By the time people started saying that time moved differently in his shop, Hassan Ali was already too old to correct them.
The shop sat just off Bethnal Green Road, squeezed between a nail bar and a chicken shop that smelled of old oil and teenage hunger. Its window was crowded with clocks — wall clocks, mantel clocks, carriage clocks, watches dangling on hooks like patient fruit. Some ticked loudly, some barely at all, some had stopped years ago and were only pretending to be alive for dignity’s sake.
Above the door hung a fading sign:
H. ALI — CLOCKS & WATCHES REPAIRED
No slogan.
No website.
No social media handle.
Only time.
Inside, the air always felt a little thicker, like history had condensed itself and decided to stay.
The Man Who Fixed Time
People said Hassan had been old since the seventies.
He arrived in London from Sylhet in 1976 with a suitcase, a toolbox, and a memory full of ticking things. In the village, he had been the boy who could make broken radios speak again, who could listen to a wristwatch and tell you what was wrong with it like a village doctor diagnosing a fever.
In East London, time already belonged to factories and buses and bosses. But a small watchmaker’s shop on Bethnal Green Road took him in — an old Englishman named Mr. Cartwright who spoke in slow, careful sentences and treated watches like small, stubborn children.
“You’ve got good hands,” Cartwright had said the first time he watched Hassan take apart a pocket watch. “Careful. Gentle. You respect the gears.”
Hassan stayed.
He learned about escapements and balance springs, about mainsprings and jewelled bearings, about English customers who grumbled but always returned if you were honest with them.
When Cartwright died, he left the shop to Hassan.
“You’re the only one who listens to them like I do,” he’d said. “They’ll be lonely without you.”
By then, Hassan had a wife — Fatima — and a small son, Imran, who liked to sit under the workbench and collect fallen screws like treasure.
The sign above the door changed. The clocks inside did not.
Time, in Hassan’s shop, moved with a different rhythm.
It still does.
The Rules of the Shop
People eventually learned there were rules in H. Ali’s shop.
Rule 1:
He would not lie to you about your clock.
If it was beyond saving, he’d tell you straight.
“No amount of dua or duct tape will fix this,” he’d say gently. “Let it rest.”
Rule 2:
He would never, ever, change the time for you.
Customers tried.
“Uncle, can you move the clock back? Rent due soon.”
“Bhai, if you put this one ten minutes fast, maybe I’ll stop being late.”
He’d smile.
“You want discipline, not deceit,” he’d reply. “I fix the inside, not your bad habits.”
Rule 3 — the one nobody knew about — belonged only to him.
Sometimes, when a person came in holding a watch with both hands, not casually but like they were carrying something fragile and holy, he would listen longer.
To the watch.
To the person.
To whatever trembled between them.
Those were the times when time itself… shifted.
Just a little.
Just enough.
The Woman with the Broken Alarm
The first time it happened — the first time Hassan realised the shop did more than repair metal — a young woman came in just before closing.
She wore a nurse’s uniform, hair scraped back, eyes bruised with tiredness.
“I need this fixed,” she said, placing a small white alarm clock on the counter.
It was cheap, made of plastic, the kind you could buy in any market. Its face was cracked. One of the hands was missing.
Hassan examined it.
“Throw this away,” he said kindly. “Buy new one.”
“I can’t,” she replied.
He paused.
“Why?”
She swallowed.
“My dad gave it to me before he died,” she said. “He said, ‘Set it early. Wake up for Fajr and for life.’ I’ve been… missing both lately.”
Her voice trembled on the last word.
Something in Hassan’s chest tightened.
“Sit,” he said. “Let me see.”
He opened the clock, expecting cheap plastic gears and a dead battery.
Inside, he found a small, mechanical heart still beating — faintly, stubbornly.
It shouldn’t have been possible.
The clock was entirely quartz. No gears. No springs.
And yet, as he held it to his ear, he heard a faint tick. Not of metal — of memory.
He worked on it carefully.
He didn’t replace the whole mechanism.
He only cleaned the contacts, tightened a small, loose screw, and put it back together.
“All done,” he said.
She frowned. “That fast?”
He shrugged.
“It was only sleeping,” he said. “Some things just need to be reminded.”
She paid, thanked him, and left.
That night, at 4:15 a.m., the little alarm clock rang.
The nurse woke with a start. The city was dark and heavy. She almost switched it off and rolled over.
Instead, she sat up.
For the first time in months, she prayed.
For her father.
For herself.
For the strange old man in Bethnal Green who had treated her cheap clock like it was important.
The next day, she burst back into the shop, eyes bright.
