Kalyani Tupkary

Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

For most of recorded history, people have thought of people as the only ones that were someone. Well, they used to talk to Rocks, Rivers, and Trees, but they long forgot to do that ever since. This is a book about thinking about how the world is to all the someone’s that aren’t like you and I.

A map, in other words, is an arrangement of symbols into a system of meaning — and we use maps because we understand the language of signs that undergirds them. If the mapping of space was a human invention, she explained, one could also invent a means of mapping time. 

We live with these realities because they make the rest of our lives feel manageable. But time did not have to be arranged that way. We have  imagined  time, at least in Western countries, as subservient to commerce, and attempted to export or forcibly impose that understanding worldwide.