My grandmother’s gift
It’s a simple set of earrings
nothing fancy
or ornate as such
just a common floral design
set in gold.
Small, delicate earrings
that my grandmother gave me
without occasion.
I remember
my own bewilderment
at receiving them -
real gold?
when I was not even a teenager
so not yet a ‘big girl’
for such ‘real’ things.
My school then would allow
only studs
or plain rings
around the earlobes
so I questioned Dadi
with gleeful surprise
as to what I had done
to deserve them
even my Birthday
was no where in sight
and she said,
‘you just keep them’,
and I felt all grown up
that she didn’t choose
to give it
to either of my parents
for safekeeping
but chose instead
to gift it directly
to me.
And today
when I found them
after all these years
I became a child again
and memories,
that didn’t go yellow
at the edges like aged paper
that goes brittle,
came alive -
in this neat little box
with the earrings
are the sag
of her upper arms
and my clasping
playful sway on them,
her wrinkles - the fragility of life
and how I would plait her hair - the durability of footprints,
her homemade
ghee scented cooking
when I stayed with her
during vacations,
her resoluteness
when she would tell me
in no uncertain terms
that only a brother
would complete my family,
her smile
when she would see my father
after even the shortest
interval of days,
her crushing, crippling sadness
when my father died.
The earrings speak -
with them I rehear
the little, loud prayer bell
that would
resound each day
when she would come to stay.
When my father died
so much was taken,
milked like it is
when opportunity grows
tentacles of greed
and disrobes the word kind
from human-kind
and then my grandmother
herself was taken.
And this time what she left
became the loot
for the family
that survived her,
that I chose
to stay away from.
So this pair of earrings
is the only
surviving gift
I have from her
but in it are many gifts
that my memory opens -
so many stories
that sing
and this one gift
becomes many
and becomes
most poignant-shaped,
love shaped
grandmother to
her granddaughter.
Priya Virmani, Author, International and TEDx Speaker, CEO of Travel Company Ame-Luxe and founder of children’s charity Paint Our World. She received the ‘She Inspires Award’ in the House of Commons in the Houses of Parliament in London in 2019. Also, in 2019 the U.K. named her as ‘An Asian Giant - A Contemporary Icon and an Exceptional Woman Inspiring Change’. Her book published recently, The Smallest Stories to Extraordinary is a resounding manual of inspiration for trying times.