> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.merionwest.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Clock Minder - URL: https://www.merionwest.com/the-clock-minder/ - Published: 2026-10-12T13:39:54.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-13T14:03:43.000Z - Description: Shivani Sivagurunathan - Author: Shivani Sivagurunathan - Tags: Fiction Mr. Poh arrived at work with one thing on his mind. The clock on the wall in his office needed to be repositioned, but nobody seemed to care about the clock. The clock itself was plain. The University had bought three hundred clocks in bulk, on discount, from IKEA. The clock’s rim was red, its hands were black and the numbers were blue. The clock was made of plastic. When the clock was first hung on the wall, nobody but Mr. Poh noticed. The other language teachers—the four with whom he shared the office—had been typing on their computers, preparing what Mr. Poh knew deep inside he should have been preparing too: schedules. Moments before the handymen knocked on the door to announce that they were going to hang a clock on the wall, Mr. Poh had been staring at his container of porridge. That morning he opened the freezer, smelled the cold vague air of all the food he had cooked over the past week, closed his eyes and pointed. When he opened his eyes, he was a little disappointed that he had selected the porridge for his lunch and not the eggy noodles he had prepared two days prior. Still, his fingers had chosen and he had no choice but to heat the porridge up and pack it into his work container and get ready for work. When the handymen hung the clock, they hung it on a section of the wall closest to Mr. Poh’s desk. When Mr. Poh looked at his computer screen, where a document lay open, half complete, he felt the clock at his back. At first, he didn’t realize what it was. The clock, after all, was new. As he was about to type the words “Week Four,” he heard it. Duk-duk. His fingers froze. But the sound did not. It continued, continuous, and seemed to get louder. When he realized it was coming from the clock, he nodded to himself and laughed. He stood up and walked over to Mary Gomez’s desk. ![Brush-and-ink illustration of an office wall clock](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/bf/2cbf55d5-edac-4019-bf5c-bf6b4bf7d745/content/images/2026/10/clock-mw-illustration.png) “Mary,” he said, “how your work going?” Mary, who had been chatting with her ex-boyfriend, looked up at Mr. Poh. She clicked out of the chat screen and offered him a biscuit. “No lah,” Mr. Poh said, feeling heat in his cheeks, “later I have porridge. Spoil my appetite for what?” Mary started eating the biscuit. “I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Poh, the weeks are passing by so quickly and the students still seem so blur.” Mr. Poh saw the crumbs from Mary’s biscuit falling onto her keyboard. He remembered Mary once laughing and telling him about how she had taken her students to an oil palm plantation in Batang Kali and the students had screamed when they saw a cobra coiling around a fallen palm oil fruit and Mary could do nothing to stop them or the cobra and then she fainted. Still, Mary Gomez was his favorite of the teachers at the office they shared. His finger twitched. It seemed to him that help had to be offered. He heard the usual quacking of a duck in his head, urging him onward. But Mary was eating another biscuit and more crumbs were falling. The situation was total. The duck quacked again. “Student always like that lah,” Mr. Poh finally said, “where got they understand everything?” Mary nodded. She reached for another biscuit and looked away from Mr. Poh. Her computer screen was filled with icons. She tried to peer into the background, at the picture of the whole family at Christmas last year. Mr. Poh tapped a finger on her desk. Da-dum-da-dum-da-dum it went. So Mary stopped eating and looked at the finger and tried to think of ways to get Mr. Poh back at his own desk where he could continue to tap if that was what he wanted to do and she could put her headphones on and carry on chatting with Matthias. She knew Mr. Poh had an obscene love of toothpicks, that he generally preferred working quietly at his desk until he leapt from his seat at the busiest moments in the day and began asking questions. *All tiles are the same? Is there an alley near big roads?