Write...Edit...Publish...+ IWSG: Jewel Box. April 2019

If you are looking for my A-Z post that’s here.  I am keeping my A-Z and WEP+IWSG posts separate.

Last month, in a response to my theme reveal for that Challenge, a commenter wrote - sounds like a great way to honour your grandmother with your theme idea for April. And the idea for this post grew from there.  


As with my January post, I am going with a photo-essay, something I hadn’t tried till this year for these challenges.  I am over wordcount here - the original was more than 3000, I just couldn't pare it down any further. My apologies.

Diptych in Progress


Three months lapsed before we came back to the red-oxide floored, two-storied house in Dover Lane. It was an ordinary homecoming, the adults were in control of themselves, everyone was calm, dry-eyed. I, a teenager, did not really know how to mourn.

My grandmother, Thakuma, had passed away in June that year. She had been a gentle, soft-spoken woman. The house did not feel any quieter because of the absence. I went to the kitchen and peered in.  Empty. On a shelf were some jars of pickles. 


Later, at a meal, we were served from one of those jars and my aunt, her youngest daughter, mentioned that they had been made the previous season by Thakuma. My jaw clenched at the sweettartness of the fruit. My guts clenched  at the thought that a perishable could outlast the woman who had made it.

~~~

I experienced the events as a diptych – one side of it was in Nigeria where my father worked at the time, the other side was a piecing-together from letters received, conversations that happened at the time which I overheard, absorbed unconsciously but indelibly, like the pickle one.  But also conversations that happened years later. In a way, that side of the diptych is a work in progress, a piece filled in here, a patch coloured in there as life goes on. I heard my grandfather’s anecdotes about Thakuma when I was in my twenties, ten years after her death. I have heard about her from my father. And others. Perhaps all of memory is really a diptych in progress.

Sometime around early June that year, my parents got the news – my paternal grandmother was critically ill. My father should make his way back as soon as possible. However, at the time the passports were with the Indian High Commission in Lagos for renewal, a thousand miles away. My father chafed and worried, but there wasn’t anything to be done.

Thakuma died on the 21^st. Communications were slower, the news got to my father’s workplace 8 days later. Of the 11 days of sackcloth-and-ashes type mourning that Hindu Brahmins are required to follow, the major part was over. My parents observed the remaining part, I must have too, though I have no specific memory of it.

What I do remember of that day is the sound of the car turning into the driveway in the early afternoon, way too early for my father. When I’d got up and gone to investigate, I found my mother alone. ‘Go to your father’ she said in an odd but compelling sort of voice. He had retreated to the farthest end of the house. I watched him weeping silently, not knowing what to do, not knowing how to help, wildly panicked. I had never seen him weep, never seen any adult male weep before. Tears were res non grata when I was growing up.

~~~

In due course, my aunt handed over to my mother a couple of pieces of Thakuma’s jewellery – she had left them for me. That too I found vaguely astounding, how does a dying person find the headspace for these decisions?

Thakuma (elderly lady in white, L, standing) and 

I (topless kid, sitting) in same frame. There aren't  

too many photos of her.  Group taken at D Lane 

after a family wedding.

One of the pieces was a brooch, the decorative side made up of an enamelled photograph of my grandfather as a young man. The other was a ‘lace-pin,’ basically two gold-bow brooches attached to each other with a length of chain. I had never seen anything like it before. I was told lace-pins were used to pin ladies’ veils to their hair so that the fabric  stayed in place.

Other things seeped into my consciousness from somewhere – that Thakuma had left her bangles to my elder aunt. But they had no 'gold value,' since they were ‘bronze,’ whatever that meant. Thakuma had sold off her real gold bangles ages back. She had sold off most of her jewellery after the family moved to Dover Lane. Why, Aunt? To put food on the table, dear. The money had dried up, there was no income.

One of my earliest memories of Thakuma is of a trip she took me on - to a jeweller’s called A. Sircar. I was around 5. A cousin had just been born in Dover Lane, and as is the custom, Thakuma had ‘seen the face’ of the little baby boy and blessed him with an accompanying gift of gold.

How come you gave him a ring and you never gave me any, Thakuma?

She did not remonstrate or brush me off, she never mentioned even that she had given a pair of mini gold bangles as my ‘seeing-the-face’ gift. Instead she put me in a rickshaw and took me to A. Sircar’s and ordered me a ring. I only understood the true value of that baby jewellery after the conversation about the ‘bronze’ bangles, appreciated the squeeze she must have put herself through to soothe a grandchild’s peeve.

The story of the brooch I heard from my grandfather many years later. He told me that brooch was cutting edge for its time, it was made with a German enamel photography technology that had just come to India. He had it specially made for my grandmother. And I realised that she had sold off all her other jewellery but hung on to this romantic gift till the very end.


~~~

These tangible things I have of hers - this jewellery box my aunt gave me many years after Thakuma’s death. I had enquired vaguely about Thakuma’s betel casket. She used to chew betel and I have many memories of her rolling betel leaves.

I was told that the betel casket hadn’t really belonged to Thakuma - had other claimants. I must have looked crestfallen, because my aunt passed this little box to me sometime later. I lately asked my aunt if she knew its provenance, she just said it must have come from Thakuma’s parental home.  My father, who’s considerably older than my aunt, was even vaguer – it’s always been around, I’ve seen it from childhood. Both my aunt and my grandmother used it as a jewellery box. 

My aunt also passed  my grandmother’s vermilion pot to me after I got married. It’s a small, plain silver one with her name on it. Her full name was Lahari Leela - the play of waves. A beautiful name. She struggled all her life, with her initial years of infertility and its stigma, with the uprooting of the Partition, with the shocking, untimely death of her son-in-law, with money problems. But like that ring she gave me, she squeezed a solution out somehow, with infinite patience and gentle fortitude, no drama. I don’t know her date of birth. I asked my father and my aunt  -  no-one does. Guessing she was born in 1906, and married in 1918 when she was twelve. The vermilion pot and the box are now over a hundred years old. The brooch, also close.

The gold value of what Thakuma left me is not worth counting. The real value is incalculable.


WC - 1169
FCA



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