When I woke up in the back of a car, barely a meter away from the window, I saw a family riding a single motorbike. The wife, holding two children between her belly and her husband's back, smiled at me and said, "हम देर से पहुंचेंगे। जल्दी करो" (hum der se pahunchengé. jaldi karo). I asked the driver to translate. He repeated in English, “We are going to arrive late. Hurry.”

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Whether she was speaking to her husband or to me does not matter. I would rather not know. Whether it was a dream or not does not matter either. At that moment in my life, I was looking for a sense of direction, and I received a call of action; “We are going to arrive late. Hurry.”

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From that ride onwards, time, rather than space, would be my guide to understanding my position in the world. Since then, this Indian sentence, now alchemized into a proverb, has become my shadow.