The Two Clocks I Can’t Delete
I believe that the two clock phenomenon is common across all first-generation immigrants, like myself. For me, one says Santa Clara (US), the country I migrated to, and the other says New Delhi (India), the country I migrated from.
For years I told myself this was practical, but somewhere along the way I noticed something odd. I wasn’t checking the India clock to know what time it was there. I was checking it to know what time it was in me.
That’s the part nobody warns you about when you move your life across an ocean. You think you’re relocating for a job. In reality, you are actually relocating a self, and the self doesn’t travel well. Some of it lands. Some of it stays behind, standing at the old office building, waiting for a version of you that isn’t coming back for it.
I’ve done this thrice now. Once out, once back, and the second time out again. Each time I told myself the same lie, that this move was a correction, a return to normal, a settling of accounts. Each time I discovered normal had quietly redefined itself while I wasn’t looking, in both places, without asking my permission.
I’ve traded a complete citizen of one with a partial citizen of two places, and I used to think that was a loss. I’m no longer sure. A friend once told me half jokingly that immigrants don’t live in two countries, they live in the gap between them, and the gap is the only place they’re actually from, like a no man’s land.
I didn’t like that sentence the first time I heard it. I still don’t like it, but I understand it better now as I’ve had more than three decades to test it against my own life. The gap isn’t empty. It has its own weather, its own habits, its own strange comforts and the specific loneliness of being asked “so where are you really from” or “which country do you like better” by the people on both sides of the ocean, each convinced that the other side is the wrong answer.
There’s a version of me that would quickly try to turn it into an advice with five tips for staying rooted while you move, that sort of thing. I’m not going to write that version, because I don’t think it’s true. Roots aren’t something you try to engineer back into a place with journaling and video calls on Sundays. You just live long enough in the gap that the gap starts to feel less like a wound and more like a room you’ve furnished, even if badly, but furnished nonetheless.
What I’ve settled into, finally, isn’t India time or US time. It’s something closer to a third clock nobody else can read, set to no time zone in particular just the hour at which I stopped needing either place to fully claim myself back.
I still keep both clocks on my phone though. Not because I need them anymore. Because deleting them would mean admitting the gap is permanent. Most mornings I’m still not ready to admit that. Other mornings it’s the only honest thing I’ve got.