The journey of this box begins in Danoli, a small village in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district, where my great-grandmother, Akkatai Gumanna, spent her childhood. In the early 1920s. As part of her bridal trousseau or rukhwat, her father Advyappa Gumanna, commissioned a local carpenter, Ganpa Sutar, to make her an Indian Rosewood vanity box—a phaner peti, as it is called in Marathi.
A white marble bust, 38 by 37 centimetres, with wavy hair arranged carefully around her face and a draped cloth across her chest. At her base, carved into the stone in plain English letters: MIGNON. She has lived at the entrance of our home in Agra for as long as anyone can remember.
I discovered this postcard quite unexpectedly in our family home in Digboi, Assam. More than just a piece of paper, it felt like a doorway into a moment from sixty years ago. Finding it made me curious about a chapter of my grandparent’s lives that I had never witnessed — a time when they lived apart, Babaji in London and Biji in Phagwara. I found myself wondering what he had written to her, how long she had waited for news from him, and what she must have felt when this postcard finally arrived.
As I wandered through the house with my great-grandmother, 55 years of age and experience separating us, I became almost childlike. I opened cupboards I had never thought to open before, pulled out forgotten objects, and asked endless questions. She would laugh, answer, and then another story would appear.
The earliest memory I have of my grandmother’s face is her nose pin. In 1939, the year she got married, it travelled as a part of her wedding trousseau from Benaras, where she was born and raised, to the town of Bareilly. I like to imagine my great-grandmother stepping into one of the old jewellery shops frequented by the family, tucked in the narrow lanes of Man Mandir, to choose a diamond nose pin for her daughter.
A Karataa (କରାଟ, कराट) is a metal ball, shaped about 2inches in diameter, which was used by women at a time when the saree was worn without a blouse or petticoat, to fasten the first secure knot of the fabric, as one began draping it around their body.
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