051: Heirlooms

My great grandmother's gift.

There are very few things I know of my great grandmother. She lived well into her nineties, and I am one of the few people I know to have had the privilege of spending time with a great grandparent. Yet I do not know her name. She was petite and had light eyes. Later in her life she grew quiet and I have no recollection of how her voice sounded, but she had a wonderful impish smile. During a trip to Bangladesh when I was a child, a picture was taken: my great grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and I. Four generations in a frame. I may be one of the only ones in my family in possession of such a photograph.

Taken after we’d returned from a wedding: my great grandmother, my mother wearing her jhumkas, yours truly and my grandmother.

My great grandmother passed away the day after the Twin Towers fell. Her daughter, my grandmother, my aunt, cousin, uncle, and a few other relatives filled their bags with whatever clothes were airing out for the evening, clambered into my aunt's white Toyota, and under the blanket of the night sky, made their way to the village where my great grandmother lived, where my grandmother as a young girl climbed trees and raised chickens. My mother and I stayed behind to be there for my grandfather, who was unwell, but also because we were frozen by what we saw on the television, terrified for my father who had just recently left for America to forge a new life for us. In the seventies as a student in Lafayette, Louisiana, people shouted at him from their cars to go back to where he came from. In the aftermath of that fall, it would be almost ten years before we were to finally be reunited as a family under one roof, no more sporadic trips and tearful goodbyes.

Coincidentally, ten years had elapsed from the time my great grandfather boarded a ship to forge a new life for his family in England to when he returned for them. He left when my grandmother was six and came back when she was sixteen; in those ten years she had continued to climb trees and raise chickens. Soon after her father's arrival, my grandmother's marriage was arranged to my grandfather. A beloved pet chicken of hers was sacrificed to the altar of impending marriage and cooked into a roast to be served to her in-laws-to-be. For their honeymoon, my grandparents left the village for the town to see a film at a theater, my grandfather's relatives in tow.

My great grandmother was married when she was three years old, to my great grandfather, who was four. Each day, my great grandmother was carried in a palanquin to her husband's village, and the two would play as children do in a nursery, and was brought back home, in her palanquin, in the evening. This journey continued until late adolescence. When she moved to London with her family, including her now-married daughter and her husband, my great grandmother, not speaking a word of English, ran the front and back of a restaurant her husband had founded, a Bangladeshi restaurant that had become a hub for Bangladeshi revolutionaries, himself a founder of an association to unionize Bangladeshi cooks in England. Ten years later my great grandfather closed shop and moved his family back to Bangladesh; a war for liberation was imminent and he wanted to be there for it.

Early into the war, my grandmother fled with her family – my mother then ten years old – from the capital to the village where she grew up. There were moments when a message would arrive late in the night that violence would soon descend upon that quiet place, and my grandmother would rouse her seven children and help them and my grandfather, who was partially paralyzed from an illness, onto a dinghy on the shore of a large pond they lived near, and all nine of them would lay flat and still in the middle of this body of water until the darkness passed and day broke.

After the war ended, the nation had been liberated, they returned home. Soon after, my grandmother retrieved the few pieces of gold jewelry she had put away in a safety deposit box at a bank that belonged to her and her mother; they were mostly gifts from her father, who, though they did not have much, indulged his only daughter, and imagined one day his granddaughters would wear them too. On the evening of this retrieval, a gang entered the family's home and, with my grandfather held at gunpoint and the little children terrified and hiding, they stole everything of any value, including the jewelry, with the exception of an ornate gold filigree kanpasha that took the form of the ear and had been hidden away. Beyond the balcony where my mother hid, she saw the face of the man who had given the order, a man she knew.

In the early eighties, my mother's older sister was the first of their siblings to marry, and friends and extended family were generous enough to loan my grandmother jewelry for her daughter to wear on the occasion, and of course, there was the kanpasha. But my great grandmother, a formidable woman of great pride, resented that her granddaughters would not have something of hers that they would not, if they chose, have forever, a small token of her love for them, an heirloom to be passed on. From a gold bangle she wore, she had five identical delicate earrings made for her five granddaughters. Long after they were all married, my aunts traded their earrings for something of their own choosing, but my mother chose forever.

A few days before I got married, my mother gave me a small white leather jewelry box we had bought together some years prior. It contained what looked like a pair of fine hoop earrings that were actually two tiny gold bangles my eldest aunt and her husband had given me when I was born. There was a long chain that belonged to my grandmother which had been bequeathed to my mother after my grandmother had passed, as well as a set of jhumkas my mother had bought when she was about my age. When I was a child, I would sometimes play with them while my mother was preoccupied, tapping on each domed drop which would softly wiggle to the touch, pretending they were tiny ornate full-skirted dresses, instead of earrings, worn by a tiny ornate person or a wiggling worm.

Earrings from my great grandmother gifted to my mother.

Also inside the box were the earrings my mother held on to, my great grandmother's gift to her. Set in the center of it are four small stones, two green, two a deep burgundy, repurposed from the original gold bangle; each earring has a petite dome drop with the same stones along the edges. This is perhaps my most prized possession, these little earrings that have seen four generations, conceived by a woman most resourceful – rode a palanquin, raised three children alone for ten years, ran a restaurant in England with no knowledge of English, had an impish smile – and from whom came women who endured.