A History of the Watches in My House.

          I said to Shri Husband: “Anyone under forty years of age won’t believe me if I tell them you didn’t own a watch when you were in school.”

“I don’t know why you’d want to advertise what I didn’t own, but whilst you’re at it, tell them I didn’t own a computer or mobile phone either,” he said.

Me: “They didn’t exist then.”

He: “Who… people under forty?”

Me, hiding exasperation: “Yes, those too, but I meant computers and cell-phones.”

He: “That was true of most people of my generation. If your parents were well-to-do, you got a watch when you went to college.”

Me: “Did your parents give you a watch after you passed high secondary?”

He: “Don’t remember.”

Me, in an attempt to badger him: “You don’t remember whether you finished school?”

Familiar indecipherable growl from Shri Husband that could be translated as “irritating sense of humour” or “bad grammar” or “shut up”.

Me, trying unsuccessfully to be an “adarsh Bharatiya naari”, trying to pacify the bad mood: “People usually remember these things. They keep their father’s watches carefully in safes in cupboards, wear them on occasions, and talk about sentimental values.”

He, unaffected by what he refers to as ‘mush and nonsense’: “Do a survey and find out what number that ‘usually’ is.”

Shri Husband believes in the management mantra: quantify everything. If I say usually, generally, or mostly, I don’t really work out an average with numbers or check percentages. Shri Husband, as if reading my mind: “Don’t go around doing a survey; I’m just saying that nine out of ten people won’t have any old watches at home. Winding watches are dead and gone, like big radios, gramophone records… except in museums and in the homes of eccentric people.”

The last adjective was directed at me. I was sitting with my small collection of once-discarded, unwanted winding watches. Relatives/friends who didn’t know what to do with them gave them to me, relieved that they were spared the ‘sin’ of dumping them in the bin or selling them to a ‘raddiwala’ directly or via domestic help. There’s always a sense of guilt when one doesn’t know how to get rid of things that are supposed to have emotions attached to them.

I adopted them (the watches, not the emotions or the people).

According to Shri Husband, I have “…spent a small fortune getting them repaired/serviced over the last many years.”

“True,” I agree. “That’s why they’re still working. I’ve meticulously maintained and used them.”

Still do. When digital watches with tiny, round, flat cell-batteries in their bowels made their way into my life, I drew up a watch-roster so every piece got a chance to be on the wrist.

The ‘dukaandaar’ who services them tells me that there are others like me who care for such valueless items. As long as he gets paid, he’s happy. If it weren’t for idiosyncratic customers, his own once-in-demand skill would perish. He’s part of a nearly-extinct breed, like the knife-sharpener or the tinning-expert (the ‘kalhai-wala’).

Few women owned watches when we were children, so most of the watches in my ‘dabba’ are ‘gentswatches’ (said as one word). Long years ago, there was a waiting list for buyers of Made in India watches. The only other I’d heard of were Swiss watches with jewels and springs in their mechanism that were said to last a lifetime. If you didn’t have relatives who could smuggle in a watch for you (nothing good about the ol’ days, I tell you, even then people wanted to avoid paying ‘duty’), you had to book a watch a year before an eighteenth-birthday/wedding/exam-result. Once you owned it, you wound it once daily, kept it safe from rain, never loaned it and bequeathed it to a favourite amongst those who’d outlive you.

(Watch-care went to ridiculous lengths. I knew someone who shaved the distal part of his left hand so sweat wasn’t trapped and the watch was kept dry. Seriously.)

On a flight, a teenage co-passenger watched me wind my watch. I put it to his ear to let him hear the tick-tock. In his Gen-xxx world, from his cradle-days he’d seen brightly-coloured watches-and-straps. The only ticking sound he knew about was connected with bombs. He watched me suspiciously till we landed.

In spite of digitization and the introduction of the hh:mm:ss method of measuring time, watch-hands have survived. Many watches now have multiple hands inside several circles, telling the time(s) in New York, Frankfurt, Bangkok, Tokyo, wherever. Up-market advertisements remind us that nothing matches the luxury of owning such-and-such designer watch which is deep-water/earthquake proof and has innumerable seldom-used features. This in a world where the humble mobile-phone has shoved cameras away from shop-shelves and got their manufacturers worried about their future.

I said aloud: “Phones do the job of watches, every computer has a clock in it, why do we need wrist-watches at all?”

Shri Husband responded: “There are suckers for all things foolish.”

Not knowing what to say next, I was furiously winding a cute old alarm-clock when it fell out of my hand.

And Shri Husband yelled: “Watch out.” Strange, how puns happen at the unlikeliest of times.

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