“It worked,” she said. “But… I didn’t tell you the time I wanted. How did you know to fix it for Fajr?”
Hassan blinked slowly.
“I didn’t,” he said. “Maybe… it knew.”
After she left, he sat at his bench for a long time, holding the empty screwdriver and listening to the ticking of every clock in the room.
They sounded… different.
As if they were speaking to him in a language he had always known but never learned to answer.
The Son Who Lived Elsewhere
Hassan’s son, Imran, grew up in the shop.
As a child, he loved the tiny tools, the steady ticking, the warm lamplight over his father’s hands.
As a teenager, he began to hate the smell of metal and dust.
“This place is like a museum,” he’d complain, kicking at the base of the counter. “Everything old. Everything slow.”
“Old things survive,” Hassan would reply.
“So do cockroaches,” Imran would mutter.
He wanted speed.
He wanted money.
He wanted glass towers in Canary Wharf.
He studied hard, got good grades, escaped into a world where time was not measured in ticking and chiming but in deadlines and data.
He became a project manager for a tech company, the kind with unplaceable logos and free coffee that tasted of ambition.
He visited the shop less.
Fatima noticed first.
“He’s drifting,” she said quietly one evening, stirring the daal. “You stand there with your tools, and he is somewhere else.”
Hassan shrugged.
“Children are like arrows,” he said. “We pull them back as far as we can and hope they land somewhere good. We cannot follow every flight.”
When Fatima died of a quiet, mean illness, Imran took three days off work to attend the janazah.
He cried.
He held his father’s hand.
He promised to come more often.
Then life — frantic, hungry — swallowed him again.
Hassan did not chase him.
He simply kept winding clocks.
Waiting.
The Woman Who Wanted Yesterday Back
One rainy Monday, a woman entered the shop carrying a watch wrapped in a silk handkerchief.
She was in her late forties, maybe early fifties, with tired eyes and lipstick that had outlived her patience.
“This was my husband’s,” she said, unwrapping the handkerchief carefully. “He died last year. It stopped on the day he went.”
Hassan took the watch.
He recognised the brand.
Mid-range. Reliable.
The kind a man bought once and wore for twenty years.
“What do you want?” he asked. “For it to work again?”
She swallowed.
“I… don’t know,” she said. “Part of me likes that it stopped when he died. It feels… respectful. Like it went with him. But also it hurts. Every time I look at it, I’m stuck there. In that minute.”
She pushed her hair back.
“Is there a way,” she whispered, “to keep the watch… but not that moment?”
Hassan said nothing for a long time.
Then he opened the back of the watch.
The second hand was indeed stuck on a specific moment.
11:23.
He removed the hands gently.
Placed them aside.
Reattached new ones from his box of salvaged parts.
“Now,” he said, “you have a choice. You can keep the original hands in this.” He placed them in a small envelope. “Or you can leave them here. I will keep them in my drawer. Safekeeping.”
Her eyes filled.
“You can do that?” she asked.
“I can keep anything you ask me to keep,” he said. “Time. Tears. Moments. But I charge extra for the last two.”
She laughed through her tears.
“Keep them,” she said. “Please.”
He put the envelope in the deepest drawer of his bench.
The drawer where he kept odd things:
A child’s first lost tooth.
A theatre ticket from 1984.
An aerogramme no one claimed.
A bus ticket from Sylhet to Dhaka.
The second hand of a clock that had stopped on a night of violence.
People thought they were junk.
He knew better.
They were anchors.
After the woman left, her watch ticking softly on her wrist, Hassan opened the drawer.
For a moment, the shop grew quieter.
As if time itself had leaned in.
The Clock That Knew Two Countries
Hanging on the wall behind his bench was a clock no one ever asked about.
It had two faces.
One labelled LONDON.
One labelled SYLHET.
They were connected by a small brass rod.
When one moved, so did the other.
Sometimes in sync.
Sometimes slightly out.
Hassan had made it himself in the 1980s, in an attempt to reconcile his own split sense of time.
When it was midday in Bethnal Green, it was late afternoon in the village he’d left behind. When he went to sleep in London, his mother in Sylhet was already waking to Fajr.
“Time is rude,” he told Fatima once. “Never knocks before entering another country’s house.”
He never adjusted the clock for daylight saving.
“Governments play with clocks,” he’d scoff. “Dragging them back and forward like children. Time itself doesn’t care. Only we do.”
On the days when homesickness bit hard, he would sit and watch the Sylhet face.
If he stared long enough, he imagined he could hear the azaan over paddy fields, the chatter of women washing clothes at the pond, his mother shouting his name with that half-annoyed, half-adoring tone.
