First published in 1942, Nanak Singh’s Punjabi novel Pavitra Paapi (Saintly Sinner) subsequently won a Sahitya Akademi Award, and was also made into a Hindi film. Translated into English by the author’s grandson Navdeep Suri, The Watchmaker is a timeless classic of doomed and unconsummated love. Rendered in another tongue with enormous sensitivity, this novel retains the earthy metaphors of the Punjabi original.
Set in the cities of Amritsar and Rawalpindi in the 1930s, it traces the story of an ill-fated young man Kedar Nath. When he desperately joins work as a watchmaker under the parsimonious Attar Singh, little does he realise that another family has lost its only breadwinner. Panna Lal, grievously in debt, goes to work one day and learns that he has been sacked from his position as the shop’s accountant and Kedar, armed with the knowledge of repairing watches has been hired as the new replacement. Panna Lal walks away, casting the last accusatory glance at Kedar.
When Panna Lal’s children come looking for him, Kedar is plagued by guilt. Afraid of saying the unpalatable truth, he invents the comfortable lie that Attar Singh has sent their father to Bombay on business. He visits their home, and on their advice, takes lodging nearby. Soon, he is exposed to the dire straits of their family: the increasing debts, the young mother Maya looking after four children, the marriage arrangements of the eldest daughter Veena that have been suspended for want of money and so on. Kedar starts shouldering all the responsibilities of running their family and repaying the various debts. In order to account for Panna Lal’s absence and to keep up a lie of such a magnitude, Kedar (writes and) reads a weekly letter (purportedly from Panna Lal) to the family and manages to satisfy them about his whereabouts.
It is not just a story of a young man playing good samaritan by weaving a litany of lies. Quite naturally, Kedar falls in love with the beautiful Veena, and is torn between pursuing his romantic interests and answering his gnawing conscience (which in true Indian fashion reminds him that he is like a brother to her, and that it is a sin to break such trust). The pleasure of watching Veena gives him the necessary emotional sustenance to bear the crushing poverty which he has called upon himself. With nothing but bitter black tea to sustain him, Kedar wrecks his health working hard to settle Panna Lal’s debts. He then convinces Maya to make all arrangements for Veena’s marriage to another man.
Veena sends for Kedar the night before her wedding and confronts him, however, it is too late for the lovers to change their entangled fate. Doomed in love, the young lovers seek their deaths in diverse ways.
Navdeep Suri’s translation preserves a poetic narrative style of an earlier era, a style that doesn’t show and tell, but only hints and implies. The unpretentious novel subtly questions societal norms and deals with the eternally hazy divisions that separate love and duty and sacrifice. In the end, it is also a story of a watchmaker whose Time has gone all wrong. This embattled love-story, with its tragic ending, has an universal appeal.
— Meena is a poet and critic based in
Chennai. meena84@gmail.com