Ever wondered what it is about the human heart that loves the sensuality of the antique? That makes you feel warm when you run your hands over a family heirloom belonging to a branch of the family tree unseen? That makes you smell the flowers that grew by the road you walked home from school?
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Is it the promise of the future? That something will stay on even when you are gone? Or the glimpse of the past, despite the fact that all you may remember is a withered face in an old photoframe?
Or perhaps, it is the sense of entering someone else's world. A world where you are accepted because by bequeathing the heirloom, you have been given a promise that you are always accepted here. That it is your gate pass into a place where no one will judge you. Bcoz no one lives there anymore.
As i tried on my mother's engagement sari for my college farewell and looked into the mirror, I was a little breathless. I wondered how my mother must've felt, and somehow her sentiments of apprehension, which she probably will never speak to her daughter of for fear of seeming not 'a mom since birth' and breaking the essential distance for future parenting, those very sentiments seem to have been woven into the pink silk and the even now brilliant silver threadwork. I felt closer to her knowing that at my age she too had done this - looked into a mirror and realised...
..that she was, like i am now, 21 year old.