The man who bought time

 


Urban Fable | The Man Who Bought Time

By Faraz Parvez
Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal
Former Faculty Member, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA
(Pseudonym of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal)

⏳ “In cities where people sell their futures for survival, one man tried to buy back his past.”

In a chaotic neighborhood of Karachi, where the rickshaw horns never sleep and streetlamps flicker like guilty hearts, there lived a quiet man named Qamar. He worked as a copy typist at a legal firm and returned every evening to an empty rooftop room with a fan that sang like a dying pigeon.

Qamar was 52.
Single.
Unnoticed.
Wearing shoes older than most of his coworkers.

But he carried a pocket watch with no hands.

The Offer

One winter night, on his way back home, Qamar saw an odd sign pinned to a telephone pole:

“Time for Sale — Discreet. Expensive. Worth It.”

Curious, he followed the chalk arrows winding through narrow alleys until he came upon a rust-colored tent lit from within.

Inside sat an old woman, her eyes milky with mystery.
She said nothing at first, only pointed at an hourglass.

“You want more time?” she asked finally. “Or a better one?”

The Transaction

Qamar emptied his life savings.
A lifetime of restraint, skipped luxuries, and lonely evenings now lay in the folds of her embroidered shawl.

She handed him a brass coin engraved with an hourglass symbol.

“Toss this in your sleep,” she said, “and choose the hour you want to relive.”

That night, Qamar dreamed of his university days—of Nazia, the poetess he never proposed to.

He awoke with a note on his pillow: “You have one more chance. Use it wisely.”

The Rewriting

That week, everything changed.

He walked differently.
Smiled more.
Typed with vigor.
Wrote poems on office stationery.

And then, one morning, he vanished.

The Twist

In the HR office, no one remembered a man named Qamar.
His ID card showed a different name.
His rooftop room now housed a newlywed couple.

But in Nazia’s 1992 poetry collection, a handwritten note had appeared:

“To the one who was once too late—thank you for returning.”

What This Fable Teaches Us

Time is not always linear.
Regret is a currency that buys either torment or transformation.

You don’t always get to erase the past—
but sometimes, if your heart is brave enough,
you might just be invited back to touch it differently.

✨ Let the Fables Continue

Read more surreal urban tales at:
📚 farazparvez1.blogspot.com
Where the mundane meets the magical, and stories remember what people forget.


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