‘Watch Whisperer’ of Nizamuddin: ‘To repair is to bring the dead back to life’

Javed came to Delhi as a young boy after his father Riyasat Khan moved here with his family from Rampur in Uttar Pradesh.

Javed wasn’t interested in studies – he preferred to be out in the streets with his friends over sitting in a classroom. He dropped out of school after Class 8.

“I wanted to start earning at a very young age,” he said.

Watches entered Javed’s life by accident. The family lived in Nizamuddin West, and had a man called Ishaq Khan, a watch repairer from Lucknow, as a tenant.

“Sometimes, when Ishaq worked late into the night, I would sit beside him and watch him. One day he asked me if I wanted to learn how to repair watches. I was keen to learn, and he was keen to teach, and so it began.”

This was 1970, and Javed was 12 years old. For the next year, he trained with Ishaq, accompanying him to his workplace in Chandni Chowk. “My father did not stop me. He knew I was not interested in studies, so he let me do what I wanted to,” Javed said.

After he’d picked up the skill, Javed landed himself a job at Surendra & Co., the Connaught Place shop that only stocked and repaired HMT watches. Then, sometime in the 1980s, he started out on his own — setting up a stool and counter by the roadside in Nizamuddin and, after about two decades, a shop in the same neighbourhood.

Javed’s shop, in a crowded lane off the street leading to the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, is a 10-foot-by-10 space in a basement. The small sign says “Old Swiss Watch – Sale and Service”. Inside, five clocks hang on the wall, with the pendulums of the three vintage ones swinging in a mismatched rhythm.

Around 4 pm, the clocks start to chime, a few seconds before and after one another, filling the small space with odd music. Javed, sitting at his work bench in a corner, does not look up.

On the bench, lit up by a bright LED, is a universe of clutter — cardboard containers of springs, pins, crowns and bezels, small tins of cleaning solution, wooden brushes, tweezers, screwdrivers. There’s also an old CD player that plays old Hindi film songs by Mohammad Rafi and Mukesh. Its music has been his constant companion at work for the last 20 years, Javed says.

Here and there in the shop lie dozens of timepieces – old and new, ordinary and priceless. There are refurbished HMTs, workaday Swiss brands like Favre-Leuba and Roamer that go for a couple of thousand rupees and, locked in a drawer, vintage Omegas and Rolexes that cost many times more.

“We buy old, broken watches in bulk, those that people are ready to throw out, and we then strip them for components,” Javed said. The components are stored in cardboard and plastic storage boxes that are labelled by hand with markers – by brand name, part type, sizes, etc.

Spare parts for many of these watches are no longer available. Sometimes he fabricates some components by himself, he said.

“Customers come from very far away,” Javed said – “Kerala, Karnataka, Madras, the South, and abroad”. Some customers courier their broken watches to him for repair. He never disappoints them, he said – “There isn’t a watch that I have been unable to repair so far.”

He has slowed down over the years, though – business has slowed, and the nature of his work has changed. “Earlier I repaired 20 watches a day. Today, I am able to work on far fewer. Each job is harder, and feels more like resurrection than repairing. To repair old watches means to bring the dead back to life,” he said.

In the age of the mobile phone, no one needs a watch to tell the time any longer, Javed said. At the same time, a new generation has begun to increasingly see value in their grandfathers’ timepieces. So they come to him with their tokens of memory, wanting them to tick again.