Journey by Debasis Patra

In the hill village of Jyotipur, where the river bent twice before reaching the paddy fields, there lived a clockmaker named Anil, and he had a question that would not leave him alone.

It began in the morning when his granddaughter Mira, six years old, held up her hand and asked, “Dada, who made my hand?”

He answered the way he had been answered as a child. “God made it.”

“Then who made God?”

Anil opened his mouth and found nothing in it. He laughed, patted her head and sent her to play. But that night, bent over a pocket watch he had repaired a hundred times, he could not stop turning her question over, the way he turned a gear to see whether its teeth were true.

The next morning he walked to the river and sat beside Devi, the old schoolteacher, who fed the fish every day at dawn.

“Devi-ji, a child asked me who made God. I had no answer.”

Devi kept scattering crumbs. “Because the question assumes God is a clockmaker. Someone who stands outside the clock, builds it, and walks away.”

“Isn’t that what a creator is?”

“Look at your own watch. Tell me, when does the spring cause the gear to turn?”

Anil frowned. “When it unwinds.”

“Before the gear turns, or as it turns?”

He watched a fish rise and break the surface. “As it turns. The spring and the turning are one motion. And the time on the dial is what the motion shows.”

“Cause, effect and result,” Devi said, “and you cannot pull one out without stopping the others. Now ask yourself: you say the spring comes before the turning. Before is a word about time. But time is something your watch measures only once it is running.”

Anil sat quietly. “Then what was there before the watch began?”

Devi smiled. “Perhaps ‘before’ is a word that only works inside a watch.”

That evening a storm closed the valley, and the village gathered in the temple hall. Anil told the others what Devi had said. Raghu, the young doctor home from the city, shook his head.

“That is poetry, not proof. Show me the evidence.”

“I do not have it,” Devi admitted, “and I will not pretend to. I say only that the idea fits what we see, and I mark clearly what I do not know. Why the world takes shape at all, why this universe and not another, I cannot say.”

“Another?”

“Possibly. Our universe may be one result among many. A watch can stop. This one may one day wind down. But the winding and the turning and the time they show would not stop being what they are because one watch stopped.”

Raghu leaned back. “Then God is only a word for all that?”

“A kind word,” said Devi. “People need something to hold in the dark. I do not take that from them. I only ask that we not pretend the word has a face, or wants, or keeps accounts on us.”

A woman near the door spoke up. “And karma? My mother said what we do comes back to us.”

“Things we do have consequences,” Devi said. “That much is true and worth living by. But no judge sits above the river counting. A farmer who is kind may still lose his crop to a flood. The river does not hate him.”

It was Raghu who asked the hardest question, long after midnight, when most of the others had fallen asleep.

“If there is no fixed self, no permanent soul, then who am I? Who is deciding what I do?”

Devi took out an old photograph of a boy standing by a school gate. “This is me, fifty years ago. Is he the same person who sits here?”

Raghu studied it. “In a way.”

“Not one cell is the same. Not one belief. I remember that day, but my memory has been rewritten each time I told it. And yet I am connected to him. I am what that boy became, the way the river at the delta is what the river at the hills became.”

“So the self is a river, not a stone.”

“A process of the whole body,” said Devi. “Hands, heart, years, village, everything.”

“Then I am not free,” Raghu said. “What I want was shaped by things I never chose.”

“True. You did not choose your wants. But you can notice them, weigh them, put them against what you value, and act on the weighing. That is freedom enough to be responsible for. You are not a ghost above the machinery. You are the machinery learning to steer itself.”

Raghu said nothing for a long moment.

The storm passed by dawn. Anil walked home across wet fields, and Mira was waiting on the step, holding up her hand again.

“Dada, did you find out who made it?”

He knelt and took her small hand in his. He thought of the spring and the gear, of the river and the delta, of a boy by a school gate.

“I do not think it was made to you, Mira, the way I make a watch. I think your hand is a part of everything that is, just as a nail is a part of a finger. The same existence that is in the river and the stars has become, for a little while, a girl who is curious about her own hand.”

Mira thought about it seriously. “So the world is looking at itself through me?”

Anil blinked. He had not said it so well, even to himself.

“Something like that,” he said. “But there is much we still do not understand. Shall we keep asking?”

She grinned and held up the other hand. “Who made this one?”

And the clockmaker laughed, truly laughed, and began again.

Debasis Patra