A cookbook that dates back to the year 1986 is filled with my maternal grandmother’s handwritten recipes. This diary was her companion throughout her life, but after she died in 2023, it became dearer to my mother. Now, in the age of ordering in and eating out, it has found new relevance amongst my mother and her sisters
In 1972, a family friend gifted this Nutrine box to my maternal uncle for his birthday, and originally it was filled with toffees. As it emptied, like the fate of most chocolate or biscuit tins in South Asian families, my grandmother filled it with sewing accessories – spools of thread brought by my great-grandfather from Singapore many years earlier in 1953.
The object that we discuss here is a saree: a luminous, dual-toned Banarasi, whose history takes us back to a time period of more than a hundred years ago. It belonged to Tapati Rani Devya, my mother’s great-grandmother. She is a figure so distant from me in lineage, that I know only fragments of information that allow me to paint an incomplete picture of what her life might have looked like
This is my great-grandfather’s journal. He wrote in it over six decades, from the 1920s to the 1970s, and the book reflects that history. He wrote these entries “for remembrance, a brief description of how we live our lives”.
This is a poignant and bittersweet story of Uma Chatterjee (Mukherjee), who was my mother’s paternal aunt. One of her noteworthy and only remaining creations was a tablecloth, made for a school assignment around 1958 or 1959.
There is a ruqqa, a wedding card tucked into the folds of a family album. It announces the union of my maternal grandparents – Ahmed Uddin and Rafi Unissa Begum, better known in our family as Pasha and Nafees, and dates back to February 12, 1961
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