Lahore: At the corner of a narrow alleyway in Lahore’s Main Market, Muhammad Yaqoob, a life-long resident of the city, can be seen from the display cabinet of his rickety kiosk unscrewing a gold bracelet watch. Guided by the loupe that protrudes from his left eye and gives him a faintly menacing look, he works his way across the miniature world hidden inside the timepiece. Under his expert gaze, and with a delicateness that belies the craggy sturdiness of his hands, the watch is taken apart before being put back together again.As Yaqoob unmakes the timepiece, the swirl of commerce buzzes around him. The passage where his kiosk is set up is known as the ‘corridor of frames’ due to the deluge of open-fronted picture framing shops that inhabit it. Directly opposite him, two women are arguing with a framer about an order that has gone wrong, while next door the sound of a hammer striking against a nail cracks out of a workshop. In between, a chai wala hurtles across, distributing tea among the numerous merchants in small, green cups. This is a place of flurry and commotion, but amidst it all, the watchmaker sits adrift of the currents of the bazaar, meticulously tending to his craft.Muhammad Yaqoob has been repairing watches for 50 years now. Credit: Usman AhmadFor almost 50 years now, Yaqoob has serviced and repaired the timepieces of the patrons of Main Market. His path to horology had opened up for him after a failed apprenticeship at a local carpenter’s. In his early teens and pressured by his father to find a vocation, he soon realised that he did not want to spend the rest of his life making furniture.“I couldn’t handle the fumes from the wood stains and polishing solutions” he says. “I would come down with severe headaches and felt like I had been drugged or put under the influence of something.”With little formal education and the expectation of helping relieve the financial burdens of his family weighing over him, he decided to join the Bhatti Watch Company, which was back then the main watch repair studio in the upscale district of Gulberg.“The moment I started working there, I knew that here was a profession I could fully devote myself to. I was at ease with work and found that it suited my temperament,” he says.An assortment of watches brought for repair at Yaqoob’s shop. Credit: Usman AhmadHe learned his trade from the nine other watchmakers who worked there. During a 15-year stay with the company, he came to master the numerous painstaking skills, methods, deftness and hand-eye coordination quality watchmaking requires. Then, shortly after getting married in 1971, he decided to venture out for himself and set up his own kiosk. He has been there ever since.As Yaqoob tells it, in the early days of his business, a lot of the watches he would receive for repair were from high-end brands like Rolex and powered by intricate automatic movements.“I used to get for repair all sorts of expensive watches that had been purchased abroad. Many of them had complicated movements, and I would often have to rely on my wit and experience to work them out,” he says. “Even the cheaper watches that came were mostly automatic but ran on more mass-produced systems.“Though the complexity of the watches often confounded me, things were still easier then as you could get most extra parts from suppliers in Anarkali. Nowadays, a lot of the old traders have closed, and original factory parts are almost impossible to come by.”A lot of watches that are brought for repair these days are cheap and uninspiring. Credit: Usman AhmadNot that there are many people still bringing him intricate statement pieces. Today, the majority of his work involves servicing or changing the batteries on a range of inexpensive and uninspiring quartz watches. The less complicated the work the less profitable it is.“It is difficult to charge a decent rate for the work that most people require to get done these days,” he says. “Money was good when I first started my kiosk, but things have changed now. Also, there are less people wearing watches these days with the arrival of mobile phones and other modern technologies, so the number of customers is a lot fewer now. A lot of the watchmakers who are still around have started repairing other things but I have stuck to timepieces. It is what I love, and, after all the long decades I have done this, I have no wish to change.”He realises, though, that his commitment to watchmaking is an anachronism – persisting as a remnant of a bygone time in an age when the traditions of artisanal trades have become a rarity. With his face lit by the dim orange glow of the withered skeleton-like lamp that has been an ever present companion to him in his years at the kiosk, Yaqoob is quietened for a moment by the stark silence of memory. When he begins to talk again, a sweep of nostalgia passes over him and renders his expressions both calm and vulnerable. There was a time, he recalls, when there were watchmakers like him spread out throughout the market.“It used to seem like everyone had a watch that needed fixing. There were so many of us, but no one ever went short of business. A lot of the old ones have either died or are too long in the tooth to carry on. The others have moved onto other things and younger people are not taking up the trade. I am one of the last ones left here.”Muhammad Yaqoob is one of the last few watch repairmen at Main Market, Lahore. Credit: Usman AhmadYaqoob, however, is nothing if not resolute and his passion for his work remains undiminished. “I don’t think I have taken more than a day off at a time since I started and even those are rare. I once came down with a terrible back ache but after one day at home, I rushed back. What was I going to do in the house anyway?”When the timepiece in Yaqoob’s hand is nearly done, a woman comes to collect her own watch from him. She is in a rush and tells him to hurry. But before she finishes speaking, the piece is already in her hand, fished out by Yaqoob from his cupboard without a hint of a glance. A jab of embarrassment hits her, and instead of tearing off, she stays to talk with Yaqoob for a while about everything from the suffocating humidity to the traumas a tailor has inflicted on her by making the wrong sized dress. Then, when she is gone, Yaqoob lowers his head and begins to repair another timepiece with movements that are tangible and precise and performed with the intimacy of a duet between a master craftsman and his tools.Usman Ahmad is a British freelance writer and photographer based in Pakistan. His work has featured in Foreign Policy Magazine, Vice and The Diplomat among others. He tweets at @usmanahmad_iam.