Ma’s penchant for the handicrafts always mesmerises me. Sewing, embroidery and knitting are her forte.My mother has no exotic buttons in her box. She is not a collector. Her box contains regular, mundane buttons that she thinks she might find useful.
The Bonti is a kitchen instrument that is used in Indian households to peel, chop, shred, slice and dice vegetables and fruits, especially in the states of Bengal, Assam, Orissa.
This cabinet was originally commissioned by Bhaskar Vinayak Pandit or Aṇṇā, my great-great grandfather, some time towards the latter half of the 19th century. But the story of the cabinet is as migratory as the family that possessed it.
This alna is a ‘wooden rack’, which measuring 72 inches by 39 inches. It’s not surprising that I had trouble finding a non-Bengali word for an alna, since as I later discovered that it is one of the few pieces of Bengali furniture that has a purely Bengali etymology
My great grandmother was born in a small village called Boala (now in Bangladesh). She possessed many aged utensils and other heirlooms, which were distributed among her four daughters as a part of their trousseaus during their weddings and some after her death.
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