Keepsakes

My scars were still healing when they laid my grandmother in the ground. She had not spoken a word in two weeks. In Urdu, the word for precious is قیمتی. She would write it in Hindi as कीमती. What is valuable is pronounced the same in both languages—keemti. At eighteen, she had her nose pierced to indicate she was now married. When we poured water on her face from a pale pink jug, the hole on the side of her nose was closed. Later, dividing her things, we found a gilded nath with a pearl in its center. I had never seen her wearing it. Nano had forsaken beauty while still alive, given away most of her precious things. Why did she keep this? And who would get it now—when none of us could wear it? For weeks, I had been clipping on an artificial one in secret, my family unaware. Seeing what lay inside the carved wooden box, with a quiet desperation, I wanted it. But I worried about being too greedy, having already a delicate string of memories. Nano was a hoarder. Buried inside her drawer beneath pens dried of ink, caramel toffees melted together, and flowers pressed inside books, was a plastic bag filled with rusted keys, remnants of distances she had traveled. What else had she carried from Delhi to Lahore? I wish I had discovered her life before the end of her life. In her childhood home, I imagined locked doors, the keys lost forever. I could imagine exactly what that felt like—every time I glimpse my palms, I notice holes in the middle of my hands. I do not have the courage to claim what I want. The first time I loved someone, I couldn’t tell them, so I put it inside a poem. Silence, too, has a قیمت. What I have inherited, because of mine, is an envelope of pictures, family members I don’t recognise, Nano’s name scribbled on the back in illegible print. I keep it in my drawer, in a house held together by words—crumbling—to remind myself, even when hidden, unsaid, forgotten, we can have keemti things.