A Letter

“Dear Ma,

As I write these words, nine silver bracelets clink on my left wrist. If we sat facing each other, there would be two gold bracelets on yours, possibly with a design of cocoa pods on the ends. My memory is unclear. Too busy with youth, I never paused to look, and their detail is lost to me. Today, I don’t know if they were inherited, gifted as mahr (dowry), or bought with money you earned.

Were we able to speak with each other now, what questions would we ask, what silences would fill spaces in our exchange, and what memories would we share? There are so many moments when I’ve wanted answers from the past, to gather the pieces that stitch together into “a body that walks in history.” Why turn to the past? Is it loss that propels navigation through memory, imagination, and analysis? Is it arrival at new coordinates and conditions in life? Is it turning to face the world on one’s own terms—Indian, Caribbean, and feminist—and having to figure out what you will carry in your jahajin bundle as you cross boundaries and borders?

Besides love and blood, what is our connection, Ma? On one of the fingers on my left hand, the side with the keys “d,” “e,” “t,” “r,” and “s” of indentureship and almost all the letters of dark waters, I wear my father’s mother’s wedding band. It’s more yellow gold than one finds typical today, thicker than my own wedding band and fitted next to it. It feels almost as if, across decades, the marriage and motherhood stories of Taimoon, born on 14 November 1913, and daughter of Kapooran and Shah Mohammed Hosein of Balmain, Couva, are just as proximate to and touch mine. Indeed, they do, for our foremothers’ choices and compromises have decisive consequences on our own lives, influencing what we think and write, and the pauses and silences at our fingertips.”

-A Letter to My Great-Grandmother, Gabrielle Jamela Hosein