Description
She has spent nineteen years keeping time for everyone else. Now she is counting down to her own.
For nearly two decades, Tehmina has been the quiet machinery behind other people’s lives. In Colaba she sells watches to people who can afford to be late. At home she keeps the schedule of a husband whose certainty has the force of law. Her only reprieve is a hidden hour each week in a Bandra garage, beside Ashish, a mechanic who has never asked her to be anything but herself.
Then her daughter, newly married and sharper than anyone expects, sees what Tehmina has hidden for ten years. Zoya doesn’t ask her to stop. She asks her to plan.
What follows is a countdown: twenty-five small, careful movements toward a door that Tehmina has never dared to open. Beyond it lies a new life of unfamiliar silence and surprising color, of ink and clay, small rebellions and unexpected friendships. But freedom, she soon learns, is not a single act of courage. It is a long practice, and it asks something of everyone who stands close. Old rules loosen, new bonds form, and the people she loves most start to want things she never imagined.
Set between the glass boutiques of Colaba and the oil-stained lanes of Bandra, and told through the language of watchmaking (mainsprings, tension, friction, time), Borrowed Seconds is a story of mothers and daughters, of what women inherit from one another, and of how hard it is to stop counting once you’ve learned to survive.
