Chapter 1
The Letter from Kenanga House
The letter arrived on a Tuesday, between a broken cuckoo clock and a wristwatch that had been through a washing machine.
Iris Lim ran her workshop out of a narrow shoplot in Petaling Jaya, third unit from the corner, beneath a signboard that said LIM & DAUGHTER, CLOCK AND WATCH RESTORATION. There had once been a Lim to go with the Daughter. Her father had died four years ago, mid-repair, his loupe still in his eye, and Iris had kept the sign because painting over half of it felt like a second funeral.
She was thirty-four years old, and she could take apart a hundred-and-forty-year-old Swiss movement blindfolded, and she had not taken a holiday since the sign meant two people.
The envelope was cream, heavy, the kind of paper that has opinions about itself. The postmark said George Town, Penang. Inside, in a typeface that had gone out of fashion before her father was born, was a letterhead: THE KENANGA HERITAGE TRUST. And beneath it, in careful fountain-pen ink:
Dear Ms Lim,
I am writing on the recommendation of the Straits Horological Society, who inform me that you are the finest restorer of antique clocks now working in Malaysia, and that you are honest, which in my experience is the rarer qualification.
Kenanga House will open to the public next year as a museum of Peranakan life. The house has stood mostly closed for forty years. It contains seven clocks. All seven stopped on the same night, the fourteenth of March, 1986, and no one has wound them since.
