One of the few remnants of my family’s connection with erstwhile Burma (now Myanmar), is a lacquerware box, an inheritance from my maternal grandmother. When my mother, Manimegalai, got married, the box was a part of her dowry and is well over 80 years old.

These beaded dogs were made in my grandmother’s natal home in Chabua, a small town in upper Assam, sometime in the late 1960s, most certainly before 1968, the year my grandmother, Shushila Devi Lohia, got married.

This three-piece sofa set was bought by my great-grandfather, Dr. R. Krishnaswami in the late 1940s. My grandmother, seven or eight years old at the time, remembers accompanying her father on a walk to Mount Road, then home to various furniture stores. It was purchased for 175 rupees, a price considered extremely high for that time period, given the socio-economic conditions of the country post-Partition.

There was literally nothing that Kiran Chandra Roy could do when the tenant fled from Itarsi in Madhya Pradesh, rather than pay months of outstanding rent. The silver lining was that he was a skilled carpenter and in his hurry to flee, had left quite a few pieces of furniture behind, which Capt. KC Roy, my dadu promptly confiscated and carted home. That is how this teakwood table came to our family in the late 50’s.

The nilavilakku, as it is commonly called in Kerala, or the vazhaipoo vilakku as it is known in Tamil, is common to both states. Nilam, meaning floor, is in reference to the floor-standing lamp while vazhaipoo likens the top of the lamp to the banana flower. The exact date and origin of Pradeep’s vilakku is unknown, but it can be traced back to beyond the 1930s in Madurai.