The Jewellery You Were Given at Birth and Have Never Once Taken Out of the Box

The box is usually gold. Sometimes it is velvet, sometimes it is a small cardboard square wrapped in tissue that has gone yellow at the folds. Inside: a pair of tiny gold earrings, a thin bangle with a name engraved on it, a chain with a pendant of a deity you were told was your protector. The weight of it, when you finally pick it up, is almost nothing. The weight of leaving it there is considerably more.

Gold jewellery gifted at birth or in early childhood is one of the oldest forms of blessing in Indian families. It is not decoration for an infant, an infant cannot wear it safely. It is a claim staked on the future. The person giving it is saying: I was here at the beginning of your life, and I wanted you to carry something of mine into it. A grandmother's first gift to a grandchild is rarely chosen for its market value. It is chosen because she held the piece in a shop and thought of the child before the child had a face she recognised.

You know it is there. You have moved it from one house to another, from one drawer to the back of a shelf. Sometimes you open the cupboard and see it and close the cupboard again. The guilt is not about the jewellery. The guilt is about what the jewellery represents: a version of you that someone else believed in before you had done anything to deserve it. To open the box is to reckon with that. To keep it sealed is to defer the reckoning indefinitely. Both choices cost something.

Gold jewellery that has been stored unworn for years does not age badly in the way fabric does. A 22-karat gold bangle from three decades ago is still 22-karat gold. But the setting on a stone may have loosened. The clasp on a chain may have stiffened. Enamel work, if there is any, can crack with temperature changes over time. Before you wear a piece that has been sealed for years, take it to a jeweller, not to sell it, but to have it checked. A loose prong on a small stone costs almost nothing to fix and prevents losing the stone the first time you wear it. This is the only practical step between the box and your wrist.

The earrings are too small for your ear now, probably. The bangle may not close over your wrist. But a thin gold chain from a first birthday often fits an adult neck exactly, because chains are sized for necks and necks do not change the way wrists do. A pendant can be re-strung on a longer chain if the original is too delicate. A bangle that no longer closes can be worn as an open cuff if the gold is thick enough, or reset into a ring by a skilled karigar. These are not expensive alterations. They are decisions. The decision to wear something is different from the decision to keep it safe. Both are valid. The problem is when keeping it safe becomes keeping it hidden, and keeping it hidden becomes forgetting that you have it at all.

In most cases, the person who gave you this jewellery is older now than they were then, or they are gone. If they are still here, they have almost certainly forgotten the specific piece, not because it did not matter, but because they have given other gifts since, lived other days. The weight you carry around the box is yours, not theirs. They gave it and let it go. The holding on is something you constructed afterward, out of love and out of the particular way grief works when someone is still alive but the moment of the giving is long past. You are allowed to open the box. You are allowed to wear what is inside. That is what it was for.