My six-year-old niece pronounces ‘entry’ as ‘en-try’; as with all little students, she’s been coaxed and pampered with the word, ‘try’. Soon there’s another word for her to read: ‘exit’. We are in a mall, where she’s tried to read the signages that announce shops and their intent. Both the words are unfamiliar to her — when I tell her their meanings, she’s surprised that ‘entry’ and ‘exit’ could be so close to each other, in parallel queues. I look at her — something inside me is coagulating into tears — it’ll take her a lifetime to understand and measure the distance between ‘entry’ and ‘exit’ in different spaces: homes, workplaces, relationships. I can’t tell her any of this, of course. She’s happy with a lollipop that she hopes will never ‘end’.

“How old is the lollipop inside my mouth?” she asks. “When is its birthday?”

Did questions such as these ever occur to those who imagined the calendar as a space to deposit and arrange their time? I say “deposit” because that is what it feels like to me — our insect-life of collecting time, involuntary and yet compulsive. For objects of a certain kind, architecture, and tradition, we use words that treat the accumulated years with the kind of reverence that financial institutions pay to interest earned on money. We are loathe to use such energetic words for humans and other living beings — time seems like a burden, an instinct that is held in a phrase such as ‘take years off’, as if it were something to rid oneself of, like disease. We are not art, which time allows the opportunity to marinate into something more than itself, to become what is called, for instance, a ‘classic’. We are machines, which, with ‘wear and tear’, lose efficiency and function — we have expiry dates. Does the calendar reflect that?

Time is like art — it has no compulsion to pay obeisance to efficiency. I sometimes wonder what the sense of a ‘year’ might have looked like had our form and constitution been like art. Imagine a year that derives its form from, say, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. What might the duration and the units of such a calendar be — day, week, month, year, what other units? What could a calendar look like if it had been structured from the same impulse as a lyric poem? Or the lifespan of a dream? Why does the imagination fail to think of time outside readymade units? To think of the life of a work of art as the length of a calendar year would distort most of the social apparatuses that keep institutions and the stock exchange in power. (Imagine, for instance, what would happen to the ‘school calendar’ if there was no time infrastructure of the kind that runs and codes our lives.)

The logic of calendars is an import from the seasons, the agricultural cycle, the shape and behaviour of the moon, the woman’s menstrual cycle (which leads us to speculate whether drafts of the kind of calendar we use might have been first created by women, a proposition put forward by the ethno-mathematician, Claudia Zaslavsky, by studying the Ishango Bone from 20,000 years ago), from cycles of abstention and immersion, attachment and detachment… In a calendar is a rhythm of work and pause, the spine bent working, the head surveying the horizon, the white breath amidst the blue and red traffic signs of numbers imprisoned in squares inside rectangles, as if Time was a Kandinsky canvas. Money, though, has no spine, nor does it need rest. It works tirelessly, even as we sleep — the market is its gym and, if the calendar were to be imagined into being today, its form would derive from the shrewdness of money, which knows neither end nor death, which reproduces by defying all documented manners of reproduction. The mall — and even the corporatised nursing home — feels like that too, indifferent to the pulse of work and waiting, life and leaving. Waiting for my mother’s appointment with a doctor in the geriatric wing of a clinic, I try to imagine an adult mayfly’s calendar, its lifespan of a day; I also think of Ginkgo biloba trees, some of which can live up to 3,000 years.

The calendar is art, conceptual art that compels us to imagine life and its obverse. It is art that is provocative, but, because it’s gentle and comes to us in the form and structure of numbers, we accept it with the kind of happy resignation that parents accept the growing height of their children. Having come to think of life as a continuous process of rehearsal, not necessarily as preparation but more as repetition, the occasional unease I feel about the calendar perhaps has to do with its form. The calendar rehearses death, but without the sound of crying. We are biologically conditioned to acknowledge the singularity of death; the calendar frustrates that attestation. Moments of grateful ebullience make us sprint towards phrases like ‘a second life’ — the calendar, by returning with variants of the same form, as if Time were a draft that needs annual editing, gives us an intimation of the end, while clarifying why we cannot use a phrase like ‘second death’. We think it is life that gives us our history. It is perhaps death that makes us belong to history. All history is a registering of death, of our extinction, as species and as individuals. It is not that we honour our commitment to history by dying, we only stop being employees of history by retiring from life.

Death must have an audience, like life does. That is why we spectate on the last night of the year, aware that, like the ‘entry’ and ‘exit’ signs on the malls, life and death are neighbours, like the 1st of January is to the 31st of December.

Sumana Roy is a poet and author