I am typing this with a heating pad on my left shoulder, because yesterday I turned my head to look at an auto rickshaw. The auto was doing nothing. It was merely existing at speed, which in Bengaluru qualifies as an event. Millions of years of hominid engineering went into this spine, and the idle curiosity of a three-wheeler has defeated it.

On the laptop in front of me, between my first sip of filter coffee and my second, a model has gone from version 5.5 to 5.8. It translates Kannada into French. It drafts contracts that would keep a lawyer billing until Diwali. It paints the Mysore Palace in oils, with fewer tourists than the original. It did not need to lie down first. It has release notes. My neck has a heating pad and a rumour that things improve by Sunday.

The slowest clock I own is in a building near Mayo Hall. To change my address on a municipal portal, I am told to bring an affidavit. The affidavit needs a notary, and the notary needs a clerk behind a steel desk stacked with blue-ribboned files from 1997. The clerk studies my Aadhaar printout the way an archaeologist studies a shard. My street is “4th Cross” on one document and “IV Cross” on the other. He says “Window 4” without looking up, the way a priest says amen. Window 4 closes at one for lunch and reopens at half past three, provided the man with the stamp is back from tea. The stamp is the only fast thing in the building, and it moves in one direction only, downward, and only on other people’s paperwork.

So the government office runs on three clocks, and none has been introduced to the others. The machine keeps quarterly time. Every few months it sheds its old architecture and nobody holds a funeral. Biology keeps geological time. Eat a bowl of bisi bele bath at noon and your stomach files an appeal that runs all afternoon. There is no patch to push to a pancreas. The liver does not accept updates, having seen what updates do. And the bureaucracy keeps time slower than biology, which I would not have believed before Window 4. A cell will mutate if you expose it to radiation. A government record will not change if you expose it to reason.

Everyone assumes the fast clock will drag the slow ones along, the way a better router speeds up a laptop. I assumed it too, which is the embarrassing part. The machine predicts the structures of two hundred million proteins and asks what is next. My thumb is on day six of a paper cut.

The mind, the traitor in the household, sides with the machine. In one blink mine leaves this room, spends a moment in a rainy evening in Jayanagar twenty years ago, and boards a spacecraft to Mars. The body needs eight hours of sleep and a glass of warm water to stand up without seeing stars of its own.

So the mind is on Mars, the machine is on 4.2, and the rest of me is outside Window 4 in rubber slippers, holding a shoulder. It is ten past one. Window 4 closed on time.