I have often wondered what kind of reaction those people who study time get when asked what they do for a living and answer: “I am a horologist.”
In Trinidad I might even be asked: “Where you study? The University of Charlotte Street?” and Guyanese will immediately associate me with Tiger Bay. But even though I am not a horologist, I tend to be extremely punctilious about punctuality and get almost physically ill when I am a few minutes late.
I also become frustrated when I am kept waiting. During my tenure as a functionary in the office of a particular Prime Minister, I was summoned to his office on what I was told was extremely urgent business. I left the project I was completing, rushed through the downtown traffic and hustled into his office, only to be told by the secretary to wait because the “boss” was in another meeting. After half an hour I left and told the secretary that I was going back to my office and perhaps the Prime Minister could call me when he was available.
The Prime Minister got the message and subsequently, whenever he could not see me with the same urgency with which he summoned me, he always came out of his office and told me how much longer he would be. “If it was me,” one friend remarked, “I would have fired you.” I suppose this is a risk taken by all of us who insist on punctuality and respect. But I remember the wise words of a teacher when, during a transport “go-slow” in Trinidad, I arrived at school late and rushed into his class with a: “Sorry, Sir. I am a little bit late.”
His reply was characteristic of his humour-tinged sarcasm. “Monsieur Deyal,” he replied, “being a little bit late is like being a little bit pregnant. You are either pregnant or you’re not. You are late, not a little bit late, but late.” I would have liked to tell him that the reason I was late was that there were eight of us in the family but the alarm was set for seven.
However, for once, self-preservation jostled my love for “answering back” out of the way. I am, for a West Indian, embarrassingly punctual. I arrive at the homes of people five minutes early for a function to which I am invited, only to find the hostess in curlers and a duster and the host washing his car. Then I get the invariable smile and: “Boy, you early. I wasn’t expecting you so early,” followed by the grudging: “You want to come in?”
I would go to a carnival fete at the advertised time, only to find that there was nobody there, not even the DJ, until several hours after and by that time I was stoned anyway. Now I rush to get to the airline departure gate at the time that boarding is supposed to start, only to have to wait for another 40 minutes. Yet I masochistically persist in stressing myself out to arrive early and raise my blood pressure further in the frustration of having to wait.
I blame it all on my father. Regardless of how poor the people were in the little village in which we lived, every home had a Smith alarm clock (the same way almost every male had a Wilson hat and a pair of Technic shoes). Even if we had a grandfather clock, my father’s built-in timepiece was much more accurate. Regardless of what time he arrived home the night before, my father always woke up before the clock, which was permanently set for 4:30 a.m. There was no escaping the inevitable – he would materialise in the darkness and shake me awake.
My mother got up to make breakfast and lunch for both of us and I then walked about a half-mile to catch the bus to go to school. Despite all the clocks in our houses, watches on our wrists and time literally on our hands, in every Caribbean country time is a foreign magazine.
Kitchener, the calypsonian, sang, “Any time is Trinidad time,” but the same holds for all the other countries. It is the first thing you hear when you schedule an event and nobody turns up on time, even though you deliberately put an earlier starting time, knowing that people would come late.
They know when you say eight you really mean nine, so they could safely arrive at ten with the excuse: “Sorry to be a little bit late.”Even though one of my favourite excuses is: “Heidi Klum refused to untie me,” the story I like best is about the Trinidad businessman who fell asleep at his girlfriend’s place. When he woke up at four in the morning, he grabbed his cellphone and frantically dialled his wife, saying: “Don’t pay the ransom! Don’t pay the ransom! I escape!” Tony Deyal was last seen remembering the sadistic Swiss clock restorer who was so angry with a clock that refused to work, he tied it up, focused a searchlight on its face and snarled, menacingly: “Ve have vays of making you tock.”
