There’s a nail in the living room wall of our home in Jaipur, about a foot above my head, roughly seven feet off the ground. Hanging from it is an old wall clock. There are clocks in other rooms too, as there tend to be in most homes, but this one is different.
It’s time to change the batteries. And since I’m the tallest person in the family, I’ve been called in for the job. I take the clock off the wall and turn it over. On the back, a decades-old sticker is still clinging on.
Thakur Das Khatri, Tripolia Bazaar. Established 1890.
The shop has since shut down, but its name remains, a little piece of another era that has somehow survived on the back of this clock.
About forty-five years ago, when Dad must have walked into that shop, it would have been a different place altogether. Rows of beautiful clocks, all kinds of them, gleaming and competing for attention. And then one caught his eye.
Large golden numerals, from one to twelve. A little panel at the bottom displaying the temperature. Thirty-five degrees that day. No need to wait for the weather report to find out that today was hotter than yesterday. For its time, this was no ordinary clock. It was a little marvel of modern technology.
But the most remarkable thing about it was a tiny speaker. Every hour, the clock played a short melody, followed by a series of deep, resonant chimes, one for each hour. Dad took one look at it and bought it.
I doubt he could have imagined then that this clock would become anything more than a way to tell the time.
Amma, my grandmother, was blind. Once the clock came home, its hourly chimes gave her a way to keep track of the day. She no longer had to ask someone what time it was. The melody would play, the chimes would follow, and she would know how far the day had moved along.
For the rest of us, it was a clock on the wall. For Amma, it was perhaps something more. A quiet companion that told her the time without her having to ask.
And so the years passed.
It has been more than twenty years since Amma passed away. The house has changed in some ways, and perhaps stayed the same in others. But the clock has remained where it always was, ticking away and chiming every hour, year after year. As if nothing had happened. As if the people it once helped were still here to hear it.
Over time, we grew so accustomed to its sound that we stopped noticing it altogether. The melody plays, the chimes ring out, and we carry on with whatever we are doing. Talking, working, sitting around the house. The sound is there, yet somehow we don’t hear it anymore.
Dad likes to joke that you can hear the clock only as long as you’re awake. Once you’re asleep, you can’t hear a thing.
He’s right, of course. But I sometimes think there are sounds we don’t need to consciously listen to. They settle somewhere inside us, quietly becoming part of our lives, until we don’t even realise how much they mean to us.
Now, when I’m away from Jaipur, I find myself missing the sound of this clock.
It’s a strange thing. All those years at home, I barely paid attention to it. And now, away from home, I miss that little melody, followed by the familiar chimes. To me, it’s no longer just the sound of time passing. It’s the sound of home. Of Dad. Of Amma. Of all those ordinary days that have gone by but never quite disappeared.
Perhaps we only begin to understand the value of certain things when we’re far away from them. A wall we’ve seen every day. A clock that’s hung in the same place for decades. A sound that has marked every hour for as long as we can remember. We don’t think much about these things because we assume they’ll always be there. Until one day, we realise just how much of our lives we’ve left in them.
Here, it’s an attempt to preserve a clock, holding on to a sound and an era that will never come back.
Tap the clock to hear its chimes. You can find it here: tick.to/ajanta