The Clock That Lost an Hour

The clock tower of Pinewood Hill had been keeping time for one hundred and twelve years, and for one hundred and eleven of them it had been right.

Then, in October, it started losing an hour.

Not slowly, in the way an old clock might lose a minute here and there. It lost a whole hour, every single day, and always in the same way. At nine in the morning the great hands read nine. At nine at night, when the lamplighter went by, they read eight. By morning someone had corrected it and the whole thing started again.

"It must be the gears," said Mr Gupta the baker, who knew nothing about gears.

"It must be the cold," said Mrs Dsouza, who knew nothing about cold clocks.

"It must be a ghost," said Mr Bose, who had been saying it must be a ghost about everything for fifty years.

Tara, who was twelve, had a notebook, a pencil, and a very good habit of ignoring grown-ups' theories.

"Gears do not lose exactly one hour," she told her little cousin Rohan, who was following her up the winding lane to the tower. "A broken gear is messy. It slips. This is tidy. Somebody, or something, is doing it on purpose."

"Is it the ghost?"

"Rohan." Tara sighed. "Ghosts do not own watches."

The keeper of the tower, old Mr Pillai, met them at the foot of the steps with a ring of keys and a frown. He had tended the clock for forty years and he was taking its misbehaviour personally.

"Three times this week I have wound it and checked it myself," he said. "Perfect at dusk. Then in the morning, an hour behind. I have even slept in the tower. Nothing. The key was in my pocket all night."

Tara wrote that down. Key in pocket. Then she asked to see the clock room.

They climbed one hundred and six steps. At the top, behind a wooden door, the machinery of the great clock filled the room like a mechanical heart: brass wheels, iron weights, a pendulum swinging slow as a sleeping breath.

She walked around it once, slowly. Then again. On the third circuit she crouched.

"Mr Pillai, what is this?"

On the floor, behind the pendulum case, someone had pushed a small tin of grease and a worn cloth. The cloth was warm to the touch, and it smelled faintly of cardamom.

"Cardamom?" muttered Mr Pillai. "That is odd. I use only machine oil."

"Does anyone else have a key?"

"Only the mayor." He hesitated. "And my late wife's, which I... never gave up. It hangs on the hook by the door."

It was not on the hook.

Tara chewed her pencil. A person who smelled of cardamom. A person who knew the tower. A person who adjusted the clock by exactly one hour, and always at night.

"What happens at nine o'clock in the evening, Mr Pillai?"

"Nothing. The lamplighter. The bakery shutters. The last bus to Shimla leaves at nine-ten."

"And at eight?"

He thought. "Mrs Sen's evening class, I suppose. Down in the old hall. She teaches the village women to read."

Tara stopped chewing.

That evening she did not go home for dinner. She sat on the low wall opposite the tower with Rohan and a flask of tea, and waited. At half past eight a small figure came up the lane, a woman in a faded blue shawl, carrying a basket that smelled strongly of cardamom and warm bread. She looked left. She looked right. And then she took a key from her pocket and quietly opened the tower door.

They followed. Two flights below the clock room, Tara put a finger to her lips.

They heard the soft, careful rasp of a spanner. Then a whisper, as though the person were speaking to the clock itself.

"Just one more hour, old friend. Just one more hour, and then they will all be home."

Tara pushed open the door.

The woman spun around, one hand pressed to her chest. She was elderly, with kind eyes and a tired face. On the floor beside her stood a basket of still-warm bread rolls, and an enormous knot of knitting.

"Mrs Sen?" said Tara.

"Oh, dear." The old woman sank onto an upturned crate. "You are Mr Pillai's little detective. They said you were clever."

"You have been changing the clock."

"I have." Mrs Sen smoothed her shawl. "Every evening. Do you know, the women in my reading class all work on the tea estate at the other end of the valley? They finish at seven-thirty, and it takes them an hour to walk here. By the time they reach the hall, the lamplighter has gone by, and the clock says nine. Nine! Their husbands begin to worry. Their mothers-in-law say, 'Late again! Does she even want to learn?' Some of them have stopped coming."

"So you moved the clock back," said Tara slowly.

"One hour, to make nine into eight. Just in the evening, to give them time. Then I come back at dawn and put it right before anyone wakes. It is a small thing." Her voice wobbled. "I did not know it would cause such a fuss."

For a moment, nobody said anything. Down in the lane, the lamplighter's lantern bobbed past, and far away the last bus gave a lonely honk.

"You could have just asked," said Rohan.

"Ask whom? The council? They would have talked for six months." Mrs Sen tried to smile. "Sometimes a person only wants to solve a small problem quietly."

Tara looked at the great clock, its hands now reading eight. She felt a strange tug of sympathy. And then she felt something else: an idea, bright and clean as a coin.

"Mrs Sen," she said, "what if the class started an hour later? Officially? What if we told the mayor?"

So the next morning, a very surprised Mr Pillai went with a very determined Tara to see the mayor, and by Friday a new notice hung on the board outside the old hall: READING CLASS: NOW 8:30 TO 10:00 P.M. EVENING WALKERS WELCOME.

The great clock of Pinewood Hill kept perfect time after that, for another hundred and eleven years and then some.

But sometimes, on winter evenings, when the lamps are lit and the cardamom bread is warm, the baker's wife swears she can hear a soft whisper from the top of the tower, as if the old machine were quietly saying thank you.

Mr Bose still maintains it was a ghost. Tara lets him.