Mud and Gold

Years of solitude can turn me into a snob. A visit to my home town every year helps me to shed my guise.

‘She has taken out all her money from the bank to buy a double layer bead chain in gold.’ My mother told me.

‘Why does she want one now?’ I asked.

‘She is eighty five years old and she wants to wear one before she dies.’ That’s it. My mother tagged me along with them the next day to the jewellery shop to buy it. A wish not yet satisfied in life should be declared as a death wish to get it fulfilled.

The next day she saw me wearing a black thread around my neck with a terracotta pendant dangling to it. I had admired terracotta jewellery long before a friend gifted me a pair of earrings and a pendant. I had left wearing gold chains daily.

She gave a reproving look and asked, ‘Where is your Thaali chain? And what is that black thing around your neck?’

‘Wearing gold is not safe in Delhi. So I don’t wear the chain',I said.

‘You are now not in Delhi. Take that dirty thread off your neck before you go out and wear your gold chain'. That was a statement rather than an advice or an order.

A year before my mother had her gold chain snatched by a pair of crooks on a bike. An old couple in the neighbourhood was robbed of their gold and money some six months back. Still the place was regarded safe because it was the place where we were all born and gave birth in.

I smiled inwardly. I was in a place where wealth and marital happiness were weighed in accordance with the yellow metal I wear. The glimmer of yellow can blind all other signs of impoverishment. All that glitters need not be gold but yellow metal.

Standing at the doorway of forty I am no less stubborn than a fifteen year old. I go out wearing that same black thread and terracotta pendant around my neck. I knew she would not mind. It was just her habit of articulating her thoughts and perceptions of eighty five years.