UNCUT GEMS

From nani’s bangles to custom keepsakes, heirloom jewels have a special place in any trousseau. By DHVANI SOLANI. Illustration by SHWETA MULEKAR.

- DHVANI SOLANI

WHEN I GOT married over a decade ago, I revelled in micromanaging every detail. From a grumpy registrar's cross-city trek to secret booze in the parking lot and a cake-cutting song filled with inside jokes—every detail was obsessively accounted for. The only thing I handed over to my folks, entirely and unthinkingly, was sorting out jewellery for my trousseau—an inheritance I considered archaic while my mother insisted it was streedhan. Women’s wealth.

For the past decade, those small and not-so-small pieces—some bought, some melted down and remade from older jewellery, some passed down through generations—sat in the cold, dark interiors of a bank locker. If they could talk, they'd tell stories: of sober events and raucous parties my grandmothers might've taken them to in Myanmar, Karachi, Saurashtra and eventually Mumbai; of a shy, curly-haired girl later saved as “Mom” in my phone, wearing them with quiet joy; and then of a younger me dismissing them as merely wealth on display. Until earlier this year.

My mother took them out of the locker and brought them home—part practical will-making exercise, part gentle reminder of what I have access to. Maybe it’s age, or the unravelling of once-rigid (faux) feminist ideals, but those pieces no longer felt like symbols of tradition I'd rejected. They felt intentional. Personal. Like love and care passed down in a gold-and-stone time capsule. A glimpse into decades of fashion and feeling. And just so damn beautiful.