At 69, Javed Khan has little intention of letting time catch up with him. For more than 55 years, the watch repairer has spent his days coaxing old timepieces back to life, one tiny gear and spring at a time. He was barely 12 when he first learnt the craft. Today, after repairing more than 30,000 watches, he remains as fascinated by their intricate mechanisms as he was when he began. “I will keep repairing watches for as long as I am alive,” says Khan, with a proud smile.
In the bustling lanes of Hazrat Nizamuddin, where devotees make their way to the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya and visitors stop by Ghalib’s tomb, time seems to move at its own pace. Hawkers sell flowers and prayer offerings, rickshaws squeeze through narrow streets, and shopkeepers call out to passers-by. Yet, tucked away in the basement of Markazi Market, there is a little workshop where time is measured differently.
Javed Times, barely six feet by six feet, is crowded with old watches, miniature tools and mechanical parts. Seated at his workbench, Khan peers through an eyeglass loupe, his fingers carefully negotiating the delicate insides of a watch. A signboard outside announces its speciality: Old Swiss Watch Sale & Service. Khan began learning the trade in 1970 under Ishak Khan in Chandni Chowk. He subsequently worked at Surendra & Co. in Connaught Place before setting up his own shop. Over the decades, he has repaired thousands of timepieces, from Omega, Zenith and Favre-Leuba to the much-loved Indian HMT watches.
The challenge, particularly with vintage watches, is finding spare parts. When a component is unavailable, Khan often salvages one from a broken watch or fashions a replacement himself. “Sometimes, a small part is missing, and you cannot find it anywhere. In such cases, I try to make it myself. You have to understand the watch completely before you can repair it,” he says.
His workshop also houses nearly 150 antique watches. Refurbished HMT timepieces sit alongside vintage Swiss models, while some prized possessions, including a 1936 Omega, are tucked away in drawers beneath his workbench. In an age when smartphones and smartwatches have made checking the time almost instinctive, Khan's customers often arrive with something far more precious than a malfunctioning watch: a memory. An old timepiece inherited from a father or grandfather cannot simply be replaced with a new one.
“People may buy a new watch, but an old watch can have a different value. Sometimes it belongs to their father or grandfather. They do not want to replace it; they want to keep it working,” he says. That sentiment brought Shazia Akhtar, a businesswoman from Saharanpur, all the way to Nizamuddin. She arrived at around 11 am to have her Swiss watch repaired, only to discover that Khan usually opens his shop after 2 pm.
“I came here from Saharanpur to repair my Swiss watch, but here I came to know that he opens his shop after 2 pm,” she says. The watch was a gift from her brother, making it too special to entrust to an unfamiliar repairer. “This is my precious watch. I cannot give it to just anyone,” Akhtar says. Customers travel from different parts of the country, some in search of vintage watches, others hoping to revive timepieces they have treasured for years. But the future of this painstaking craft remains uncertain. With fewer young people willing to spend years mastering the intricacies of mechanical watches, skilled repairers such as Khan are becoming increasingly rare.
“This work needs patience. You cannot learn it in a few days. It takes years to understand the small parts and how every watch works,” he says. For now, Khan remains at his workbench, surrounded by the ticking remnants of another era. Outside, Nizamuddin rushes about its daily business. Inside his little workshop, however, he continues to give old watches a new lease of life, one careful repair at a time.