Some months back, I posted a photograph of mine on facebook, in which I was wearing a traditional Bengali cotton tant sari; ivory coloured and richly edged by a bright red and broad gold border. I received a flurry of comments and compliments on the sari and a lot of my friends likened me to my mother.

I am always flattered when people tell me I resemble her. Ma has an effortless, natural elegance which I don’t believe I can ever quite master and hence it’s flattering to be told I look like her. I always had this vision that somehow as I would grow older, I would automatically transform into someone as graceful as her; efficiently no-nonsense, in crisply starched cotton saris, or Maharani-like, in powder-puff clouds of chiffon.

While that was not to be, there’s a little anecdote I want to share about the sari I am wearing in my picture at the end of this note.

It belongs to my mom, Sunanda Ghosh. She got it as a gift some months before my father passed away in 2004 and was able to wear it perhaps only once. After Baba’s death, she stayed away from wearing her favourite (and typically traditional) Bengali tant saris with red borders*. This one too stayed locked in her almirah at her home in Nagpur, while she moved to Mumbai to live with me.

Years passed and Ma sold her home in 2013. She stoically gave away dozens of her lovingly collected saris to charity, saying that there was no point holding on to so many of them, since both my sister-in-law and I don’t wear saris too often. I watched in helpless dismay, knowing what she said was true, as I saw her donate her crisp Bangla cottons, lustrous Kanjivarams, satiny Banarasis, the airy gridded Kotas, papery Organzas, too many to recall and yet wrapped within the precise folds of each one of them, lay a precious and indelible memory for Ma.

But she kept this one sari aside for me. This was a special favourite and I think she felt a twinge of regret at not having been able to wear the sari often enough. She hesitantly asked me if I’d wear it. I said, “Yeah, sure.”, not knowing when and where I’d get the chance to wear something so very Bengali and traditional (given that most of us dress like clones of each other to work nowadays, in fuss-free clothes and usually not in hardcore desi clothes like saris!).

Then yesterday, I was invited to a griha-pravesh (housewarming) puja and Ma suggested I wear this. I feared I’d be over dressed and look too much like an art-directed Bengali ‘bou-ma’ (which means ‘daughter-in-law’, in Bengali), but I decided to humour her.

When Ma finished draping the sari around me and she stepped back to look at me, a magical little moment occurred. I don’t know who felt happier – Ma at seeing her daughter in a much beloved sari that she has forsaken the right to wear, or me – at seeing the expression of joy and satisfaction, mixed with a bittersweet nostalgia on her face.

And so the beautiful bond that we share with our mothers and daughters, are kept alive and made richer through the saris that we pass on or receive. The very fabric of our lives – fragile, tensile, priceless – to be coveted and treasured forever.
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*Ma wears all other colours, but has opted not to wear the traditionally Bengali Hindu colours of matrimony (red and white), after my father passed away.

**In the pictures (L to R):
My mom, Sunanda Ghosh in the early 1980s in a Bengali Taant sari, in Kurnool.
Me, in the traditional Bengali red and white Taant sari my mother gifted me
Ma and I, on April 15 this year in our Tussar Jamdani saris as we brought in the Bengali New Year, in Mumbai.