Every clock in Narayanpur had passed through Devidas’s hands at least once, and most of them twice.
He was eighty-one and still worked, though slowly, with a lens screwed into one eye and a cloth spread on the table to catch what he dropped.
His own clock, on the wall above the workbench, was five minutes fast. It had been five minutes fast for as long as anyone could remember, and people who came to collect repairs found this funny — the clock man with a wrong clock.
His grandson, home from the city and bored, finally asked.
Nana, you fix clocks all day. Yours is wrong.
Devidas did not look up from the movement he was cleaning.
It is not wrong. It is five minutes fast.
That is what wrong means.
The old man set down his tweezers.
When your grandmother was ill, he said, the doctor came at four. I set the clock forward so I would be ready at four and not at three minutes past. She was ill for nine years. I never set it back.
The boy did not know what to say, so he said nothing, which was the right answer.
Every clock in this town is correct because of me, Devidas said, picking up the tweezers again. I am allowed one that is not.
When he died the family argued about the shop and agreed about the clock. It is still on the wall, still five minutes fast, and his grandson winds it on Sundays.
