Time Present And Time Past

Kaneshiro Takeshi’s especially endearing mute character in Wong Kar Wai’s Fallen Angels had said, in a voice-over, something about how there are many people whom you brush pass every day, and you’ll never know who would one day become a friend or confidant.

I find myself thinking about this after I start noticing how I sometimes cross a particular stranger’s path more than once, at times even within the span of an hour; I wonder if they consciously register the fact. Is there any deeper significance to it other than the probable reality that the world is getting smaller - or, rather, the Earth remains the same size, but there are more people on her than ever?

It occurs to me that whenever I brush pass somebody, the two of us are often traveling in opposite directions; they head towards where I’ve came from, and I to where they have left. This makes me think of the conversation I had with Germ many years ago about the directions in which our lives were paving out. It had seemed that he used to have the problems I was then having, and vice versa. One of us – I can’t remember which – had said, “It’s like, your past is my future, and my past is your future.” Where we were, then, would be the point at which our lives intersected.

I think only once in a while will one of these intersections lead to a convergence; most of the time, lives intersect only to later diverge. Sometimes, however, they would run parallel to each other for a time, close, almost touching - or, even, glancing each other at times – but never ever converging.

Once, as I was chatting online with Nish who was located in Mumbai, he had asked what time it was in New Zealand. I told him it was a little past twelve midnight in Welly, and asked what time it was in Mumbai. He told me it was a little past five in the afternoon. When I realized it with a start, I had hurriedly tapped it out: omg i’m already in your tomorrow!

At that time, it had seemed like the most amazing thing ever – to be in somebody’s tomorrow – because for a long time, I’d felt I was, and would have a place only, in everybody else’s yesterday.

I think I might be beginning to understand a little – if through rather solipsistic lenses - what T.S. Eliot might have been suggesting when he wrote: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” I could very possibly be wrong too, but time is, in a sense, both a tangible and intangible paradox; it must be opened to innumerable interpretations.

So maybe I brush pass a stranger walking in the opposite direction most of the time; maybe I walk into somebody’s past on an almost-daily basis and they into mine; and maybe my life’s path is filled with intersections that have preceded only divergences – a lot of maybes.

But there are still more maybes that I think are worth holding out hope for: maybe some – or even just one - of the strangers I’ve brushed pass really would one day turn out to be a friend; maybe at some point in time, I would be in the future of the people whose past I walk into nearly every day; and maybe the people – both strangers and friends - whose lives and mine have intersected and diverged, would one day have gone so far from me that I’d come to see them right in front of me.

(And even if the hope had been in vain, at very least, invoking the international time zones, I can be sure I’ll always be in somebody’s tomorrow.)