The Repair Shop

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. The shop, its owner, the student and everyone else in it are invented.

The strap

The shop was not much wider than a wardrobe. It sat in a market lane in north Delhi, a few streets from the university, between a phone-cover stall and a tea stall, under a tangle of cables so thick the pigeons used it as a hotel.

Inside, under one bulb, sat Gyurme. He was sixty-four, Tibetan, short and square, with grey hair cut close and a leather apron gone soft with age. He mended shoes on the left side of his bench and watches on the right, and he did not talk much about either.

Kavya Menon came in out of the July rain with a sandal in her hand. The strap had torn away on the walk from the metro, and she had done the last stretch with one foot bare, which in a Delhi monsoon is a decision you regret.

She was twenty-seven, from Kochi, in the third year of a PhD in history. She had a chapter due in November, and she had rewritten its first page, by her own count, forty-one times. She apologised for the sandal, for the water on his floor and for interrupting, in that order.

Gyurme looked at the sandal. “Sit,” he said, and pointed at a stool.

One stitch

She had meant to leave it. She sat instead, because the rain had got worse, and watched.

He cut the old thread out with a small curved knife. He drew a length of new thread across a lump of wax, twice. Then he pushed an awl through the leather, pulled the thread after it, drew it tight and looked at it. Then the next hole. He did not hurry, and he did not stop.

His lips moved while he worked. At first she thought he was counting stitches, but it went on after the stitching was done: a low, steady murmur in a language she did not know, like someone keeping a tune going under his breath.

It took twenty minutes and cost sixty rupees. The new stitches were small, even and plain to see, darker than the old ones. “It will hold,” he said, and that was the whole conversation.

Forty-one times

That night, in her rented room with the iron grille on the window and the ceiling fan that clicked once on every turn, she opened the chapter and read the first page. It was not right. She had no idea what would make it right. She closed the laptop and lay looking at the fan.

She had always been like this. At school it had made her the girl with the best marks. At the university it had made her the student who sent in nothing. Her supervisor, a kind and very tired man, had stopped asking about the chapter in May.

The watch

In August her watch stopped. It was a small steel wind-up watch her father had given her when she started the PhD, because, he said, a historian should own one thing that ticks. She wound it every morning. One morning she wound it, and it would not go.

She took it to Gyurme with her stomach in a knot. “I overwound it,” she said. “I wound it too far. I broke the spring.”

He opened the back with a little blade and put a loupe in one eye, the small black magnifier a watchmaker holds close to the eye, and looked for a long time.

“Not broken,” he said. “Dirty. Old oil. It needs cleaning.” She said again that she had overwound it. “No,” he said. “You can’t. It is made to wind up full.” It was the most words she had heard from him at once.

Kavya looked it up that night. A mechanical watch is built to be wound all the way, and one that stops at full wind is usually asking to be cleaned. She read about it for an hour instead of writing.

Gyurme wrote nothing down. He put the watch in a small dish, put a lid on it and said, “Two weeks.”

The long way round

The rains eased in September. The lane steamed in the early mornings and by ten was full of rickshaws, scooters and students carrying photocopies. Kavya found she was taking the long way from the metro so that she passed the shop.

She had no reason to go in. Then her running shoes, which she wore at night to run round the block when she could not sleep, began to come apart at the toe, and she had one.

The question

That afternoon there were three people ahead of her. A man in a good shirt wanted his heel done “right now, uncle, two minutes”. Gyurme finished the shoe he was holding and set it on the shelf. Then he took the man’s shoe. The man sighed a great deal. The heel took eleven minutes, and he walked out better than he had walked in.

Kavya sat on the stool and listened to the murmur going on under it all. When the shop was empty she asked, before she could stop herself, “What are you saying? When you work.”

Gyurme did not look up. “A prayer,” he said. “To Guru Rinpoche.” He drew the thread tight. “My mother said it while she worked. So my hands know it.”

That was all. He did not explain who Guru Rinpoche was, or ask whether she would like to know, and she did not ask again.

Accomplishment

She looked it up, of course; that part of her work she could still do. Guru Rinpoche, the “Precious Teacher”, is the eighth-century master Tibetans remember for helping Buddhism take root in their country. The prayer was the Seven-Line Prayer, which tradition says was first revealed as a hidden treasure text in the thirteenth century, short enough to say in a breath or two and said by Tibetans everywhere.

She read it in translation, slowly, the way she read old documents. It told of a land to the north-west, of a birth in the heart of a lotus, of a name everyone knows. The third line said he had reached accomplishment, the most wonderful and supreme kind. Translators put the word differently: attainments, accomplishments.

She sat up at that. A prayer about accomplishment. The Tibetan word was ngödrup. A glossary explained that the supreme accomplishment is enlightenment itself, and that lesser ones, even marvellous ones, are not treated as ends in themselves. Most of what she read after that she did not understand, and she was honest enough to admit it.

What she did understand was smaller. Gyurme said a prayer about the greatest accomplishment there is, and he said it over a sandal strap. He did not say it once, perfectly, and put it away. He said it every day, all day, under one bulb, a stitch at a time.

Chalk

In October she noticed the shelf. The mended shoes waited there in a row, and on the sole of each Gyurme had drawn a small chalk mark: a circle, a cross, two short lines, a triangle. No names, no tickets. He knew whose was whose.

He never began a shoe until the one before it was finished. She had watched it all autumn. Now she thought about it. That night she opened the chapter, did not read the first page, went to section three, which was the worst, and mended one paragraph. Then she stopped, which was the hard part.

The smoke

At the end of October the smoke came, as it does now most autumns in Delhi, when the air goes still and the stubble is burned in the fields to the north. The sun turned into a copper coin. People in the lane wore masks and squinted at each other.

The watch had taken longer than two weeks. When she came for it, Gyurme wound it, held it to his ear and put it in her palm. It was ticking. There was still a fine scratch across the glass, from some morning years ago.

“I can change the glass,” he said. “Not needed. It keeps time.” She looked at the scratch for a while. “Leave it,” she said, and was surprised to find she meant it.

November

The fog came after the smoke. On a cold night in late November Kavya sent the chapter to her supervisor. It was not right. Section three was better. The first page was still wrong in forty-one ways, and she sent it anyway, with a short note saying it was a draft, which was true of everything.

She did not know what he would say. She did not learn the prayer. She was not sure what she thought about Guru Rinpoche, or lotuses, or accomplishment of any size. She wound the watch every morning, all the way, because it was made for that.

Some evenings, coming back from the metro, she passed the shop, a small yellow box in the fog, and heard the murmur still going on under the noise of the lane, steady and unfinished, like stitching.