Diamond Dust (2000)

Anita Desai's collection of stories, first published in Britain by Chatto & Windus in 2000 and in the United States the same year as a Mariner paperback, ranges, as its jacket puts it, from India to New England and from Cornwall to Mexico, and includes the title story "Diamond Dust, a Tragedy", "Royalty", "The Artist's Life" and "The Man Who Saw Himself Drown", in which a man staying at a hotel goes walking by a river. (Open Library)

Watches

Tissot (unidentified model): In "The Man Who Saw Himself Drown", the man comes upon a crowd dragging a body from the river and is pulled into the circle around it. He stares, then stares harder, and the details come into focus: the Tissot watch on its metal strap, the ball-point pen still clipped to the shirt pocket, the cleft chin, the uneven teeth. In every detail, he says, the drowned man is himself. The watch is one of the details by which he recognizes his own body. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: I stared at him, taking in every detail. Then I stared again, harder, and more details came into focus: the Tissot watch with the metal strap, the ball-point pen still attached to the shirt pocket. (Anita Desai, Diamond Dust, scan cataloged as Houghton Mifflin (Mariner), 2000, p. 88, in "The Man Who Saw Himself Drown", which the contents page lists from p. 83; Internet Archive scan OCR)