My mother is the last remaining female descendant of my maternal family, but knows little about the pazaib. I often wonder, did Baebaejaan come to Karachi with the pair of these pazaib? Did she perhaps give one to another daughter? Or sell it to start a new life?
My grandfather, Divan Mohideen, bought a red and yellow tin coin bank in 1968, when he was 22 years old. It came from the Madras Central Co-operative Bank Ltd., one of the oldest banks in the city, its roots reaching back to the 1930s. The British had a curious habit – banks in London often gave small metal coin boxes to families, especially children, to teach them thrift and discipline.
My paternal 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. This brass dabbi was one of the many objects she and her sister brought along to their marital house in Larkana.
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
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.
I found this letter written by my grandather to my grandmother on the eve of India’s Independence in 1947. It was posted from Muzaffarnagar to Deoband.
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