* When nobody could answer, Mr. Poh would march back to his desk and stare at the ceiling for quite a while, digging at his teeth with a toothpick. “Mr. Poh, you think every country needs a flag?” The paintbrush Mr. Poh had been thinking about vanished. He had never considered the importance of flags before. He glanced at Mary. It was Mary who introduced bookshelves into the office and filled them with old smelly books. She was always thinking about others. Always thinking about others! He knew the Malaysian flag but how often did he think about it? He lived in Malaysia but he didn’t carry the country’s flag around with him. “It’s for sure a good thing,” Mr. Poh said, thinking hard about why. Mary laughed, noticing the superior baldness of Mr. Poh’s head. His baldness had never occurred to her before, nor had the way his head shone as though perpetually damp. Even his thick-rimmed glasses appeared foggy as though it was Mr. Poh himself who was exuding liquid. The chat screen blinked. “A good thing because we can put it on airplane and when they march at Olympic games,” Mr. Poh said. In a dash of the finger, the chat screen emerged. In a flash, Mary saw the words “tempted” and “lunchtime.” Matthias had been talking about leaving his job, finding “new ways.” Yet, he wouldn’t say what he meant by “ways.” Going deep into the Bible? He’d always revealed glimpses of fragile piousness, saying grace, for example, and then eating his food with a frown. “Sure, Mr. Poh,” Mary said, “you think harder about this. I feel it’s an important question. Especially for a country like Malaysia. One look at the news and you can see we’re all over the place. What’s the meaning of a flag?” Mr. Poh sensed a revelation rising up into his skull. Eyes fixed on Mary’s shimmering floral dress, he realized she was not an ordinary person. The other teachers passed pictures of their children from desk to desk or discussed the rise in petrol prices, gray flames flickering mildly in their eyes as they began talking about the Institution, the terrible, oppressive Institution. Mary had no children, she took the bus to work, and every day she had enough energy and excitement to twirl her hair as she worked at her computer. He could see that the moment between them was over. He walked back to his desk. He’d left his lunchbox open and now the porridge had earned a dull glutinous layer like curdled fat in milk. One or two pieces of carrot fought to penetrate the surface and the anchovies were nowhere to be seen. The more Mr. Poh stared at the porridge, the more he heard the clock’s awful sound. He closed the container, switched off his computer monitor and pretended to read a book on grammar. He felt vastly comfortable. His face developed a serene, learned look and he inhabited it so professionally that he began to believe he was reading Davidson’s *Guide to Excellent Grammar*. He turned the pages following a smooth internal rhythm that arrived from somehow knowing the natural pace at which he read. At times a smile would form on his face, slowly, and in keeping with the rhythm. He would nod as though he and Davidson were having a profound discussion about syntax. He was enjoying himself. All sorts of thoughts freely entered and left his mind and entered again transformed. He had forgotten about Mary, who had forgotten about her lunch and had inadvertently eaten all the biscuits in her jar. Matthias had written a near essay on “finding ways.” He was going to fish for six months, climb Mount Kinabalu and teach math to underprivileged kids in Sabah, make things with his hands…chairs, tables, kitchen counters…start a society at church. Yesterday she’d told him literally, not metaphorically, to go fly kites. She urged him to read books he hated. She asked him if basil complemented pork or if coriander was better. He’d replied, sure, sure, but now she knew he’d not understood her. Mary got up from her seat. Across the partition, Mr. Poh was smiling like a man fashioning his own madness. She tore a sheet of paper out of a notepad on her desk and crushed it into a ball. There he was, now nodding, now pretending to be happy, but really, what was he thinking about? Did he ask those ridiculous questions for attention or did he genuinely want to know why women made the best mothers? No, he was a stupid man, utterly useless, incompetent, why did the University hire him in the first place? A language teacher who couldn’t tell past from present tense, future from past and present tense? Confusion! Didn’t he know the now from the then? Fool! *Tomorrow I was going to the Kuan Yin temple.* The future is not the past. Dunderhead! The paper ball was ready to go. The paper ball was softening in her hand. But the office door opened and Alfred Nambiar, the only professor at their department, wanted a paperclip. Mary dropped the paper ball. She opened her drawer and showed Alfred her box of paperclips. He smiled his crooked smile, a smile that appeared on his half-thick lips when he was silently saying something. Mary watched his finger swirl around the paperclips. Then Alfred brought a thumb in, clipped one up and smiled again. “I knew I’d come to the right place,” he said. Mary fixed her eyes on the purple tie hanging like a pole from Alfred’s thin neck. The tie had red polka dots and the dots looked alive. “Everything ok, Prof?” Mary asked, feeling stupid about her question. Alfred lifted his hand, gently pushed the lower part of his sleeve up and looked at