The Clockmaker’s Gift

Tucked between a shuttered bookstore and a baker’s shop with flour-dusted windows, there was a narrow lane most people walked past without noticing. At the end of it stood a small, unassuming store with a crooked wooden sign that read: Naveed the Clockmaker. The paint was worn, the letters softened by years of rain and sun, but the name still held.

Inside, the air hummed with quiet purpose. Dozens of clocks lined the walls—cuckoo clocks with sleepy birds, brass pocket watches resting like treasures, tall grandfather clocks that swayed gently with time’s rhythm. Each tick was precise, yet together they created a soft, steady chorus, like a room breathing in unison.

Naveed himself sat behind a cluttered workbench, magnifying glass perched on his nose, fingers moving with the grace of someone who had spent a lifetime listening to silence between seconds. He repaired time for others, yet wore no watch. When asked, he’d only smile and say, “I carry time in my hands.”

He wasn’t a man of many words. Neighbors respected him, nodded when they passed, but few knew much about him. Some said he’d once been a teacher. Others whispered he’d lost someone long ago. Whatever the truth, he lived simply, tending to broken clocks as if they were wounded birds.

One afternoon, a boy appeared at his door—fifteen, shoulders hunched, eyes full of storm. He held a cracked wall clock wrapped in newspaper.

“My dad threw this,” the boy said. “Said clocks are useless. That time doesn’t matter now that Mom’s gone.”

Naveed took the clock gently, as if it were fragile bone. “Time always matters,” he said. “But not the way most people think.”

The boy frowned. “What do you mean?”

Naveed tapped his chest. “There’s the time on the clock. And then there’s the time in here—the memory of a laugh, the weight of a silence, the moment you realize someone’s missing. That kind of time doesn’t move forward or backward. It just… lives with you.”

The boy, whose name was Sami, came back the next day. And the day after that. He didn’t say much at first, just watched Naveed work—how he cleaned tiny gears with a soft brush, how he coaxed springs back into place, how he listened to each mechanism like it had a story to tell.

“Why do they keep ticking, even when they’re broken?” Sami asked one afternoon.

“Because they’re made to,” Naveed replied. “And so are we.”

Slowly, Sami began to talk—about the house that had grown quiet, about dinners eaten in silence, about how his father hadn’t smiled since his mother left. He missed her voice. He missed the way she used to sing while making tea.

One evening, Naveed handed him a small wooden box. Inside was the repaired clock, its face gleaming, hands moving smoothly. On the back, engraved in careful script:

“Start again. Even time forgives.”

“Give it to your father,” Naveed said.

Sami hesitated. “What if he doesn’t want it?”

“Then you’ll know you tried,” Naveed said. “And trying is how healing begins.”

That night, Sami placed the clock on the kitchen shelf. His father stared at it for a long time. Then, quietly, he asked, “What would you like for dinner?”

It wasn’t much. But it was a beginning.

Weeks later, Sami returned with his father. The man stood awkwardly at the door, then stepped forward and shook Naveed’s hand.

“Thank you,” he said, voice thick. “I didn’t know something broken could still tell time.”

Naveed looked around the shop, at the hundreds of ticking clocks, each one once silent, now alive again.

“Nothing truly stops,” he said. “As long as someone cares enough to listen.”

And so the little shop remained—a quiet harbor in a rushing world. People came not just for repairs, but to sit for a moment in the company of ticking time, reminded that even when life breaks, it can still move forward.

Because time, in the end, isn’t just measured in hours.

It’s measured in moments we choose to men