When she died, he didn’t change the clock.
He only whispered, “Now you know what time it is everywhere.”
The Granddaughter Who Didn’t Believe in Clocks
The first time Leila came to the shop alone, she was thirteen and angry at the world.
She was Imran’s daughter.
London-born.
Fluent in English, half-fluent in Bangla, fluent in silence with her father.
She considered the shop old-fashioned, like Eid cards and cassette tapes and men who still said “Video shop” instead of “Netflix.”
“You still fix these?” she asked, nudging a mantel clock with a purple-painted fingernail.
“They still break,” Hassan replied.
She rolled her eyes.
“I use my phone,” she said. “It tells me everything. Time. Weather. News. If I’m late, it’s because I ignore it. Not because it’s broken.”
He smiled, small.
“Even phones need repair,” he said. “Screens crack. Batteries tire. Only time does not get tired.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then blurted, “Dad said you care more about clocks than people.”
The words hung between them like a misfired arrow.
Hassan’s hands stilled.
“Did he?” he said quietly.
Leila flushed. “He was angry. He said when he was little, you were always here. In this shop. That you missed sports days and parents’ evenings and… stuff. That you ‘married the clocks’.”
Hassan laughed softly, without humour.
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe your father doesn’t remember who paid for his school shoes.”
Leila winced.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s okay,” he said. “People remember pain more clearly than presence. It’s not their fault. The brain is a dramatic thing.”
She sat on the stool, arms folded.
“Do you regret it?” she asked. “Spending so much time here?”
He considered.
“Every day,” he said. “And not at all.”
She frowned. “That makes no sense.”
“Exactly,” he replied. “That is what it means to be a parent.”
She visited again the next week.
And the next.
She began to help in small ways — dusting, sorting, learning the names of things.
“This one?” he asked, holding up a gear.
“Escape wheel,” she said promptly.
“And this?”
“Balance spring.”
He nodded.
“You are learning.”
“It’s kinda satisfying,” she admitted. “Like… tiny engineering. For patient people.”
“You can be impatient and still be gentle,” he said. “Just not at the same time.”
She thought about that for a long time.
The Day Time Stopped on Bethnal Green Road
It happened on an ordinary Wednesday.
Schoolchildren shouting.
Ambulances whining in the distance.
Pigeons arguing over chips.
Hassan was at his bench, working on a watch he’d seen three times before. The man who owned it kept dropping it down the stairs “by accident.”
Suddenly, all the clocks in the shop stopped.
Every single one.
The ticking ceased.
The humming fell silent.
The air thickened.
The shop held its breath.
Hassan looked up, confused.
This was not a power cut — most of his clocks were mechanical.
The second hand of the London-Sylhet clock paused midway between seconds.
Even the cheap plastic wall clock from the pound shop, the one that refused to die, surrendered its tick.
Outside, through the front window, cars appeared frozen mid-motion. A bus sat motionless at the traffic lights, people inside caught with mouths half-open, eyes half-blinked.
Only Hassan moved.
His heart thudded in his chest.
“Allah…” he whispered. “What is this?”
He stepped carefully to the door.
The bell above it did not ring when he opened it.
Sound had been cancelled.
The street was a photograph.
He saw a woman reaching into her bag. A cyclist leaning into a turn that never completed. A man carrying a box of vegetables, a carrot suspended mid-fall from its edge.
He stepped back inside, closed the door.
The clocks remained still.
He could feel something pushing at the edges of the shop. Like a storm testing a window.
Then — faintly — he heard it.
A tiny, determined tick.
He turned.
On the shelf in the back room sat a small bedside alarm clock Leila had brought last week, one she’d broken in a fit of rage during an argument with her father.
“It’s like him,” she’d said angrily, thrusting it into Hassan’s hands. “Always shouting. Always ringing. Never listening.”
He hadn’t fixed it yet.
Now, it was ticking.
Softly.
Stubbornly.
He picked it up.
The hands were moving.
Slowly, but moving.
As they completed one full revolution, he felt the shop shudder.
The wall clocks jerked.
The watches sighed back into motion.
Outside, sound returned in a rush — car horns, footsteps, someone shouting, a distant siren catching up with itself.
Time resumed.
Hassan stood in the middle of his shop, clutching the small alarm clock to his chest.
He laughed once — a thin, disbelieving sound.
Then he whispered, “So. This is how it is.”
He knew now.
The shop wasn’t just a place where time was measured.
It was a hinge.
A place where time could pause — briefly — if it needed to gather itself.
And he, absurdly, was its keeper.
The Night Leila Ran Away
It was only a matter of time — and time, in this story, is not a joke but an accomplice.
