Time stands still: A jail mulaqat with Umar Khalid

It is the arid sameness of the desert that makes it difficult to navigate for a lost traveler. There is no reference point. It’s the same for people who have been in jail for a while: one loses precision in pinpointing time. That’s what my friend Umar Khalid said during one of our jail mulaqats.

It has been almost four years since he was put behind bars. When I thought about it on my way back from Tihar, I could sense more clearly what he meant. We say, “the day before we met last week” or “the week after she moved to Hyderabad”. That’s how we make timelines. We have different timelines with different sets of people – family, office colleagues, college friends. We have many points of reference to orient our lives as they are in motion.

But in jail, Umar said, after a point time becomes a lump, a blurr. That’s what the jail’s routine, monotony, and listlessness does. So, when one of the inmates returned after his two-week parole, Umar ended up asking, “How come you are back? It has hardly been a week!”

In jail, one starts to develop a very different relation with time. The measure of time is no longer...

Read more