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.
There is an object in my kitchen that does not belong only to me. It belongs to Nanna to her hands, her afternoons, her particular way of making everyone around her feel held. It is a Sarota: a betel-nut cutter, small and bladed, made of steel, worn smooth in the places where her fingers rested.
My chinchpeti was made in Gwalior by a local jeweller around 1968, the year I was born, and commissioned by my maternal Aaji. It is simpler than the bright, dangling chinchpetis one sees today and the word opens a jewellery box of Marathi for me.
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