One night, just past midnight, the shop phone rang.
Not the mobile.
The landline.
Hassan, half-asleep in the back room, stumbled to answer.
“Hello?”
“Abbu.”
It was Imran.
His voice was strained, thin.
“Leila’s gone,” he said. “She left a note. She’s not answering her phone. I… I thought…”
His voice broke.
“Maybe she’s at yours.”
Hassan’s heart stuttered.
He had been waiting for this — not Leila running away specifically, but some collision — between father and daughter, between generations, between longing and fear.
“She isn’t here,” he said. “But she will be.”
“How do you know?” Imran snapped.
“Because,” Hassan replied calmly, “when children are lost, they look for the last place time felt soft.”
He hung up gently, ignoring his son’s protest.
Then he turned all the clocks in the shop to the same time.
Midnight.
Time did not stop.
But it did… slow.
The air thickened again, like syrup.
Five minutes later, the bell chimed.
Leila stepped in, eyes swollen, backpack slung carelessly over one shoulder.
“Dadu,” she whispered.
He didn’t scold her.
He didn’t say, “Do you know what time it is?” or “Your father is worried sick.”
He simply opened his arms.
She folded into them like a collapsing tent.
“I hate him,” she sobbed. “He doesn’t listen. He thinks time works only one way — his way. He says I’m wasting my life doing art. That time will ‘run away’ and I’ll be left behind.”
Hassan stroked her hair.
“Time does not run,” he said softly. “It walks. We are the ones who sprint and then wonder why we cannot breathe.”
“I wish I could go back,” she said. “To when… to when Mum was alive. To when he smiled. To when he had time to sit with me and draw.”
Hassan closed his eyes briefly.
He could feel the clocks behind him, listening.
“You cannot go back,” he said. “But you can… visit.”
She sniffed. “What does that mean?”
He led her to the London-Sylhet clock.
“Close your eyes,” he said. “Think of a time you want to feel again. Not to change it. Just to feel it.”
She closed her eyes.
He placed his hand over hers on the clock’s frame.
For a moment, the shop grew warmer.
The ticking deepened.
Leila felt something shift — a soft lurch in her chest.
Suddenly, she could smell her mother’s perfume.
She could hear laughter from the kitchen.
She could feel crayons in her toddler hands, her father’s bigger hand guiding hers on the page.
It lasted only a heartbeat.
Then it was gone.
Her eyes flew open.
“What… was that?” she whispered.
“Memory,” Hassan said. “Given a little space. Time remembers us if we remember it back.”
She took a shaky breath.
“I can’t stay at home tonight,” she said. “We shouted. I said things. Ugly things.”
“You can stay here,” he said. “Sleep in the back room. Tomorrow, you and your father will fix what can be fixed, and live with what cannot.”
She nodded.
That night, as she slept, the clocks in the shop ticked quietly around her.
Not nagging.
Not rushing.
Just keeping her place open in time.
The Father Who Came Late
In the morning, Imran appeared at the door, eyes red, shirt creased, tie crooked.
He looked like a boy who had tried to grow up too fast and tripped over his own deadlines.
“Is she here?” he asked.
Hassan nodded.
“In the back. Sleeping.”
Imran sagged with relief.
“Thank God,” he whispered.
Hassan studied his son’s face.
“You’re tired,” he said.
“I have to be,” Imran replied. “Work… deadlines… mortgage… Dad, you don’t understand.”
“Maybe,” Hassan said, “but time does.”
Imran frowned. “What?”
He gestured around the shop.
“These,” he said, “are not just clocks. They are… witnesses. Your entire childhood is hidden in their ticking.”
Imran gave a short, incredulous laugh.
“You’re talking like some Sufi,” he said. “Since when did you become mystical?”
“Since,” Hassan replied calmly, “I realised I have more past than future.”
He pointed to a small wall clock near the back.
“You see that one?” he asked. “The green one with the crack? I bought that the day you started school. You cried all morning. I came back and fixed clocks all day instead of going to the cafe with the other men. I thought I was being responsible. Providing. Years later, you remember I was absent. I remember I was present in a different way. Time holds both. It doesn’t choose.”
Imran’s mouth trembled.
“I always felt,” he said slowly, “like you loved this place more than me.”
“I loved feeding you more than playing with you,” Hassan said. “I am sorry if that translated badly.”
Silence.
Then: “I’m doing the same thing, aren’t I?”
Hassan didn’t answer.
He didn’t need to.
The clocks were loud enough.
From the back room, Leila appeared, hair messy, eyes cautious.
“Dad,” she whispered.
