Time marches on in Europe. And in my apartment in New York. But I know it stands still in my grandfather’s room. Silent, except for the click-clack of his alarm clock. It’s the least charming room in the 2-story house he, ironically, had built on Ataturk Block. He wore all white in those days. Cream, beige, off-white. Sometimes he wore a kameez for so long that the winter dust settled and transformed a crisp ivory to a sullen beige. 

My grandfather had a beard–a serious one unlike mine–styled after his forefathers, fashionable to a particular set of Muslim men molded from an ethos of Islamic revivalism. Uncomplicated, severe men he traveled most of his life with. Many of them have died, but their country strides on. My beard curves and turns in the same places his did. I look in the stained mirror: like staring at puddles on a broken-down road.

When I was a child, he delivered a solemn sermon at the blue tiled mosque every week. Later, we piled into the car, we picked up his friends and drove to Shah Jamal. A weekly event that was a flat, uneventful routine. He fulfilled it scrupulously yet indifferently, just as an alarm clock ticking, day in, day out. He couldn’t drive because of a car accident he had a decade before I was born. A reminder to myself: he had already lived a lifetime before me. 

I remember a sermon he gave on honesty–only truth sets the soul free, he declared. It stuck with me so deeply I refused to lie even when my mother tried to hide from an unwanted guest. She slapped me for my integrity, for blathering away the truth. In perfect contradiction. 

I thought: honesty requires articulation. Truth requires words. But perhaps truth–haqeeqat–was contained in my grandfather’s long silences that season, silences as thick as the smog congealing outside. Smog that blocked every road, that choked up any response, that devoured you in every corner of the city. Smog that made time stand still.

But I know that time has been still since she passed away. When I got the news in 2019–a hurried text message that our grandmother was in the hospital–I sat on the dining table until I couldn’t hear the city anymore. She passed away as soon as my mother boarded the plane back. We didn’t tell my mother until her plane landed. I don’t think I told myself the truth until then. 

At 82 years of age, my grandfather collapsed on the fluorescent emergency room floor in grief.  He was the first one to cry. He sobbed in ways that electrified the entire room, that I heard oceans and time zones away. At 82 years of age, he would collapse on the fluorescent emergency room floor in grief.

Losing an elder is losing a library. An index of warm days, shelves full of hands held. My grandmother spoke and pages unfolded. In Surah al-Asr, God declares: by Time, humanity is in perpetual loss. Only the Divine could take an oath on something that is admittedly dissolving. Time: a certainty, a gentle yet firm baton in our backs marching us to loss. To death. The only exception to this loss, al-Asr continues, are those who enjoin others in haqq–the truth. Libraries are but repositories of time. Pages unfold, time burns them away, but do we lose truth in the process? Can I recover truth when it’s held in silence, in unread letters, in noiseless sighs, in unvoiced prayers, in the background clicking of the alarm clock? 

My grandfather, if it’s not obvious yet, was a pious man, punctuating his days with the comings-and-goings of prayer, beseeching for the Almighty’s mercy. But perhaps he needed to ask for forgiveness in more material ways. Perhaps who needed to forgive him was the person he shared a bed with for fifty years. 

I pray for him, I hum for forgiveness. I’m always confused as to the object of my prayers, though. Perhaps I’d like to imagine he and I shared that confusion. How do you ask for forgiveness when you haven’t forgiven yourself? Like prostrating on sinking earth. By Time.  

When she died, and while my grandfather could still walk, he went to her grave every day for months. Until his body gave out. Until he was bed-ridden. By Time.

Sam Cooke maintains that his first love will be his last. “When I fall in love it will be for, forever yeah,” he croons. “When I give my heart it’s gonna be completely.” Did my grandmother give her heart completely or her body? Did she feel there was a difference? What does forever mean to a believer? I have a memory of sitting in her lap, oiling my hair with one hand, moving a ludo piece with the other. 

