This brass cooking pot belonged to my maternal great-grandmother, Leela Chander. Referred to as a dekchi, It is a wide-mouthed pot, that sits obediently in my grandmother’s drawing room. But years ago it was used to cook biryani to serve up to 30 people.

I was at my maternal home in Ajitgill village, Faridkot, looking through old things when I saw my nani’s sandook in the corner. It wasn’t locked so out of curiosity, I looked inside. It was like opening a pandora box. All of her things were still in there. Her clothes – she would wear men style kurtas with a collar and pockets on both sides, with a ghaghra – her trinkets, handwritten notes, and photographs. It was then that I felt closer to her than ever before.

Always having been a practical woman, Didimoni read the situation [in what was now East Pakistan] and slowly began to realize that they wouldn’t be able to stay in Khurshimul forever. So she decided to begin transporting some valuables to Kolkata, to my grandfather. Making several trips, Didimoni singlehandedly began taking these pujo utensils from Khurshimul to Kolkata.

In those days, included in every dowry was a sewing machine, and this belonged to my great-grandmother. The sewing machine is a Singer, with gold embossed work and dates back to the early 1940s. Portable in nature, a standard 14 inches in size, it has a wooden cover with my great-grandfather’s initials P.S Hora (Prem Singh Hora) painted on it.

The main driver behind the purchase of this weapon was prevention of danger. My grandfather would tell my father that after all he’d seen during the partition, very few things remained that scared him, death being the least of them all. During the violence of 1947, his family had eaten food while sitting next to dozens of dead bodies and pools of blood, and had witnessed unthinkable difficulty in trying to survive.