This Chunni or nose ring found its way to Bombay on the nose of its fiery, feisty owner, Lakshmibai Chhabria. She continued to wear it even after she lost her husband, her eldest son and her land of birth, all with one single Partition line, lakeer, as they call it in our family.
The story of this ‘vari da baagh’ begins with bebeji. It was hand-embroidered in around 1965 and given to my dadi as part of her wedding trousseau. The baagh is made of red “khaddar” hand-dyed and hand-woven cloth.
These beaded dogs were made in my grandmother’s natal home in Chabua, a small town in upper Assam, sometime in the late 1960s, most certainly before 1968, the year my grandmother, Shushila Devi Lohia, got married.
The cupboard is a tall and narrow one, measuring 6 feet in height. It has four shelves inside, and a pull-out drawer symmetrically placed in the middle. The piece was in display in a furniture shop, and the shop keeper enticed him to pick it up. At Rs 200, it seemed a great bargain for a wooden unit claimed to be made of teak.
The Pears Cyclopaedia was first published in 1897. Sold for a shilling, it was originally referred to as “A Mass of Curious and Useful Information about Things that everyone Ought to know in Commerce, History, Science, Religion, Literature and other Topics of Ordinary Conversation.”
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