Time may be an invention, but this doesn’t mean that it’s extraneous, and not as indivisible from us as darkness and daylight are. For instance, the Bengali New Year (put in place by the Emperor Akbar) feels at once utterly ornamental, festive, and natural. Sometimes, the inventedness may become too clear, and, as a result, oppressive. The French created a new calendar after the Revolution to rid themselves of the traces of the ancien régime and used it for twelve years. A recognition of the invention of time leads to attempts at reinventing it.

The sort of challenge posed by the revolutionaries is now more or less impossible, even to the likes of ISIS. The exception is the Bolivian government, which installed a clock that goes anti-clockwise in the house of congress in La Paz. “Who says that the clock always has to turn one way?” said David Choquehuanca, the foreign minister, naming it the “clock of the south”.

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“Why do we always have to obey? Why can’t we be creative?” After all, he said, it is daytime in the north when it is night in the south; it is often warm in the south when it’s cool in the north. Why should the motion we call “clockwise” encompass the different kinds of ebb and flow that define the world?

I’ve been unable to find a “clock of the south” in my vicinity. Still, I’ve noticed something like it in my bathroom mirror. It both belongs and doesn’t belong to my physical and political environment, since it’s a reflection. Unlike the Bolivian clock, it’s immune to human control. It both disobeys and slavishly mimics invented time.

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist and musician. His new novel, Friend Of My Youth, has been published in April.