She was a devotee of Data Sahib for life. Growing up in the time-worn walled city, she would accompany her father to the sanctum of the city’s patron saint. Despite my grandfather, and his unbelief in shrines, she would go regularly. My grandfather gave her (in silence I imagine) the money to offer ceremonial food to the many who came to eat at the shrine. “Data saab de daware, baithe mangan de saare,” goes the Punjabi kalam, and I imagine she sat out there, pressed against the rose-drenched walls of the sepulcher, asking Data Sahibto listen. “Gallan dillan diyyan saare sunnaniyan,” Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan choruses against the heartbeats of the tabla. I tell him words from my heart. I sit in Data’s shrine (gender-segregated now), trying to imitate my grandmother. I eye hundreds of hands crescented in sacred exhortation, waiting for a signal. I press up against the white-tiled floor and I hope for the walls to talk back to me. And despite the silence, I hear earthquakes.  

Love is an action, not a packaged feeling. It lives, it moves, it’s something not only acknowledged but actualized. Just like hands with that week’s last remaining bank notes pressed against you in perfect contradiction, paying for something you condemned, told your friends you would never believe in. Love heals the wounds of the past. But what if the wound is too great? What if the dishonor is so large it closes the heart to that secular love? I don’t think she ever forgave him, no, not for that sin, not for infidelity. 

They wrote to each other, back when my grandfather could not afford to keep my grandmother with him when he was living in the northwest. He tore the letters up after she died. Perhaps he burned them? Some things remain between a husband and wife, he announced. My favorite character in my least favorite Murakami novel says: “Letters are just pieces of paper. Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.” Fuck that, I thought: I’m gonna rummage through the trash, take every stray piece of those letters, stitch them back together, sing the words back to life. And if he burned them? I’d make a library out of the ashes. That’s my grandmother, too.

My grandfather’s face would grow beet-red on hot days. Or if he ate something moderately spicy. If you encountered him on one of those days, he would seem deeply angry. Sometimes he was, but the anarchy was in not knowing. Inheritance is a devil; my mother received a fifth of the Ataturk Block house, I got two of his white kufis. Both of us got chronic cases of rosacea. 

I look in the mirror again and my skin is flushed. By Time.

My cousin’s two-year old child, untainted by time and unaware of death, would walk around the Ataturk Block house searching for my grandmother, retracing her steps, knowing where she sat. I remember taking that walk . Did my grandfather take that walk too? Did he walk in her footsteps, understand her routine? Would he follow his grandchild, and his great-grandchild?

My grandmother’s death was silent in New York. I’d wait for the LIRR train to pass next to my apartment every night at 1:32 a.m., 2:22 a.m., 3:02 a.m., counting each clamorous passage until my mother called me from smoggier skies. I caught glimpses of the noise during those frantic phone calls, the collective grief, choruses of prayers, the shock of men in my family crying. I wanted the city to make noise, I wanted to march into loss. 

When my grandfather died in 2020, no one could go back. I imagine that is the worst nightmare for a child in diaspora: the complete inability to return, transformed into an exile. The shock of a funeral on Zoom. I shared recordings that night on the family WhatsApp. Despite those winter silences, I had gotten him to speak about his life. On his deathbed, he revealed how he and his family hid Hindu refugees during the Partition over 70 years ago. In perfect contradiction. The day after, we performed virtual funerary rites over a laptop screen. A distant relative positioned the phone over my grandfather’s shrouded body. I looked at his face, every pixel brimming with noor. 

My last memory of my grandfather that season is of him lying on his deathbed, furiously scribbling Bulleh Shah lyrics on a post-it note. He was beet-red in the dead of winter. No confusion this time; I had written them wrongly. “Bulleya! baat sacci kadon rukdi ai?” When can the Truth ever be stopped? 

“Ek nuqte vich gal mukdi ai.” 

Love is a choice. One that seemingly many in my family could not make, did not make. You were right, Abu Jee, truth does set you free. But love also requires honesty. Love is abundant when you’re a believer. On a clear, smogless day, I see it raining down. 

I have grown comfortable in unknowing as a form of knowing. The truth is not in knowledge, but in being comfortable that the pursuit exists in multiplicity. It’s impossible to try and study every book in the library. But Time, that inescapable nuqta, is the impediment at the same time as it is a theophany. And it holds truths delicately even while burning others away. In perfect contradiction.

So, can I recover some truths when they’re held in silence? A reminder to myself: a library is also silent. And there’s still plenty to read.