chutney. 

“Of course. It is the only way to like it.” 

Kriti wears the same jacket she wore on the night we first met. Near the momo stall where we danced drunk on free time that only second years in college can have. Where we laughed and ran back to our rooms, full and laughing. In a few minutes we will hop back to our red bricked hostel building again, get into our cosy beds and sleep hungover, but not hungry. The momos stall bhaiya will shut shop and return tomorrow evening, for another day of feeding hungry girls and sometimes, the sleepy boys. 

I think of Dhritvan far far away, probably fast asleep by now. More than anything I think of his sleep as our last act of rebellion. Finding time to pause on a campus that is always in motion. I look at my friends gathered around something hot and shared. Making time for community, for friendship, for food and for sleep is a luxury and I am determined to never lose it. 

“This is what life is about!”, Neeru says to me, her mouth half open to cool the chicken inside. Her hand finds mine once more and we skip down the road, yelling goodnight to bhaiya and to the rest of the world that can hear us. Back in our rooms where we’ll dream sweet dreams of work-life balance and never ending lunches. 

Not everyone gets this. An empty road to walk down. A friend to hold. A moment to linger. 

Time for time. 

Neeru is right. It is a miracle we are here. This is what life is about.