Apart from several novelties received from family at their wedding, a widowed aunt gifted a vermilion case or shidoor kouto to Thamma. Its uniqueness characterised by the engraving in Bengali letters — ‘chiroshukhi’ or forever happy. The kouto would be more than 72 years old now, having been passed on from Thamma to my mother and then to me.
At the time of Independence, he chose to join the newly-created Pakistani Civil Service, and this decision effectively terminated his employment with the Indian Government. I remember him telling me that when Pakistan was created, the new Civil Service used these Indian postcards and ‘Pakistan’ was stamped on top of the image of King George VI.
It was only in 1968, at age 11, when my father began arranging the tiny sheetlets, he amassed, into the leather-bound albums that have now been passed on to me. By 1972, he had a collected over 6,000 stamps that were distributed evenly in eight albums.
On one of his trips back to Srirangam around the 1930s, my grandfather picked up this hand-crafted metal box. He used it as a paan box, and furnished it with his requirements. Inside are two repurposed kumkum boxes, and the longer cylinders actually once held camera film reels. Each of these was for a different ingredient.
It’s been almost two decades since I first grew curious about a locked cabinet in my parent’s dresser. Inside it, stacked horizontally, lay an intriguing collection of Bangla literature, almost all of them dated 1973 along with short handwritten notes on the title pages. The books ranged from Tagore’s seminal literary treatise, Sahityer Pathe, to Gour Kishore Ghosh’s 1969 revolutionary drama, Sagina Mahato.
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