The Observer

 Kabir looked at his watch.

The second hand had stopped.

He waited, almost expecting it to move if he gave it enough time. It didn’t.

Across the office, Rhea was typing. A phone rang near the reception desk. Someone laughed in the conference room. Outside the window, a bus pulled away from the traffic signal.

Everything else was moving.

Only the watch had fallen silent.

Kabir turned his wrist towards the light. The silver case caught the afternoon sun. He held it close to his ear.

Nothing.

His grandfather had worn the watch for almost forty years. Kabir still remembered his hands winding it every evening, slowly and carefully, as though time could be persuaded to behave.

Three days before his grandfather died, he had taken the watch off and placed it in Kabir’s palm.

“Take care of it.”

Kabir laughed. “I’ll lose it.”

“You’ll lose many things,” his grandfather had said. “Don’t lose time.”

The memory passed.

Kabir looked at the watch again.

His chest had begun to tighten.

He loosened the top button of his shirt and tried to take a deeper breath. It stopped halfway.

Rhea noticed him from across the room.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

She watched him for another second.

“Coffee?”

He shook his head.

She nodded and went towards the pantry.

Kabir picked up his jacket.

“I’ll just be back,” he said, though she was already walking away.

The fire door closed behind him.

The stairwell was empty and cooler than the office. 

Kabir sat on the third step, elbows on his knees, trying to slow his breathing.

His phone buzzed.

Rhea.

Everything okay?

He read the message and locked the screen.

A small brown ant crossed the concrete floor, paused at the edge of a crack, and disappeared inside.

Kabir watched it go.

Lucky thing.

His fingers went into his jacket pocket. Instead of his handkerchief, they found a folded prescription.

He opened it.

His name was printed at the top.

Below it, the name of the medicine.

He folded the paper again.

For six months, he had been taking the little white tablets. They had helped sometimes. Other times they had seemed as useless as a locked door.

The doctor had given the problem a name.

Kabir had never found the name particularly useful.

The panic had no name when it arrived.

It simply arrived.

His breathing became harder.

He pressed his palms against his knees and waited for the feeling to pass.

It didn’t.

He stood up.

Then he walked out of the building.

The afternoon street hit him all at once.

Traffic. Horns. Voices. Heat rising from the pavement.

He walked without deciding where to go.

At the next crossing, a bus swept past him. A woman carrying groceries stopped beside a fruit cart. Two schoolboys were arguing about cricket.

Nobody knew that Kabir was struggling to breathe.

Nobody knew that, for the last few minutes, he had been frightened of something he could not see.

He kept walking.

The public library appeared ahead, slightly removed from the noise of the street. 

He climbed the wide granite steps and sat down. In the middle of the busy city, they felt like an island of peace. 

People were scattered around him—students with books, office workers eating lunch, an old man reading a newspaper.

No one paid him any attention.

That surprised him.

For months, panic had made him feel that everyone could see what was happening inside him.

Now, sitting there, he wondered if perhaps they had never seen anything at all.

The fear rose again.

His heart began to beat hard. His chest tightened.

The familiar thoughts followed.

You’re going to collapse.

You can’t breathe.

Something is wrong.

He knew these thoughts. He had heard them many times before, and usually he fought them, trying to convince himself that nothing was wrong. But that afternoon, sitting there exhausted, he had no strength left for the argument.

So he let the thoughts come.

You’re going to lose control.

He watched the thought pass without answering it.

You’ll never get better.

Another thought, just as familiar.

Something terrible is about to happen.

He did not try to push it away.

A little girl ran up the steps chasing a paper plane. It landed two steps below Kabir. She picked it up, looked at it, and ran back to her mother.

Kabir watched her.

His heart was still beating hard. His chest was still tight. Yet something had changed.

He was no longer listening to every thought as though it were a warning.

Traffic moved along the road below. A pigeon landed near his shoe and walked away. Somewhere behind him, someone turned a page.

Kabir could hear even that small sound.

For the first time in months, he was not trying to make his mind quiet. He was simply sitting there while it made its noise.

The thoughts came and went, but he no longer felt compelled to follow each one or fight it. He could observe them without being drawn into them.

And slowly, the noise began to matter less.

His breathing settled.

The tightness in his chest eased.

He looked towards the road.

The sun had begun to move lower, touching the glass buildings with a warm, fading light.

He had spent so much time trying to get rid of his thoughts that he had never considered simply letting them pass.

Perhaps they were not instructions.

Perhaps they were only impressions.

He didn’t know.

For once, he was willing to leave the question unanswered.

Something brushed against his wrist.

A faint sound.

Tick.

Kabir looked down.

The second hand had moved.

He stared at it.

Another tick.

Then another.

The watch was moving again.

He smiled.

Not because he understood it.

He didn’t.

It had stopped before. It had started again before. Always at the strangest times.

He remembered his grandfather’s hands, turning the little crown at the side of the watch.

Don’t lose time.

Kabir slipped the watch beneath his cuff.

The evening traffic had begun to thicken. People were going home.

He stood and walked down the library steps.

The city had not changed.

Neither had the watch.

Perhaps the only thing that had changed was the way he was looking at both.

He reached the pavement and stopped for a moment.

The watch ticked quietly beneath his sleeve.

It never stopped again.

***