By Neelam Saran Gour
It is an antique wall clock and its brand name, I have discovered, is Ansonia Kitchen Clock. The name conjures up an image of a cosy fireplace and wall in some nineteenth century European or American kitchen. God knows who brought it out to India and who originally owned it and how it found itself on an auctioneer’s table in old Etawah some time in the 1920s. All I know is that my grandfather bought it for ten rupees as a gift for my father as a prize for passing the matric examinations with distinction. Its glass door had a long, oblique crack on it. The story in the family goes that when it stood on a table, just after being brought home, while my grandfather sat shaving, a monkey descended from a tree, peered into its glass pane, and beholding another monkey in the reflection, hit out with a paw. Crack and all, it travelled to Allahabad with my father. And hung on the wall of my two successive homes, its quiet, clicking hoofs keeping count of time’s steady trot for years as I read through the long afternoons and evenings. It had a beautiful silvery chime, ringing and sweet, like a carillon of church bells let loose in the vibrating air every quiet hour.
Only my mother knew how to wind it up the right way. Taught to her by Rafiq Ghariwallah, whose receipt for repairs, faded and brittle, still stayed, folded up in its cabinet. Now that my mother’s gone these twenty years and more, all our efforts to keep it striking meet with little success. It adorns my wall like a mute ancestor who, having witnessed epoch-making events in its heyday, now adopts a voluntary oath of silence as best befitting the uncomprehending present.
It was this silence that I set out to break one summer morning. Surely there was some clock-maker still left in this city who could decode the cryptic workings of this ingenious time-keeper. I remembered the name Rafiq Ghariwallah from my mother. He had a tiny shop near – and most appropriately – the Ghantaghar or clock tower in Chowk. Somewhere behind the toy market and the dry fruits market. My mother had taken our clock for repairs to Rafiq Ghariwallah – was it fifty, or sixty years back? I decided to go scouting for Rafiq Ghariwallah’s descendents to help me break my clock’s silence. The dry fruits lane and the toy market, altered though they are, hold memories too vivid to fade. My mother took me there, both of us perched on the seat of a slow cycle rickshaw, happily contemplating the prospect of our bags soon to be loaded with cashews, raisins, dates, walnuts, almonds! In my childhood children in our families used to wake up in the mornings to find cashews and raisins beneath their pillows. The dark cavern of the shaded toy market was full of tempting things and I used to come away with a cheap little plastic doll or a string-pulled toy cart. Now the toys are high-tech, expensive and international. But behind the treasure island there’s no dank little watch-maker’s den to be seen. I ask around after Raqiq Ghariwallah and his descendents and am informed – by an ancient dry fruits stall owner – that Rafiq’s family had moved long ago. To somewhere in the Civil Lines. That, as far as he knew, Rafiq’s grandsons were still in the watch business. More he didn’t know. But where in the Civil Lines? Not in the main market. Somewhere in the former residential areas – since the market had invaded the residential areas now. Some colony named Amravati Complex, contributed a younger stall-keeper.
Some time went in tracing Amravati Complex. Google Maps came to my help, and as the fine veins of streets, parks, traffic islands and markets unraveled in the screen of my cell-phone, as old British street names erupted in my mind behind the tangled geography of the new names, as old extinct landmarks rose like ghosts of an earlier city to steer my memory towards the direction of Amravati Complex, I found myself going all breathless with wonder.
I parked in a lane leading down between close-built houses. An eatery, a mobile phone showroom, a car dealer, a nursing home, two medical stores, a beauty salon, a hotel, a jewelry shop, a coaching institute, a boutique. But where was the watch-maker? Enquiries didn’t help. The hordes of students pouring out of the gate of the coaching institute didn’t know. The shop managers didn’t know. The press-wallah with his stationary cart didn’t know. The fruit vendor on his moving cart didn’t know. No old Ilahabadis here. All these people had drifted to this city in recent years, pursuing their life challenges. People with memories of other places that they carried in their hearts as I carried mine. The old Ilahabadis were elsewhere, so I was like a rudderless boat and a boat without a compass.
Finally, after many stops and queries, I came across a roadside tailor, sitting at his old sewing machine beneath a lost looking old peepal tree.
‘If you are looking for a watch dealer there’s one behind the third lane there. It’s called Aman Watches and it belongs to someone called Surendra.’
That couldn’t be anyone from Rafiq’s family, I thought. Still I thought I’d try my luck.
Sure enough, a watch store. A small but regular showroom with a middle aged man of nondescript appearance behind the counter. I produce my Ansonia from my shoulder bag and place it carefully before him. From my wallet I produce that frayed and faded receipt. Rafiq Ghariwallah, 29 Ghantaghar, Chowk, with its date – February 1959.
His face reacts but he controls it and goes expressionless.
‘Do you know this handwriting?’ I ask him.
He hesitates, then relents. ‘My grandfather’s,’ he murmurs.
‘He repaired this clock for my mother. Decades back. No one else knows how to make it chime after my mother’s passing. My mother was an old customer. Can you help?’
He examined my Ansonia carefully, shook his head. ‘Only my grandfather could. Clocks like this – they’ve all gone silent.’
I wanted to tell him that my clock held on to its own time like an impregnable secret but decided to ask him something else.
‘How are you called Surendra?’
He spoke after a moment’s pause. ‘I’m called Surendra in this area.’ He answered in a dead-pan voice.
‘But your real name?’
‘Anees,’ he replied, speaking very softly. And as though responding to the irrational confidence he’d reposed in me, he added: ‘If you come again in, say fifteen days, my old grand-uncle will be visiting us from Dilli. I could ask him to take a look at this clock. He used to be a clock repairer once.’
I agreed. He gave me his card with his phone number. Aman Watches, 29 Amravati Complex. I was mindful of the trust he had recklessly committed to in sharing his name with me. Surendra who was Anees and had come to this area from elsewhere.
As had all these others on this lane. My Ansonia which had come from elsewhere, these students, these store-owners. Their stories swarmed around me, as did the story of that rooted one, the tailor at his sewing machine, the old peepal which stood forlorn after all its companion trees had been cut down. And I myself who brooded on stories. This stranger had unthinkingly shared his secret with me. In exchange I owed him a secret too.
‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘- this entire colony stands on the site of a bungalow that my own in-laws lived in for many decades. A vast bungalow with lawns, orchards, a well, outhouses. Here where your shop stands is where my husband used to ride his bicycle and fly kites as a child. And where this lane cuts across that one is where his parents’ bedroom used to be. With the heavy mahogany bedstead, the Burma teak wardrobes. And on that piece of ground beneath that portico there I stood when I entered the house as a bride while the ritual water was poured from a pitcher over both flanks of the door frame.’
We turned to gaze at those vacated pockets of air and at the ground beneath. The silent ground which had seen much. All that had fallen silent. My clock, Anees, and those who had inhabited this plot of land. We’d all learnt to fall silent when the need for silence arose.
But though my clock had lost its speech, somewhere in its tortuous machinery lay a cog or spring or lever that could make its ringing chimes break into life and speech again.
(Neelum Saran Gour, retired Professor in English Literature at the University of Allahabad, is the author of 6 novels, four short story collections, a translation of her own work and 2 books of non-fiction. Her latest novel won the Hindu Fiction Prize 2018 and the Sahitya Akademi Award for 2023.)