The Wedding (2001)

Imraan Coovadia's novel, published by Picador USA in 2001 and based on family stories he heard as a child, begins when Ismet, a clerk of modest prospects from Bombay, glimpses Khateja from a train window and pursues her to her village. She agrees to marry him but resolves to make his life miserable, and the couple, like many Indians of the time, emigrate to South Africa at the turn of the century. (Open Library)

Watches

Waltham watch: Yusuf Haveri, Khateja's father, grips his new son-in-law by the arm straight after the ceremony, hands him two train tickets in a brown paper envelope and glances at his new Waltham wristwatch: twenty minutes until the seven-thirty train, no time to squander. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: He glanced at his new Waltham wristwatch and added informatively, "Twenty minutes. Not much time, necessary to hurry, can't be squandering the minutes, we do not have all the time in the world. (Imraan Coovadia, The Wedding, scan cataloged as Picador USA, 2001, p. 65, closing up the OCR's line-break hyphen in "informatively", where the quotation continues; Yusuf Haveri is named as Khateja's father on p. 24; Internet Archive scan OCR)