“Leila,” he said.
They stood there, separated by two steps and twenty years of unspoken expectations.
Hassan turned away, pretending to sort screws, giving them the illusion of privacy.
He listened anyway.
“I shouldn’t have said I hate you,” she said.
“I shouldn’t have said art is a waste of time,” he replied.
“I just… don’t want to disappear,” she said. “I don’t want time to run away and leave me with nothing.”
“I’m scared of the same thing,” he admitted. “That’s why I push you. Too much. Too hard.”
They both laughed shakily.
Hassan felt something loosen inside him, an old knot untying.
For a strange, suspended moment, three generations Coexisted:
An old man who had given his life to clocks.
A son who had given his life to schedules.
A granddaughter who wanted to give her life to colour.
Time, for once, did not demand they hurry.
The Clockmaker’s Last Adjustment
Years later, when Hassan’s hands began to shake too much for fine work, he made a decision.
He called Leila to the shop.
“I am giving you something,” he said.
“A watch?” she teased. “Or the whole universe?”
He smiled.
“Almost,” he said.
He handed her the keys.
“To the shop?”
“To the shop,” he confirmed. “And to whatever it does that I don’t fully understand.”
She stared.
“I’m not a clockmaker,” she said. “I paint. I…” She fumbled. “I don’t know how to fix things like you.”
“You fix different things,” he said. “Feelings. Walls. Canvases. Maybe time, too, but with colour instead of gears.”
“What about Dad?” she asked. “Shouldn’t it go to him?”
Hassan shrugged.
“He has his own clocks to manage,” he said. “Digital ones. Corporate ones. He is a good man. Busy in a world that eats men like him. You… you can stand here and let people breathe.”
She held the keys as if they might burn her.
“I’ll mess it up,” she whispered.
“All clocks are always messing up,” he said. “Running fast, running slow. We still trust them enough to glance. That is all anyone can ask.”
When he died, it was quiet.
He was at home, not in the shop.
He had wound no clocks that day.
He had only whispered, “Enough,” and time, for once, obeyed him.
The Shop After
Under new ownership — though the sign stayed the same — the shop changed slowly.
Leila painted the inside walls a softer colour.
She cleaned the windows.
She moved some clocks to make space for a small stool where people could sit and simply exist.
She kept the rules.
She did not lie about what could be fixed.
She did not change time to suit people’s wishes.
She listened to the watches people brought in, and sometimes to their owners’ stories.
It turned out people still needed a place like this in the age of smartphones.
Maybe more than ever.
Once, a Deliveroo rider burst in, rain dripping off his jacket, helmet under his arm, eyes frantic.
“My watch stopped,” he panted. “I know it’s stupid, I’ve got my phone, but this was my grandfather’s. I… I feel like I’ve killed him again.”
She took the watch.
Opened it.
Inside, the battery had simply given up.
She replaced it.
Handed it back.
He exhaled as if she’d pulled him from deep water.
“How much?” he asked.
She told him.
He paid.
At the door, he turned.
“My grandad used to bring me here when I was little,” he said. “He said, ‘This is where time goes to rest when it’s tired.’”
She smiled.
“He was right,” she said.
Later that night, when the shop was closed, she went to the drawer her grandfather had once guarded.
It was full now.
Teeth. Tickets. Hands from clocks. Faded notes. A photograph of a woman holding a letter.
She placed one more item in it:
A small acrylic painting she’d made of the London-Sylhet clock, colours bleeding around the faces like two worlds almost touching.
“Rest,” she whispered.
The clocks around her ticked in approval.
The Time Outside
Bethnal Green kept moving.
New towers rose.
Old buildings fell.
Bus routes changed.
Languages layered themselves on street corners until a single breath could contain five different histories.
People forgot the old watchmaker’s name.
They remembered the shop.
They remembered that inside, time seemed softer.
That grief walked slower.
That memory spoke more clearly.
Sometimes, on particularly quiet mornings, if you stood on Bethnal Green Road and watched the shop from across the street, you might see him:
An older man, slightly bent, moving between clocks with a screwdriver in his hand and love in his eyes.
Or maybe it’s just the light.
Or maybe — as your stories keep saying, over and over, in one city, in one community, across one hundred doorways —
the people who carried us
never really leave
as long as someone
remembers how they
kept
time.
Disclaimer
This story, published on mujiburrahman.com is a purely fictional work. All characters, places, communities, and events described are products of imagination or used in a fictional context. Any resemblance to actual individuals or real-world events is entirely coincidental. The purpose of this content is storytelling and entertainment only and should not be taken as factual or representative of any real person or community.
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