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 The Gold Watch “Just have it melted and make something else,” my father said, giving me his gold watch. He had taught me how to read time with it. We sat close on the small open balcony above the first floor, beneath a mango tree’s tallest branches. His finger pointed to the thin gold hands which make the passage easily from hour to hour. One late afternoon, my grandmother died. A skinny adolescent, I sat on my father’s lap; his balding head on my shoulder, he cried. I can still feel his arms enclosing me as if to hold someone who would never vanish. In a way, he had also learnt about time from his own father, the years when he watched him, a white shape who lingered every afternoon in the rocking chair, unaware of sunlit flies swarming, mourning himself, inviting silence. ...

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