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
The box was gifted to 10 year old Sushi by my grandfather Digambar Singh Karki in 1955. The small box made of brass or peetal has a latch, circular lid and a curved handle.
It is a different feeling to be holding this piece of fabric in my hand, almost like a portal allowing me to feel my grandfather’s presence. I had been carrying a piece of my land without knowing it, and seeing this object as a vessel – one that connects the immediate to the vast – has transformed my understanding of my ethnic identity.
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.
A camera sits on my bookshelf- heavy, leather-bound and silent for decades. Once owned by my great-grandfather, S.M Faruque- a man I never knew. Not his voice, nor his demeanor, nor the quiet rituals of his day. And yet, I have come to see fragments of the world as he once did; through the twin lenses of his Rolleiflex camera.
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