his golden watch. “There are preposterous essays to be marked. Can you believe a student has begun an essay by talking about his feelings? *Feelings*, Mary. What am I supposed to do with that?” Alfred covered his golden watch with the lower part of his sleeve. Mary said, “Put them in their place, Prof. We all know you do. We’re not here to breed weak people, isn’t it?” Alfred nodded as though he’d finally realized what he’d wanted for lunch. A plate of chicken rice, the chicken flat and pale, the vinegary sauce orange-red like a watery wound, popped in Mary’s head and disappeared. “You and I, Mary Gomez, *we’re* not here to breed a generation of *feelers*. How can the country progress if it’s governed by *emotions*? This is what I say again and again to those nincompoops who sit and stare at me with open mouths like I’m God.” Alfred brought out a glistening fountain pen from his shirt pocket and held it as though he were about to use it. “That’s a very nice pen,” Mary said. Alfred’s eyebrows narrowed down. His usually concrete eyes threatened to collapse. “A gift. Some old friend. Dead now. Yes, I always think a good pen is a mark of good character. Wouldn’t you say so?” The analogy was entirely new to Mary. She thought hard about her collection of plastic pens and that pushed a yawn down before it could flower. “If a generation ready for you,” Mr. Poh shouted from his seat. Mary and Alfred turned to look at Mr. Poh whose forehead had welcomed a fine spray of sweat. “Ah, Mr. Poh,” Alfred said, “ever the passion, quell thy passion, thy fire must be meek.” A giggle flew out of Alfred’s mouth. Mr. Poh stood up. He walked over to Mary and Alfred. He gazed at the pen and the way it sparkled made him feel soft and sad and he looked up into Alfred’s eyes and he saw the same sparkle there as though the pen and Alfred’s eyes were the same thing. Mr. Poh shifted his eyes onto Mary’s shimmering floral dress and again he felt soft and sad and he looked into Mary’s eyes and he saw the same shimmer there as though the dress and Mary’s eyes were the same thing. He bent his head. From there, he said, “I been thinking. Mary ask me to think about why every country need a flag. It’s a good thing to think about and it seem to me that it’s one picture we all know. Picture can come up anytime and we all know.” Mary and Alfred laughed. The next day, Mr. Poh arrived at the office with one thing on his mind. The clock needed to be repositioned. He announced his desire. But people were busy. Then he went to the handymen and asked them to let him into the storeroom where he found a hailer. He made sure to check that the hailer was working before returning to the office. When he first spoke into the hailer, his voice became so loud that he was instantly reminded of the duck’s quack. He dropped the hailer and the sound it gave out was like a cow mooing as it died. He saw himself as a young boy, squatting by a lake, feeding the ducks until one duck waddled up to him, looked him in the eye and quacked so loudly that Mr. Poh ran back to his father who told him something like, “Who asked you to go so close? Every time something bad happens, immediately, *immediately*, learn the lesson.” Now, at the age of forty-five, Mr. Poh still did not know what the lesson was and the duck had followed him into middle age. He shook the duck off and went back to the office. He turned the hailer on and said, “Dear colleague, a clock is been put on our wall. *Our* wall. You see it?” His colleagues had no choice but to look up at Mr. Poh who had taken to standing on a box of books Mary had brought in. When he pointed at the clock, they all followed his finger. “It *our* choice *where* the clock goes. It’s not so simple. I cannot decide. We got no choice when the clock came. But now it here. And because it’s here, we got a choice. So tell me, brother and sister, what you going to do? Choice is yours. You got freedom. Where the clock go?” People were too stunned to speak, so Mr. Poh spoke again into the hailer, this time raising his voice, “You don’t know? Answer is very simple. We vote!” The voting took place not long after that. The clock found itself in the middle of the wall facing the desks. Two years later, the clock stopped working, but Mr. Poh was not interested in the clock any longer. He had other things on his mind. ### Shivani Sivagurunathan is a Malaysian author. Her first novel, [*Yalpanam*](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/59020247-yalpanam?ref=merionwest.com), was published by Penguin Southeast Asia in September of 2021\. Her poetry collection,[ *Being Born*](https://shivanisivagurunathan.com/2023/02/09/review-of-being-born-a-poetry-collection/?ref=merionwest.com), and her book of fiction, [*What Has Happened to Harry Pillai?*](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/64407213-what-has-happened-to-harry-pillai?ref=merionwest.com)*: Two Novellas*, were released in 2022.