Chapter 1

He remembered lying in his cot, the pale morning light slipping through the slats of the wooden blinds. A yellow beam would creep across the floor, inch by inch, until it reached the leg of his mother’s chair. Then it would climb, slow and patient, until it touched her hands as she mended a shirt. That steady movement was time. He did not know the word for it then, but he watched it day after day, fascinated by a thing that never stopped.

There was the clock on the wall of the living room, a round white face with black numbers and two thin hands that moved in a quiet, relentless dance. The second hand jumped each tick with a soft click, like a heartbeat. His grandmother would point to it when he asked when dinner would be ready. “When the big hand reaches the six,” she would say. And he would sit and watch, waiting for the hand to travel that short distance, breathless with anticipation. The moment the hand touched the six, something shifted in the house: the clatter of pots, the smell of stew, the sound of chairs being pulled out. Time had spoken, and everyone obeyed.

As a toddler, he learned that time came in segments. Morning was for waking and eating porridge. Afternoon was for napping under the mango tree while the sun burned high and white. Evening was for stories and the soft glow of kerosene lamps. Night was for sleeping, though he often lay awake and listened to the crickets, wondering if time slept too. But it did not. The clock ticked on, and the moon moved across the window, and the world kept turning.

He grew older and began to notice the markings of days beyond the simple cycle. There was the ringing of the church bell on Sunday mornings, a deep sound that rolled across the compound and called people to prayer. There was the market day, when the dusty road swelled with traders and the air grew thick with the smell of dried fish and spices. Those were markers too, ways of carving time into recognizable chunks. And every single one, from the first dawn he could recall to the latest sunset, was built upon the use of time. He had never seen a day that did not rely on it.

At school, time became a strict teacher. The bell would ring at eight, and everyone had to be seated. Then again at ten, for break. Then at noon, for lunch. Then at three, for home. His life was sliced into periods, each with a purpose. Lateness meant punishment. The clock on the classroom wall was larger than the one at home, with a loud tick that echoed in the silence during exams. He learned to watch it, to measure his answers against the diminishing minutes. He learned that time could befriend you or abandon you, depending on how you used it.

But it was not just in clocks and bells. Time was in the way the old women sat in the shade, fanning themselves and talking slowly, as if they had all the time in the world. Time was in the way his mother’s hair turned gray, strand by strand, over the years. He noticed her hands growing more wrinkled, her steps a little slower. She used time differently now, he thought. She held it more carefully, as if it had become precious and fragile.

He thought about the sun too. It rose and set, rose and set, without fail. People said the sun was a clock, and he believed them. But the sun also told season, longer days and shorter, the rains coming and going. Time was not just hours and minutes. It was the cycle of planting and harvest, the dry months and the wet. It was the way the river swelled and then shrank again, leaving cracked mud behind. Everything around him spoke of time, and he listened.

One evening, when he was perhaps seven or eight, he sat on the veranda with his father. The sky was turning orange and purple, and the first stars were beginning to appear. He asked a question that had been forming in his mind for a long time. “If I look up at the stars, am I seeing them now, or am I seeing them from long ago?” His father was silent for a moment, then said that light takes time to travel, so the stars we see are already old. That idea filled him with wonder. Time was not just around him; it was wrapped up in the very fabric of the universe. It was a thread that connected everything: the past, the present, the distant stars.

That night he lay in bed and tried to imagine a day without time. He pictured the sun staying still, the clock hands frozen, people not growing older or younger. But his mind always circled back to the same conclusion: such a day could not exist. Since he was born, he had never seen a day that has not use time before. It was as certain as the ground beneath his feet. And yet, the more he tried to understand it, the more elusive it became. Time was a constant companion, but it was also a mystery, deep and wide as the night sky.

He fell asleep with the sound of the clock ticking softly from the living room, a sound that had accompanied every night of his life. And he dreamed of a river that flowed without end, carrying all the moments of his waking life, one after another, into an unseen horizon. He woke in the morning to the same yellow light sliding across the floor, to the same hum of activity, to the same steady use of time. Nothing had changed. But something in him had shifted. He was no longer just a child carried along by the current. He had begun to notice the river itself, to wonder where it came from and where it was going.

And that wondering, quiet and small as a seed, would grow roots deep into his heart. It would lead him through years of watching and waiting, through the small moments and the great, through the ordinary rhythm of days and the extraordinary revelations that sometimes came when you least expected them. For now, he simply rose and dressed and walked into the morning, aware that another day had begun, another stretch of time to be used. He did not know what he would do with it yet. But he knew it would be used, because it always was. And that certainty was both comforting and unsettling, a truth he could not escape and did not want to.

The power of time had already begun to work on him, shaping his thoughts, his memories, his very life. He had only to keep walking, keep watching, keep wondering. And he did, step by step, tick by tick, into the unknown that lay ahead.