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The Clock Mender of the Old Bazaar: A Short Story About Patience

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This is an original fictional story written for Learn More Hive. The characters, the shop and the events are imaginary.

The story

At the end of Saddar’s old bazaar, between a tailor and a tea stall, there was a tiny shop with a faded sign: Rahim Baksh, Clock Mender. Inside, hundreds of clocks ticked together, and none of them agreed on the time.

Twelve-year-old Zara passed that shop every morning on her way to school. Every morning she saw old Rahim Baksh bent over his bench with a magnifying glass in his eye, and every morning she wondered why anyone would keep so many broken things.

One afternoon, rain forced her to shelter in the doorway. Rahim Baksh looked up. “Come in, beta, or the clocks will think you are afraid of them.”

Zara stepped inside. The ticking was like rain on a tin roof. “Why don’t your clocks show the same time?” she asked.

“Because they are not finished yet,” he said with a smile. “These are the ones people gave up on. A clock is not broken, only waiting for someone to be patient.”

The clock that would not move

On the bench lay a small brass alarm clock, dusty and silent. “This one belonged to a schoolteacher,” said Rahim Baksh. “His daughter wants it working for her father’s birthday. Three mechanics said it cannot be fixed.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I do not know. But I can try one small thing today, and another tomorrow.”

He showed Zara the tiny wheels inside: a bent tooth on one, a spring that had lost its tension, dirt packed in a corner. “If I looked at everything at once, I would give up. So I look at one wheel at a time.”

Zara began to stop at the shop every afternoon. She brought him tea. He let her hold the tweezers. Slowly she learned to see the clock not as one big problem but as many small ones.

Zara’s own broken thing

A week later, Zara admitted why she lingered there. She had failed her mathematics test, and she was too embarrassed to tell her parents. “I think I am just not good at it,” she whispered.

Rahim Baksh did not lecture her. He only pointed at the brass clock. “Which wheel is the first one that did not turn?”

Zara thought. “The bent tooth.”

“And in your test, which question was the first one you did not understand?”

It was a strange question, but it made her open her notebook that night. She found that her trouble began with fractions, long before the chapter she failed. She asked her teacher for help, practised ten sums a day, and a month later she scored the highest marks in her class.

The ticking

On the day before the teacher’s birthday, Zara arrived to find the shop door open and silence in the air. Rahim Baksh held the brass clock to his ear and, very gently, wound it.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The clock was working. Its hands moved slowly through a minute, and then another.

“You said it could not be fixed,” Zara laughed.

“I said I did not know,” he corrected. “The only way to find out was to start.”

The next morning, the schoolteacher’s daughter cried happy tears and tried to pay him double. Rahim Baksh accepted only the normal price, and then he gave Zara a small gift: a worn pair of tweezers, still shining.

What the story teaches

  • Big problems become manageable when you work on one small part at a time.
  • Failure shows you where to start, not who you are.
  • Patience is a skill that can be practised.

Questions to think about

  1. Why did Rahim Baksh say the clocks were “not finished yet”?
  2. How did Zara use his method to improve in mathematics?
  3. What is one “broken thing” in your life that you could repair one small step at a time?

If you enjoyed this story, read another tale of persistence, The Boy Who Counted the Stairs. Students who feel overwhelmed by lessons may find help in our guides on making a study timetable and how to concentrate on studies.

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