Girish Kulkarni

Girish Kulkarni's father kept a small stationery shop two lanes from the Old Market Arcade, and it was in the back room of that shop, at the age of eleven, that Girish first opened the case of a broken alarm clock with his mother's hairpin and found, to everyone's mild surprise, that he could put it back together in working order by teatime. The clock had belonged to a neighbour who had already written it off as scrap, and when it rang the next morning at the appointed hour the whole lane treated Girish, briefly, as a minor celebrity.

He was apprenticed at fourteen to an old Parsi watchmaker named Mr. Batliwala, who kept a stall in the Arcade before Girish inherited both the stall number and the trade, and who taught him, over six patient years, that a watch is not a machine but an argument between metal parts that must be persuaded, never forced, into agreement. Mr. Batliwala's own hands had grown too unsteady for the finer movements by the time Girish turned twenty, and the old man handed over his tools — the eyeglass, the tweezers, the oiler — with a formality that struck the boy as excessive at the time and has struck him as exactly right ever since.

Stall No. 9 has not moved in thirty-odd years, though the Arcade around it has been repainted twice, flooded once, and threatened with demolition on no fewer than four separate occasions by no fewer than four separate municipal schemes, none of which ever came to anything. Girish arrives at nine, sweeps his own three feet of floor, sets out the velvet tray, and waits, with the patience of a man who has made peace with waiting, for the day's customers to find him.

In the seventies and eighties the trade was steady: railway men who needed their watches to be exact to the minute, schoolteachers, a few doctors who wore their fathers' Rolexes and would trust no one else to touch them. Girish married in 1974, a match arranged through his mother's cousin, to a woman named Sudha who ran a small tailoring business from their front room and never once, in all their years together, asked him to consider a more reliable line of work.

Quartz watches arrived in the early eighties like a slow tide, and Girish watched half the stalls around him convert to selling the cheap new imports, batteries included, no repair required. He did not convert. He says, when asked, that a man who has spent forty years learning to listen to a mainspring cannot in good conscience spend the remaining years selling something that needs no listening at all, and he says this without bitterness, the way another man might state the time.

There was a night in 1988 when a retired sessions judge brought him a pocket watch that had stopped on the day of the judge's father's death some forty years before, and asked, apologetically, whether it could be persuaded to run again without losing that date, which was of course impossible, since a watch that runs will not stay stopped. Girish explained this as gently as he knew how, then spent eleven unpaid hours restoring the mechanism to full working order regardless, so that the judge could wind it once a year, on that date exactly, and let it run for one day before stopping it again himself. The judge came back every year after that, on the same afternoon, for the rest of his life.

His two sons went into other trades entirely — one an electrician, the other in a bank in Pune — and neither shows any inclination to sit at Stall No. 9 after him, a fact the neighbourhood discusses with more sorrow than Girish himself appears to feel. He has trained one young apprentice from the colony, a boy named Anand, more out of habit than hope of succession, and corrects the boy's grip on the tweezers with the same unhurried firmness Mr. Batliwala once used on him.

Evenings, Girish walks home along the same route he has walked for three decades, stopping at the same paan shop, exchanging the same seven words with the same shopkeeper, and Sudha has his tea ready by the time he climbs the stair, the whole day folding shut behind him with the quiet click of a case being closed.

The Arcade's newer tenants call him Kulkarni Kaka now, out of respect rather than familiarity, and bring him their own children's toy watches to fix, for free, because a shop that has survived this long has earned the right to be a little bit magical to people who were not alive when it opened. Girish takes the toy watches as seriously as he takes anything else that comes to his tray, screws in his eyeglass, and gets to work.