Lost within the old labyrinth-like streets of Kolkata, somewhere between a forgotten bookstore and a small church, stood a small and old clock shop. The kind of store that is known for generations. Its windows layered with dust, the door creaking with every swing, and the bell jingling the tune of another century. The shop bore no name, just a wooden sign above the door carved with a single word : Time.
One could almost never catch someone entering the shop, and for the select few that did, most assumed it was some bougie antique shop, or that it was some sort of closed abandoned miracle. But the shop was always open. And the clocks always worked.
Inside lived Soumyanath, a man no younger than 83, stooped and wiry, with hands stained by decades of oil and brass. He didn't speak much, except to his clocks, which he wound and whispered to as if they could listen. His face was lined lie aged paper, and his eyes, though clouded, held the deep stillness of someone who had stopped counting years. How ironic. Soumyanath was a clockmaker but not as one would think a clockmaker to be. He did not repair watches for money, nor did he sell his finest pieces. He built clocks only for people who truly needed one. Most of them almost never even intended to visit the shop in the first place. None of them ever came asking for a clock. They came with something else : grief, confusion, and a question they couldn't find an answer to. They came confused, and Soumyanath would simply say, "You are here for time," and gesture to the rows of clocks that lined his walls like sentinels of silence and God knows it only confused the visitor even more.
No one knew where he learned his craft. Some said he had once been a scientist. Others called him a monk. But the truth, if there was one, was buried a little too deep inside his conscience for anyone to explore.
One rainy afternoon, as raindrops trickled down the dusty window panes, and people ran for shelter, a woman named Mira entered the shop. Mira was a rather dusky thirty-two year old woman, dressed in a worn black coat. Her face was visibly troubled as if she was carrying the weight of something unexplainable. Her hands were clenched and her eyes wide in the way of someone who had forgotten how to blink. Her face was wet but one could not say if it was tears or the rain outside.
Soumyanath looked up from the grandfather clock…