Ben Kingsley wears an unidentified watch

Ben Kingsley sits cross-legged at a wedding, his arms wrapped around one raised knee, in a gold-worked cream sherwani and a deep red turban. The wedding is his character's. The bride in red and heavy gold beside him is a near stranger to the man he plays, Darwan Singh Tur in Learning to Drive: a Sikh who taught college in India, left under political pressure, and now earns his living in New York twice over, giving driving lessons by day and working a taxi by night. The marriage to Jasleen was arranged. By the film's account the two had not met before it.

Where the embroidered cuff has ridden up off his wrist there is a watch. It has a steel case, a pale dial with applied markers and two plain hands, on a fitted steel bracelet that catches the light. Nothing on it is sharp enough to put a brand to, and it is the one thing on him the ceremony did not choose. The turban, the sherwani, the woman in red all belong to the day. The watch is his.

It is also the tool he never sets down. Darwan meets Wendy, the book critic he later teaches to drive after her husband leaves, by returning an envelope she forgot in his cab. The film runs on his schedule, on lessons booked by the hour and a nervous beginner made to merge at the pace he sets. At his own wedding the clock is still on his wrist.

Patricia Clarkson, who plays Wendy, put the script in director Isabel Coixet's hands years before any of this was shot, while she, Coixet, and Kingsley were making the Philip Roth adaptation Elegy. That was 2008. This wedding came six years later.