My family know very little about the years my great-great-grandmother spent in India. This tea cosy is one of the only remnants of the four decades she lived away from England. I also had no idea that when the tea cosy came into my possession in 2019, that it would mark the start of an exciting period of research into my ancestors’ past.
The first time I encountered the locket was as a small child. My grandmother has preserved numerous photographs of her parents from their time in British Malaya and India, but one of the most prized possessions is this jade set in a gold locket that had been purchased from Malaya or Singapore by my great-grandfather.
When an object has witnessed Partition, it ceases to be ordinary. In the case of my maternal grandparents, these objects were a framed portrait of my nana, his personal diary, and a silver drinking bowl. A photograph of my nani, Razia Ummul Baneen, holding her first born, my uncle, in her arms. The family also carried a folding wooden chair, a sewing machine, its table and motor, some clothes, and a tarazu. All these made the journey from Delhi to Karachi.
I imagine my great-grandfather, Dr. R. C. De, standing in some provincial town in France during the First World War, choosing this gramophone in a shop filled with the shimmer of brass horns and the solemn promise of music, at a time when Europe was learning the sound of death.
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