MST: Muslim Standard Time
When planning things with my ethnic friends, I often have to calculate how late to show up for things. Weddings, as we all know, start an hour and a half later than they say they will; professional Muslim events will still plan for a 30 minute delay; hangouts with friends seem to be a window of time, rather than a set point, where you must be okay with people showing up and leaving as they please.
You can understand the difficulty, then, when suddenly it becomes necessary to shift this mindset to fit the Western world. There is no grace period for being late to meetings and dentist appointments; flight attendants will scorn you for being past the recommended boarding time, and buses and trains will just leave without you. Perhaps none of that is as bad as the roomful of eyes on you as you make your way through a 200-seat lecture hall, making your way up stair by stair to the back row, trying to make yourself invisible.
I know myself and I know that I simply will never be that “five minutes early is on time and on time is late” person. I always seem to be about five minutes late to everything, no matter how hard I try. It means putting up with a lot of those stares, sometimes accompanied by thinly veiled frustration and sighs. It means a lot of the same excuse of “traffic was so bad!” when you’ve taken the same route for four years, cringing as you hear it come out of your mouth.
This tendency to tardiness has come with a lot of self hatred over the years. There was always a discrepancy for me between functioning really well in this world, even rising to the top academically and being generally well liked at work, but that punctuality piece remained a huge barrier that continued to tarnish my professional record. It always felt like a sore spot where I perceived, accurately or not, the judgment of my peers and colleagues. I talked about it at length in therapy, wondering why I constantly put myself in situations where I’d be rushing on the road and putting myself and others at risk, instead of just getting out of the house ten minutes earlier.
This trip back to my homeland has helped me understand this discrepancy a lot clearer–and has started to pave a path of greater self compassion when it comes to lateness. Time is just more fluid on that side of the world. With very few things running on a schedule, the concept of appointments being foreign, with real traffic jams like nothing we’ve ever seen here, you just have to get used to the fact that things don’t run on time. Buses seem to depart when they’re full, not according to any timetable. A theoretically 15 minute commute can take a literal two hours in Dhaka traffic. Shops will randomly close in the middle the day to attend a family function. Folks will stop along the road to say hello and grab a cup of tea, with little regard for whether they’ll make it to the office “on time.”
And it’s nothing short of beautiful. It speaks to the commitment people have to being a good neighbour or friend, which far outweighs their commitment to industriousness. It’s a reminder that companies can still run and infrastructure still gets built and the world continues to turn without an annoyingly rigid compliance to timeliness.
And at the end of the day, it’s a gracious recognition of my two identities, conflictual at times but both very much alive, stubbornly rooted in the different aspects of my upbringing and contributing to what makes me me. Whether I like it or not, the brownness in me will always incline towards tardiness because of an expectation that others won’t mind if I’m late, and the whiteness in me will get frustrated if I do show up on time and am left waiting around for others. I will probably continue to grapple with the fact that lateness looks “unprofessional” and may hurt my career, but will try not to conflate that with some Western ideal being imposed on everyone. As with all things, I think the more I can accept that this conflict is there, and begin to understand what’s at odds, only then I can begin to tackle it.