TEXT BY AAKRITI MANDHWANI
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AASHISH MANDHWANI
New Delhi, India
There is this wonderful and terrible thing about objects: they can often outlive the person they are bequeathed to. Pammi Mandhwani, my paternal grandmother outlasted her paternal grandmother, who gave her a tiny box, a dabbi the size of her ten-year-old palm. My dadi was about thirteen (we can only estimate) when her sister and she got married to two brothers and moved away from Sukkar for the very first time. The brass dabbi was one of the many objects dadi and her sister brought along to their marital house in Larkana.
The second time dadi moved houses was a year or so later. Of this forced migration, she would say again and again: all she had were the clothes she wore that day, and in her hands was the dabbi. The grandmother who bequeathed it to her was left behind, already dead. Both houses, the one she was born in and the one she first took the dabbi to, were now suddenly in another country that she was certain she would return to, but never could. This palm-of-the-hand object became the story of an origin, houses she could only narrate into being, portals to the portrait of a grandmother of whom she had no photograph.
Made out of thinly pressed brass metal, the dabbi itself is not ornate or expensive. It’s a plain, almost drab looking, thing. By the way of decoration, it has a few circular ridged markings on top. My grandmother gave the dabbi much more meaning than perhaps her grandmother ever did. The inexpensive box was something dadi’s dadi could trust a child with, not mind if she lost it in scuffles with her many siblings. These siblings would eventually be scattered, some to come to Kota and then Delhi by train, some to reach Bombay and then Kalyan by networks of sea. When these siblings were united in these overwhelmingly overflowing cities in a post-partition India, there was often talk of a pond in the village back home. Dadi and her siblings used to play around it, and the dabbi may as well have disappeared in the pond one day. It was meant to be a toy – dadi told me she often used to place tiny soil laddus in it.
My dadi never spoke of the dabbi without being overwhelmed – after all, it was the only thing she carried of home. She would probably be disturbed by this narration, an attempt at a linear analysis. Dadi started most conversations about the past in Sukkur and Larkana with a meltdown or at least a very good cry. She cried so often that it was a regular part of our everyday. Of course, didn’t all grandmothers cry? (Nani, my maternal grandmother, however, didn’t cry – I often waited for it during our infrequent meetings, but no tears ever fell). Dadi eventually bequeathed her dabbi to me during a torrential episode of such utter weeping, I swore to her that not only would the dabbi outlive her but also me – I would also give it to my granddaughter much the same way she had given it to me. While dadi was not given to lyrical meaning-making, it does not evade me that I received this dabbi when I was around ten – the age she herself had got it.
The dabbi, not much to look at to begin with, was never even polished. Dadi asked about it from time to time, just to check if it was doing okay. I turned eleven, twelve, then thirteen and started checking on the dabbi myself from time to time. It was kept in a tin box that probably contained chocolate covered almonds at a point in time. Next to the dabbi were other revered but not so expensive objects belonging to my mother – my untearful nani’s baby jhunjhuna gift, silver bangles that didn’t fit anyone anymore, expired school ID cards.
Dadi talked about the Partition as much as dada didn’t talk about it. The Sindhi story of displacement is often not narrated; the Sindhi experience of the partition not nearly as violent as its neighbour Punjab’s. When my grandparents found themselves in Delhi, dada quietly joined a cloth mill, then graduated to a government job and left to work on a bicycle, then graduated to walking to work. Ironically, he worked in the newly independent India’s planning office, planning the city of Delhi that he had never even dreamed of, but was forcefully bequeathed. He drew up plans for cramped houses that were once army barracks. Dada had many languages – he moved fluently between Hindi, Sindhi and Punjabi. He had a little English and also carried varying amounts of resentment and hate. Dadi, on the other hand, I thought as I grew older, had given away her sole possession too soon.
As I moved to London for a PhD and left the dabbi in my mother’s custody, I analysed and filed away dadi’s story. There, I actually met Sindhis from Pakistan and quickly realised that Sindh was my dadi’s homeland in a way it could never be mine. Her Sindh was frozen; my Sindh moved, its music, food and seasons changed. I would have liked to analyse this a bit more with dadi, present some findings to her perhaps, rationalise the idea of a home, but by the time I moved away in 2014, she had already transformed into an incomprehensible immobile eighty-year-old child. Dementia had taken her mind a few years ago and, nine months into my PhD, it took her body too. I thought I had said goodbye to her a while ago, but walking in circles and choking gracelessly next to my university building in Central London on quite a beautiful sunny day in May, I realised that I didn’t really get to say goodbye.
Back in Delhi on breaks, I didn’t want to look at the dabbi. It kept getting dustier, became home to mismatched earrings with no other home to go to. I finished the PhD, returned for good, and wrote a book about post partition India and the clever ways in which people (mostly women) wanted to forget, mostly through reading. I dedicated the book to my grandmother who couldn’t write or read till she turned sixty.
The thing about objects and how they can outlive people is also that they can become a bit of a burden. I had promised my dadi the dabbi would live a long life, long after I myself became electric-crematorium-facilitated dust. Of course, in her last years, since dadi forgot how to speak, remember or eat, she also forgot to ask about the dabbi. She forgot to check up on it, on any hypothetical children or grandchildren who could inherit it. I could perhaps relax about it. But this year my father has begun to forget in ways my dadi once did.
Almost thirty years after having been given it, I’ve finally brought the dabbi home with me. I’ve put it in the locker, dabbi unpolished and unspectacular as ever. There are no children or grandchildren; I’m not sure who to bequeath the dabbi to. But since I’m quite sure of how memory itself disappears so spectacularly in my family, till I figure things out, I can bequeath the story of the dabbi here, to you.