Danish Malik

The Repair Shop

Mr. Aldo’s watch repair shop was a cave of time. Dust motes swam in the single sunbeam that pierced the window, illuminating tiny towers of cogwheels, mainsprings, and the pale, patient face of the old man himself. I brought him the watch my grandfather left me, a heavy silver thing that had stopped breathing a year ago, the day of the funeral. “Ah,” Mr. Aldo said, his voice the sound of fine sandpaper on wood. He didn’t ask what was wrong. He lifted it to his ear, though it was silent, and closed his eyes. “It is not keeping time. It is keeping grief.” I didn’t know what to say to that. I just nodded, my throat tight.

He placed a clean cloth on the workbench and began. With tools so delicate they seemed like surgical instruments, he opened the case. I expected a lecture on mechanics, but he worked in a silence that was not empty, but full of focus. His hands, speckled with age but utterly steady, probed the tiny universe inside. He cleaned a speck of tarnish from a gear, coaxed a bent spring back into alignment, let a single drop of oil find its destined place. “Your grandfather,” he said, not looking up, “was a man who valued punctuality, yes? But also long walks. The watch would tick for both.” A memory surfaced, unbidden: Grandpa checking his watch before our walks, then letting it be, the afternoon stretching as long as the shadow of the pines. “How did you know?”

“A watch carries the rhythm of its keeper. This one’s rhythm became sad. It slowed in sympathy.” He smiled, a faint crack in a weathered face. “It is a good watch. It loved him too.” He worked for an hour. I watched, mesmerized by the ritual of it. This wasn’t just repair; it was a kind of conversation, a gentle persuasion back to function. Finally, he closed the case with a soft *click*. He wound the crown, gave it a gentle shake, and held it to his own ear. Then, he handed it to me. I placed it against mine. There it was: not just a tick, but a *tick-tock*, a steady, walking heartbeat in the metal. It was the sound of a finished afternoon crossword, of a kettle whistling, of footsteps on a path through the woods. It was his time, given back to me, not to measure loss, but to continue. “

A watch carries the rhythm of its keeper. This one’s rhythm became sad. It slowed in sympathy.” He smiled, a faint crack in a weathered face. “It is a good watch. It loved him too.” He worked for an hour. I watched, mesmerized by the ritual of it. This wasn’t just repair; it was a kind of conversation, a gentle persuasion back to function. Finally, he closed the case with a soft *click*. He wound the crown, gave it a gentle shake, and held it to his own ear. Then, he handed it to me. I placed it against mine. There it was: not just a tick, but a *tick-tock*, a steady, walking heartbeat in the metal. It was the sound of a finished afternoon crossword, of a kettle whistling, of footsteps on a path through the woods. It was his time, given back to me, not to measure loss, but to continue.

“It will run fast for a little while,” Mr. Aldo said, wiping his hands. “It is happy. Let it be. It will settle.” I paid him, but the transaction felt incidental. I left the dim shop for the bustling street, the watch a warm weight in my palm. I slipped it onto my wrist. The tick-tock was quiet, but I felt it there, a tiny, persistent pulse against my skin. It didn’t erase the absence. But it placed something living beside it—a reminder that what is loved keeps its own kind of time, and sometimes, with great care, it can be invited to march again, in step with your own waiting heart.

Author’s Words:

I wrote about the watch because I needed to articulate a quiet truth: grief is not a void, but a broken rhythm. My own grandfather’s absence was a silence I carried in my bones. The story was my way of holding that broken rhythm up to the light, not to fix it, but to show it could be heard differently—not as a stopped tick, but as a pulse waiting to be rediscovered. In Mr. Aldo’s careful hands, I found a metaphor for tenderness. We can’t resurrect what’s gone, but we can gently clean the memories, coax the springs of our affection back into alignment, and let love keep time in a new way. I wrote it to learn that lesson myself.

