My family and other people

Jewellery is a strange topic for me to be writing about, since I have little to no interest in it. My mother, very wisely, has handed over her precious collection to my spouse and not to me, fearing - rightly - that I will get it mixed up with junk and be unable to tell the difference. Nevertheless... Recently, having made the questionable decision to accept an invitation to a formal event, I was forced to look over my stash of nice clothes and jewellery that my family and friends have bestowed on me over the years. I picked my most expensive and beautiful sari and then had to decide what ornaments would go with it. The sari was a "peacock-throat" colour (ময়ূরকন্ঠী), an iridescent blue-green. So my easy, go-to, always-lying-about-on-the-dresser, red jewellery wasn't going to work. This meant digging into boxes, drawers, memories... A lot of the necklaces, ear tops and bangles, stuffed into velvet cases of many sizes or tangled in larger ornate boxes, stared at me dum...

My mother loves to tell stories of times when she had a bright idea and saved the day. One of these stories (about the child having a fatal accident) I've already told here . Here are a few others that I can remember. I'm sure there are many more that will come to me eventually. When my mother was very little, an aunt (her father's sister) asked her "Who is more beautiful, me or your mother?" She knew what the "right" answer was supposed to be. But she also wanted to be honest. In her mind, there was no contest between the two women in the looks department - her mom won hands down. So she came up with the following reply: "You look beautiful when you dress up, my mother always looks beautiful." When she was a lot older, maybe in college, her brother asked for her help one day. He had an important meeting to go to but a button had come off his suit and he needed it sewed back on. So my mother grabbed some white thread, the only reel in the h...

Crippling shyness has been the bane of my life. As a child, I would be spanked as soon as visitors left ...for being rude (embarrasing my parents) by not answering even the simplest question such as "what is your name". Once I tried to explain to my mother that the words came up to my throat and got stuck there. (Nowadays I think there's a diagnosis for it, "selective mutism", a close competitor to "oppositional defiance disorder" and "school refusal" in exposing psychiatric diagnoses as vicious tools for enforcing social conformity.) The first really bad thing I did - lying - was all because of shyness. My mother had given me something to take to Sharu's house to hand over to his mom. Sharu's mom was actually quite nice, she spoke softly and made us fried banana snacks. But I still found the idea of ringing their doorbell and talking to aunty quite daunting. So when I met their maid outside the house and she offered to take whateve...

Runa grew up in a big joint family. There were a lot of things she liked about that. For one thing, even though there were about twenty five children in the house (give or take a few since married daughters were always visiting with their brood and the daughters-in-law went off to visit their parents with kids in tow), grandfather's absolute favorite was Runa. Runa was not only top of her class at the local Saraswati school for girls, her voice was soft, her manners were gentle and her back was straight when she walked down the street and people whispered, "look, there goes Mohan babu's granddaughter". Runa was the one who was summoned when Mohan babu's friends came to visit and she was the one chosen to walk decorously beside him when he went off to accept an honor for lifelong service to education and community. Then there were giggling sessions with sisters and cousins and adventures with her best pals Bapi and Bhaiya, the two boy cousins who were a year o...