MaraTime: Time as Reflection & Refraction

This article is part of ‘Time and Tide’, a series of essays by Tasneem Khan. This is the seventh of the collection. Click here to read the other articles in the series.

Water offers a different language—of ebb and return, of reflecting and refracting light. It invites a pace that resists hurry and keeps changing shape without breaking.

Time with water teaches us to reflect and to refract: to let events pass through, bend our view, and return altered, letting our opinions and actions be reshaped over time.

Recipes begin with lists of tasks and materials, but their flavours are always richer than the ingredients. The tide, too, follows its own formula: moon, sun, wind, the pull of distant seas, and centrifugal and centripetal forces—each component a strong entity in itself, yet their cosmic interactions invisible until the ocean meets the shore. 

Along a wet strandline are a series of reflections: clouds doubled on sand, a flock of redshanks suspended in water-light, your own face bending where the wave thins. Reflection is not only what appears on a surface; it is about gathering context—history, weather, taste, effort, opinions, the smells and sounds that surround an act—and holding them together long enough to make meaning. Reflecting on our experiences connects the present to backstory. Similarly, tide pools become a ledger of seasons and a bowl of broth becomes a record of hands and cultural knowledge. To reflect is to place that glimpse of the surface beside memory, testimony, timing and technique until a fuller shape takes form.

This process has, over time, moved me from snap judgement to something more reflective. Early in my practice, as an ecologist and diver, I watched a highly skilled and knowledgeable boatman cast for reef fish and felt the immediate ethical nudge of a conservationist’s instinct: my reaction was sharp and fast. But the captain’s act was not one of defiance, it was continuous with his relationship to the place. Time, tide, and reflection have shown me that connection to place is not always visible to the unpractised eye. Over time, that moment was refracted through stories I heard and seasons I spent there: plates shared at family tables, ceremonial needs, years when fish were abundant, and the captain’s practiced reading of wind, swell and spawning patterns. I learned that some ways of living carry ecological knowledge no classroom could teach. Slow reflection followed—holding both the captain’s practice and the misplaced alarm of younger divers, who had only a theoretical knowledge of conservation practices, in view—so my stance softened into one that can hold tension without collapsing into certainty. This is Two-Eyed Seeing in action: letting lived experience, knowledge of landscape and scientific method bend light on each other until a fuller reality appears.

Each component carries a story:
Sugar kelp—resilient, textured, briny—teaches the flavour of endurance.
Potato grounds, a reminder of what grows unseen.
Garlic invites warmth, offering sudden clarity.
Cream softens edges, as time softens memory.
Salt, drawn from sea or jar, crystallises distance into a single grain.

As this broth cooks, the small contributions surrender themselves to the whole. Reflection, too, is a slow infusion; the longer you steep, the deeper the taste.

Across distant shores, the same rhythm of waiting, noticing, and harvesting shapes the way time is felt and honoured.

In Iceland, pearl barley swells with Arctic char in a clear fish stock beneath a sky that never truly darkens. Steam carries the metallic scent of basalt and the long patience of glaciers—one of the few grains suited to this cold, volcanic earth.

In Ireland, dulse bread—seaweed folded into a dark loaf—tastes of ocean and soil, rich in minerals and remembered flavour. In the same kitchen, Carrageen moss (Chondrus crispus) is soaked and gently boiled with honey or lemon to make a soothing jelly-drink for coughs and colds. Its thickening power comes from carrageenan, a natural gelling agent that sets like a memory.

In Goa, the monsoon acts as a key ingredient, shaping both appetite and absence. Fishing boats remain grounded to allow the sea to breed, and seafood dwindles. Foragers rise early to gather roen olmi (Termitomyces sp.)—wild mushrooms, cultivated by termites to help digest plant material, that push fruiting bodies up through the termite mounds after the first downpours—cooked the same day in coconut milk or tossed with green chili and kokum. Their flavour speaks of damp soil and delicate ecological balances.

In Tamil Nadu, salt workers coax crystals from shallow pans using sun, gravity, and careful landscape design. Seawater is first drawn into broad reservoirs, where mud and silt settle. From there it travels, pool by pool, each slightly lower than the last, so gravity carries the brine as evaporation concentrates it. In the final crystalliser pans, a delicate skin—fleur de sel—forms across the surface and must be skimmed before it sinks. Then heavier crystals fall layer by layer until the beds gleam white under dusk. By night, dew rinses the pans, and the cycle begins again: a recipe of gradient, wind, and quiet labour, of matter patiently changing state.

In Brittany, I waded with coastal dwellers across tidal flats, practicing pêche à pied—the age-old art of gathering shellfish by hand—as the tide retreats from a landscape that will become an underwater city of boulders within hours. We dug and sifted wet silt, filling buckets to soak until the shells spat their sand. That evening we boiled them with butter, white wine, and shallots, finishing with a splash of cream to thicken the briny stew—a taste of tide and pink granite, of a shore that gives only to those who wait for its turning.

In Lakshadweep, freshly caught tuna is boiled, salted, and sun-dried, then flaked by hand and mixed with grated coconut, finely chopped onion, green chilies, a squeeze of lime, and—when the season allows—a few torn curry leaves or shreds of smoked valho maas for depth. Packed into steel jars, this Uperi—granular, bright, and sustaining—carries the zingy taste of spice, wind, salt, and everything the islands yield.

On the Andaman coast, an eel caught in a bamboo trap at the mangrove mouth is threaded onto a stick and smoked slowly overnight in a pit on the beach. By morning, the flesh is infused with deep, smoky sweetness, layered with the subtle brackishness of mangroves, each hour of slow cooking adding depth no spice could summon.

Each of these preparations asks for more than ingredients. They demand return like the tide, attention, patience, communal knowledge and a feel for timing. They ask you to notice, to question, to contextualise. Recipes are vessels for this temporal and reflective seeing. They carry experience across seasons and generations, flavouring the present with what came before. They remind us that understanding is rarely instantaneous; it infuses slowly, like broth thickening on a stove.

This is the process that all the others point toward: inhabiting time so fully that it flavours you in return. Reflection is the settling of the broth, the sheen on wet sand, the sky doubled in a tide pool. It is the quiet after making, when elements infuse and the essence remains—a depth of time you can taste, even as the tide begins to rise again.