All That Was Never Said

Her hands were always in water. I used to think that was the sound of my childhood—the slap of  dishcloth against ceramic, the rush from the tap, the low hum of something cooking that smelled  of ginger and something unnameable, something that clung to the walls of our apartment for  days. My mother’s hands were pruned and pale, the knuckles slightly swollen, the skin forever  carrying the faint yellow scent of turmeric. We didn’t talk about sadness. We talked about  practicality. “Did you finish your homework?” “The rent is due.” “Pass the rice.” Our love was a  series of transactions, silent and efficient. She showed care by stacking my lunchbox, the eggs  perfectly centered. I showed respect by getting A’s. We were a closed loop, a perfectly  functioning machine with no room for the mess of feeling. 

The silence was the loudest thing in our home. It wasn’t empty; it was dense, layered with all the  things we didn’t say. The dreams she’d folded and put away like out-of-season sweaters. The  sharp, lonely edge in my father’s voice when he spoke to relatives back home. My own  confusion, a formless ache that had no vocabulary. We were fluent in absence. The fracture came  on a Tuesday. Ordinary. I was home from college, a visitor in my own home now, my duffel bag  leaking unfamiliarity onto the clean floor. She was at the sink, of course, scrubbing a pot. I was  talking, filling the silence with the cheap currency of my new world—philosophy classes, a  party, some inconsequential drama with a friend. My words were brittle and loud. 

I don’t know what I said. Something flippant, perhaps about her never taking a break, about the futility of cleaning something that would just get dirty again. A modern, American impatience with her ancient, immigrant diligence. She didn’t turn. Her shoulders, usually so squared against the world, slumped. Just for a second. And then her hand, the one holding the scrubber, went still. The water ran, a lonely soundtrack. “You think I like this?” Her voice was so quiet the water almost drowned it. It wasn’t angry. It was cracked, worn thin. “You think this is what I dreamed?” She finally turned. Her eyes were dry, but they held a depth of weariness I had never allowed myself to see. In them, I saw the ghost of a girl who had written poetry, who had loved a boy who wasn’t my father, who had imagined a life where her hands held books, not always wet cloths.

“Every stain I scrub,” she said, each word measured, pulled from a deep, dark well, “is a worry I  erase for you. Every grain of rice I wash is so you never know the hunger I knew. This water…”  She looked at her hands, submerged and raw. “This water is my language. You just never learned to hear it.” It was the most she had ever said to me about herself. It was her confession, her epic  poem, her heart laid bare—all in three sentences. And it shattered me. I saw it then. The sink  wasn’t just a sink. It was her altar. The ritual of cleaning was her prayer, a daily baptism of  worry into something tangible, something she could control. Her love wasn’t in words; it was in the spotless counter, the always-full fridge, the relentless, quiet combat against the chaos of  want. She had translated her entire soul into the grammar of sustenance and spotlessness, and I,  in my arrogant English, had called it mute. 

I didn’t hug her. We didn’t know how. The silence returned, but now it was different. Now I  could hear the symphony in it. The sorrowful violin of the running tap. The deep cello of the  simmering pot. The percussion of her heart, beating for two countries, neither of which felt  entirely like home. I walked over, took the scrubber from her stiff hand, and turned off the water.  For a moment, we just stood there in the new, startling quiet, the ghosts of her dreams hovering  between us in the steam. I picked up a dry towel. “Tell me,” I said, my own voice unfamiliar.  “Tell me about the girl who wrote poems.” She looked at her hands, finally out of the water, and  began, slowly, to dry them.

Author’s Words:

This piece profoundly humanizes the Asian American experience by reframing a universal immigrant narrative through the intimate, raw lens of unspoken love. The significance lies in its revelation of a "silent language"—where sacrifice and emotion are translated not into words, but into relentless, physical labor. The mother’s dishwater becomes a metaphor for the submerged dreams and unvoiced anxieties of a generation that built a future with its hands. It captures the poignant clash between cultures: the child’s Western expectation for verbal affirmation colliding with the parent’s Eastern grammar of service. Ultimately, it finds profound depth in the quiet, recognizing the sink as an altar and transforming mundane acts into a sacred, heartbreaking dialogue of care.