“Ah! Finally, the day has come, the Friday I have waited so many years for,” said a hoarse voice, breaking the dead silence of the night. Dead silence, for the place was desolate, and not a sound could be heard.
The voice continued, “Today is the day of reckoning, the day-”
“Not yet, at least not for me, I’m still two minutes away from midnight,” a squeaky voice interrupted.
A third voice joined, “What’re you talking about? It’s just before noon. Look, the sun is up.”
“Do we have to go through this every time? Every damn time?” The first voice sounded irritated. These two busybodies had stolen its thunder. It paused to control its exasperation, then said, “Sky, for the last time, this darkness you see around you is usually an indication of night, and the orb in the sky is the moon, not the sun. You’ll just have to take our word for that. And you, CEERI, what time is it now?”
“Midnight,” replied the squeaky voice, which belonged to CEERI, that is, the CEERI-facing face of the Clock Tower. The first voice belonged to the Lawn-facing face, and the third to the Sky-facing face.
“And what day is it?” asked Lawn smugly.
“Friday.”
“Yes. And now I shall continue with what I was saying. Today is the day of reckoning, the day-”
“And why exactly do you think I’m the one wrong, and not all three of you?” Sky could not resist breaking in. This was serious, could it be that it was actually night right now, and that he was not just three minutes behind CEERI but twelve HOURS and three minutes? He needed to settle this once and for all.
“Because you passed out one night,” Lawn looked disgusted, “and could be revived only the next morning. The time you showed while passed out was just slightly off the correct time of twelve hours later, and so they left you as you were, twelve hours behind. When you got up, you thought it was still night and you still had a chance with her, except that it was afternoon and CEERI had made significant inroads in science, and in her.”
At this point CEERI could not control his laughter any more, and bust forth. “Significant inroads, get it? D’you get it, Sky? Significant inroads,” he guffawed.
“Oh, shut up, will you,” was Sky’s response, though the resolve in his voice was not so firm any more. “So you say. Why am I supposed to believe it?”
“Don’t believe it,” said Lawn, giving him the “Logicaler than thou” look.
“Significant inroads! Boy was that funny,” CEERI repeated, tears of joy forming in his eyes.
Sky thought. It was his word against theirs. One against three.
“Signifi-”
“It’s not that funny,” he snapped.
“cant inroads.”
He gave up. He was getting tired: thinking a lot made him slower, and he was already very much behind time.
“No reply?” asked Lawn. “I thought so. Now. Where was I? Ah, yes. Today is the day of reckoning, the day-”
“Can this speech of yours wait till we get to some more comfortable time?” It was CEERI this time, “My arms are already aching and I’ve half a mind to make it six-thirty. Plus “significant inroads” was really funny and I can’t bear to listen to something boring after that.”
“No it can’t. This is a great occasion and I want all of you to know about it. Today is the day of reckoning, the day when I finally overtake her.”
Silence. Dumb silence. This was a indeed a momentous occasion. Lawn had been trying for years to overtake her, and now he was going to succeed.
“As you all know, I have been showing the same time as she has for the past couple of months. Ten minutes from now, I will finally overtake the loki, and be the fastest face in the Tower.”
“She” was the fourth face of the Clock Tower.
She had always been alienated from the others due to the fact that she had been made in Pilani and had grown up in the manners and customs of the village, while they were all educated gentleclocks from the city. When they had first met, the others had disregarded her, branding her a “loki”. They had been further enraged by the fact that she was ahead of all of them, four whole minutes ahead of the fastest of them, in fact.
But CEERI had been nice to her ever since that night; he was the only among them who spoke to her. And now she knew even he would stop, because the time had come when she could no longer hold her terrible secret. Everyone would come to know of it, and she would go back to being an outcast.
“It is time now,” she could hear Lawn saying. “CEERI, commence the Overtaking Ceremony.”
Ganga had never taken part in the Overtaking Ceremony. It had happened just once before, when CEERI had overtaken Sky, many years ago. Now she steeled herself for it.
CEERI began, “Do you, Overtaker Lawn-facing Face, assert that all your gears are in order?”
“I do,” Lawn’s voice was quavering with anticipation.
“Do you, Overtakee Ganga-facing Face, assert that all your gears are in order?”
“I do,” she replied.
“What time is it, Lawn-facing Face?”
“It is seventeen minutes past midnight, on the seventh Friday of the fifty-eighth year.”
“What time is it, Ganga-facing Face?”
“It is sixteen minutes past midnight,” cue a wide smile on Lawn’s face “on the seventh Saturday-”
“WHAT?!” shouted the other three in unison. “SATURDAY?”
“Yes, Saturday,” replied Ganga. “I was always more than a day ahead of all of you. But I never told you. You would have hated me more, would you not?”
Lawn was speechless. So many years of toil and sweat, all for this? To find out that he was not one second faster, but eighty-six thousand three hundred and ninety-nine seconds slower?
“I know defeat when I see it,” he said. “I guess I’ll just have to bide my time.” But no one was listening to him.
“Well, my secret is out,” Ganga addressed CEERI. “You know me for what I am, a poor small-town clock who is so bad at her job that she is a day off the correct time.”
“No, you’re just way ahead of your time, that’s what you are,” CEERI’s reply was unexpected and oil droplets of joy welled up in Ganga’s gears. Things were not turning out so bad after all.
“I still didn’t get one thing,” said Sky, who was, as has been amply demonstrated, a bit slow with these things. “There is a real time, right? Is any of us is showing it?”
-Nachiketa Adhikari, ’09, BE Computer Science, Pilani
This article was first published in BITS Pilani’s annual magazine, Cactus Flower in 2012.