Daylight Confusing Time

March 17, 2021 Sabeeha Rehman

“On Sunday the time will change,” my husband Khalid said.
I had been in the US only four months.
Time will change. A cosmic shift?
“It’s called Daylight Savings Time.”
“How does one save daylight?”
“We change the time on our clocks.”
“Who is we? You and I or the whole world?”
“Just the US.”
“How does one change the time?”
Duh!
“Just move the hands of the clock one hour ahead.”
Note dear readers, this was 1972, and clocks only had hands. No digitals.
“Why one hour ahead?”
“So that you have more daylight.”
“The sun will stay as long as it is supposed to stay; so how do we end up with more daylight?”
He smiled.
“Notice how it starts getting dark at 6 p.m. Well, if you set your clocks ahead one hour, then what would have been 5 p.m. will now be 6 p.m. So we will have light later in the day. It’s just a shift.”
Oh!
“If that is such a great idea, why wait until April? Why not have it in December when it gets dark at 5 p.m.?”
“Because spring is coming.”
Huh!
“Well you see, as it gets warmer, people want to be outdoors and if there is light later in the day, they get to stay out longer.”
“So it’s kind of like what we have in Pakistan, right? In summer the office hours start at 7 a.m. and in the winters at 8 a.m.”
“Kind of. But a different way and for a different reason.”
“So why not just change the working hours instead of fiddling around with clocks?”
He may have said: It’s the American way.

That Saturday night as I watched him reset the clocks, I tried to wrap my head around this phenomenon.
Sunday morning, I woke up at my biological time.
“I overslept! It’s 9:00 am already.”
“You didn’t oversleep. It is actually 8:00 a.m. but the clock says 9:00 a.m.” And went on to explain.
“Oh.”
I was finally getting it.
Getting it until it was sunset maghrib prayer time. At my usual time—6 p.m.— I spread out my prayer rug.
“If you are saying maghrib prayer, the sun won’t be setting for another hour. See, it’s still bright outside.”
“I should have noticed.”
“By tomorrow, you will get used to it.”

Two scores and nine years later, I am still getting used to it.
That evening, I wrote a long letter to my parents on a blue aerogram—anyone remember those—telling them all about DST. “Daddy, how come you never told us about this?” My father had lived in the US for several months during 1958. He had told us about the skyscrapers, highways, music, the taste of milk, the lifestyle, but hadn’t mentioned the disorienting DST. Apparently, at that time, it was not consistently observed.
“So that means that the time difference between New York and Pakistan which was ten hours is now nine hours,” he wrote.
I hadn’t thought of that. Not that I was making expensive long-distance calls, but if and when I did, I would have to take that into account.

In 2002 when I was visiting Pakistan, mummy told me that Pakistan has started the system of DST.
“Now why would they do that when the current system is working so well?” I asked.
“Don’t ask me. People are not happy and many are just refusing to comply.”
“How does one refuse to comply?”
“You will see.”

Boy did I see!
A friend called and I asked her to come over at 7 p.m.
“Which time?” She asked.
Huh!
“7 p.m.,” I said.
“I meant the old time or the new time?”
“What?”
“The old time is the usual time; the new time is the government-imposed-official-time.”
“The official time, of course. Why ask?”
“Because many people are still going by the ‘old time’. No one wants to show up an hour early. So, to be on the safe side, we ask.”

The cleaning man showed up an hour early, the doctors’ appointment was on ‘old time,’ the family gathering was on ‘new time’ and wherever I went, people were complaining about the change in times and all the confusion it was creating. The next year, Pakistan scrapped the program.

It’s March 2021. On Saturday night Khalid went about resetting the clocks. As I turned in, I tried to do the math: so what time will morning dawn prayer be? Spring Forward, Fall Back. Dawn was at 5:00 a.m. today, so it will become 6:00 a.m. tomorrow. Got it. I get to sleep an extra hour. No, no, I don’t. Dawn time hasn’t changed, just the stupid clock.

I was up at 5:00 a.m. It was pitch dark and here I was, wide awake. Too early to pray, too early to sit at my computer, too early to grab coffee. When the powers-that-be instituted Sunday as the day that would be least disruptive to time change, they weren’t thinking of the dawn prayer time. No holiday for us Muslims.