The room was wrapped in whiteness—a pale, devouring whiteness that slowly swallowed every color, as though time itself had been bleaching the walls. It was not the whiteness of purity, but of emptiness: a quiet sadness settling in layers, year after year.
Near the window, a wall clock ticked with the same rhythm it had followed for decades. Its sound was steady yet fractured, as if each tick marked not a second, but an entire generation. Time did not pass there; it accumulated. It paused, then moved again, burdened with meaning.
He sat on a chair beneath it, his shoulders curved inward—not from weakness alone, but from age itself, from years that had bent his body under their weight. His eyes carried a deeper heaviness: the exhaustion of unchosen paths, of possibilities once imagined and quietly abandoned.
In front of him stood a boy—beautiful, radiant—standing at the peak of youth, at that fragile moment when a man believes the world has just opened for him.
“I’m grown up now,” the boy said. “Times have changed. You can’t force me. I want to live my life. I don’t want to marry yet. I need to build my career. I want to travel, build my dream house, buy luxury cars, live a luxurious life. I don’t want to carry responsibilities. I don’t want this middle-class life.”
The old father looked at him, his eyes moist, trembling between love and fear. Slowly, he pointed toward the mobile phone in the boy’s hand.
“Then what is this?” he asked quietly.
The boy smiled—a sharp arrogance, a pride poisoned by display and validation.
“Just entertainment,” he said. “Time pass.”
The father turned his gaze away, overcome by grief and a sudden, piercing realization. He looked out the window at the blue sky, and memories flooded his mind.
This cramped house, where stars were invisible and seasons unnoticed, had once been a home with a wide yard. Birds used to chatter there. Sunlight spilled across the ground, bouncing off walls and brightening the mornings. In the evenings, he would lie on a charpai—a simple woven bed—beside his own father, listening to stories spoken so gently they seemed to slow time itself, stories that lifted the heart and made life feel meaningful.
His father used to tell him that at twenty, he had carried the responsibility of his family on his shoulders—not as a burden, but like a cart he pulled willingly. Without complaint, without calculation, he accepted it and still lived fully. He believed that everything belongs to its right time.
His children became his strength as he aged. Though his hair turned white, he never grew lonely. Even in old age, laughter surrounded him; voices kept him alive. Back then, the ticking of the clock sounded like hope.
The old father shifted in his chair, as one unconsciously slides from one side to another. With his body, his thoughts shifted too—and with them, an entire era.
The clock pulled him further back once again.
Even when his own father had urged him forward, he had repeated the same words: “There is time. There is time.” He spent years saying it. He said he needed to settle first. Life did settle, eventually—but youth had already slipped away. His hair began turning white before his son was even born.
When his son was still in school, his strength had already begun to fade. Unlike the stories his father once told him, he had little to offer his own children except advice—and advice was no longer heard, drowned beneath the noise of media, screens, and constant distraction.
Time seemed to move faster, or perhaps he simply could not keep up anymore. Needs turned into desires, desires into luxuries. Life demanded more. He became mechanical—worn down, exhausted, surviving rather than living.
And now his son, raised in a world of show, posts, and appearances, was fleeing responsibility, mocking emotions, treating years of struggle and an entire life as entertainment. He did not even feel grief. He wanted pleasure without purpose, freedom without direction, endless paths without limits.
The father wanted to teach him what the clock had taught him: time changes everything. It steals the beauty from the face, weakens the body, and slowly dims the inner lamp—the quiet intelligence of emotion and understanding—until it flickers, then fades.
He wanted his son to know that striving for a better life does not mean rejecting the life already being lived. Career and responsibility must run alongside living, not replace it. When one is sacrificed entirely for the other, life grows hollow. Struggle keeps a man alive; responsibility gives him form. If someone ignores parts of life while chasing an imagined destiny, he may reach it—but arrive as someone else. And at that destination, he will find neither peace nor youth waiting for him.
He wanted to save the life his son was trying to build by destroying himself for it. He wanted him to understand that the life he admired from afar would feel far more beautiful if lived with balance, not blindness.
Slowly, the old father turned toward the mirror.
The reflection stared back at him—unfamiliar, tired, altered by time.
In a voice heavy with resignation, he whispered,
“We are not the same anymore.”
Fatimah Mohsin
The author is a student , researcher and writer at NDU in Islamabad , Pakistan