This is my great-grandfather’s journal. He wrote in it over six decades, from the 1920s to the 1970s, and the book reflects that history. He wrote these entries “for remembrance, a brief description of how we live our lives”.
This is a poignant and bittersweet story of Uma Chatterjee (Mukherjee), who was my mother’s paternal aunt. One of her noteworthy and only remaining creations was a tablecloth, made for a school assignment around 1958 or 1959.
There is a ruqqa, a wedding card tucked into the folds of a family album. It announces the union of my maternal grandparents – Ahmed Uddin and Rafi Unissa Begum, better known in our family as Pasha and Nafees, and dates back to February 12, 1961
The Hasla is typically a torque-style necklace, thick and rigid, cast in silver and sitting close to the neck. It belonged to Ilm Kaur, my maternal great grandmother, who died sometime in the year 1949, succumbing to an unknown illness.
Look at how time flies, we are now headed to the hospital to bring Kasturi and her daughter back home, and the little one will use the bed her mother used. That’s the story of how the fourth generation of my family has begun putting this teak-wood cot to use.
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