Written piece
Threads of Inheritance
Sayani De
India
About this piece
A young woman comes back from far away to say goodbye to her grandmother. After she passes, she gets her inheritance, a very old, delicate muslin saree. This fabric, called Dhaka muslin, used to be made in Bengal, but the art was destroyed by British rulers.
I inherited my grandmother’s O-negative blood group,
the early-onset diabetes in her veins,
and her arched feet that are always ready to run.
I returned home across seven seas and thirteen time zones,
Before she slipped away in her sleep, eight days before touching her stolen century.
She inherited her grandmother’s eyes,
the green of a monsoon fern.
A scandalous oddity in a lineage of stable blacks and umbers,
that held the recessive tint of her grandmother’s shame,
of being the forbidden fruit from the loins of a hay-coloured alien,
a fox who descended with his pack onto their land.
My grandmother also kept the muslin saree, gifted to her grandmother’s mother,
before the art of weaving muslin was strangled by the pack.
Only a little of my grandmother’s rage was entirely her own.
A fury that let her swim to the surface each time
the earth was torn by bombs, swords, and new maps
Rangoon, Dhaka, Khulna, Kolkata—all her pitstops till
Till the men, always the men, in white, red, khaki, brown drew the new lines
With their papers and guns.
Before my departure to the opposite end of the globe
she wept, asking me to stay.
But my feet were restless. Fearful. Angry.
Of men, tongues, of being strangled
for walking home at night.
I couldn’t be safely boring
in these horrifically interesting times
When friends-of-friends vanished for saying aloud
what I only muttered in private.
She died in her sleep the afternoon after I arrived
leaving me something crumpled in an aluminium trunk.
I unfolded it, fingers trembling - her muslin saree.
Like woven air, the colour of an autumn sky,
bordered with crimson wounds of flowers,
resplendent now with holes as big as ten-rupee coins.
It levitated in the sun-dust between us
like a flag.