Who Knows Where the Time Goes?
Chitra Ramaswamy
1. Recently, I was compelled by the facts of life (by which I mean death) to put on my shoes and walk, often for hours at a time, in any direction my feet took me. My children would go to school in the morning and I would close the front door behind me as if it were the lid of a container and set off, striding as if I were not set in motion by aimlessness but genuinely had somewhere to be. Along the way, at certain junctures in the city, I watched earlier, lighter versions of myself
at the window of a cafe with a friend, heads thrown back, throats aloft, laughing
popping into a shop to buy a bunch of coriander and being asked by the (Pakistani) owner – ‘Indian?’
standing by a Scots elm on the border of the Links while the
dog sniffed the rich parts where the roots meet the earth
pausing at the place on the corner of Leith Walk and
Dalmeny Street where my daughter turned the
small flower of her face up to mine and
said something devastating and true
that has slipped my mind, but
it’s interesting how the
spot is marked nonetheless.
I felt there was no point to this walking, or rather the point was only to fill the egg timer with sand, then flip it and fill it once again, and keep doing this until my feet got sore (which eventually happened; I now have Achilles tendonitis, which is not a metaphor, but also, like many non-metaphors kind of is), or I had to pick up my children from school, or the time ran out. Look, I was walking because I had lost my hold on time. It felt literal – I could no longer seize the day. And if a person is lost it’s only reasonable that they would try to find their way.
2. Over time, and many hours of walking, I came to understand that those walks were not walks at all. They were conversations with the past. My own, mostly.
3. After a few weeks I realised a song had earwormed its way into my mind – ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’, specifically the sparse, tremulous, exquisitely melancholic live version sung by Nina Simone in New York’s Philharmonic Hall, in the autumn of 1969. But Americans don’t call it autumn. They call it fall.
4. Falling ought to be a synonym for grieving. We fall in love after all.
5. In 1969 Nina Simone was at the height of her powers. The prodigious little girl blue who had taken up the piano before her feet reached the pedals, who funded her own classical training using the proceeds from her first album, who would have been a world class concert pianist if it were not for the poison of racism she and her fellow African Americans were repeatedly force-fed, and are still being force-fed, was 36. The previous year she had performed ‘Mississippi Goddam’ at a concert three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In five more years she would leave the US for good, first for Liberia, then Europe. She called it self-imposed exile. The truth is her country’s racism made it impossible for her to stay. ‘I have no thought of leaving,’ Simone sang on that hard-won stage. ‘I do not count the time’.
6. One of the most insidious aspects of racism is that we who are force-fed it must pretend it hasn’t made us sick. There was no word for gaslighting in 1969, which must have made the experience of it even stronger.
7. The older I get, the more important I think it is to locate people in the place-holder of history. What are we made of, if not time?
8. Nina Simone wrote ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ in response to the murder of four young black girls in a Birmingham, Alabama, church by a white supremacist on September 15, 1963. Upon hearing of the murders, as well as lamenting the recent gunning down of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi, Nina Simone went round her home gathering a bunch of materials to make a gun. Her husband, upon finding her in a state of such desperation, reminded her who she was. ‘You’re a musician,’ he said. And so Nina Simone went to her piano and wrote the most exhilarating protest song of all time in a single sitting. Lesson learned? A song can be a gun, too.
9. A song is the antithesis of a gun.
10. It is strange that we have become a people who count steps. From kitchen to bedroom, bathroom to front door, home to school, supermarket to station, all the while racking up steps as if they were seconds for bargaining with that could be tacked on to a life. I refuse to allow my walking to be tracked by a watch, phone, app, some maniacal Silicon Valley tech bro, or capitalism. Like Nina Simone, and Sandy Denny, who wrote ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’, I do not count the time.
11. Everyone counts the time.
12. The very last song that Sandy Denny sang on stage, in a performance at her local school fundraiser in London on November 27, 1977, before she died the following April at the age of 31, was ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’
13. A walk is like an essay. Like life itself. It can take you anywhere.
14. While I was walking I was searching for moments of pure tenderness that were not noted at the time. I think this may be how I count the time.
15. In the recorded pre/amble on October 26, 1969, before Nina Simone started singing ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’, she talked about how tired she was and how the attempt to give people what they want is a mistake. “You use up everything you got trying to give everybody what they want,” Nina Simone said. The crowd, quite rightly, cheered. Then she introduced ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’ She called it “a reflective tune” that goes past all racial conflict, all kinds of conflict. “And at some time in your life, said Nina Simone, who happened to be poised almost precisely in the middle of her own life, “you will have occasion to say what is this thing called time?”
16. Listen, now, to Nina Simone singing ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’, preferably on a long digressive walk in what you hope to be the precise middle of your life, its summit, though you feel you are falling. Listen to the soft irony with which Nina Simone sings the words ‘I do not fear time’. It is the sole crest of defiance in a sea of mourning. It is true and not true at the same time. It is the most beautiful rendering of what it feels like, at a certain point in your own timeline, to be alive. It is the way Nina Simone sings ‘time’.
17. At that particular time, I may have been reading Miranda July’s All Fours too much.
18. On those walks I saw many small uneventful events that went towards my mending. None of them were about me. I watched people with their earbuds in, plugged into their own losses, doing the most heroic work of survival while apparently walking up Great Junction Street for a bus. I saw mothers pushing buggies with screaming babies inside. I saw trans women with devastatingly neat hairstyles and glossy lips refusing to be force-fed the poison that they don’t exist. I saw people drinking from coffee cups with their names written on them. I saw old women in saris who looked, even a little, like my mother. I wanted to fall down.
19. I was, for a time, unbearably moved by life. It was terrible to be in such a skinless state – I was so frightened I could not watch, read, or listen to anything I did not already know for fear of what it might do to me – but it was also the one road to recovery. So I walked it.
20. When we walk we are trying to leave behind the things that have broken us.
21. Thoughts fall and rise when you walk. Most are lost for good. A few, thank god, stay the distance. Here is one that arose while listening, as I was falling in the fall of 2024, to Nina Simone, in the fall of 1969, sing ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’ Those of us who don’t belong anywhere have only people (and dogs) to whom we can attach. And when those people (and dogs) die we are lost, temporarily unhooked from our own lives, with nowhere to go but outside, into the city, for a walk.
22. What is this thing called time?
First published in Issue #32
Chitra Ramaswamy’s latest book Homelands: the story of a friendship (Canongate) won the Saltire Non-fiction Book of the Year Award. She is from London and lives in Edinburgh.