“Good morning Bhaisahab. Do you have a coin-collecting album?” I messaged a dear friend whose family owned, perhaps, the oldest book-cum-stationery store in my town. A few seconds later, he texted, “I used to sell them in the 1970s. Let me check once. Else I will get it made for you!”
A book lover was carried away by the nostalgia of the times when he merrily stocked and sold coin and stamp albums to enthusiastic teenagers. It was early morning, and we were both driving down memory lane.
I had given myself this morning the task of organising and decluttering the locker. Silver coins scurried out from tiny brightly coloured pouches. While those wrapped in plastic cover still shone brightly, the others dragged behind grey and worn out. King George V peeped out from one of the coins, and from yet another, Queen Victoria. The East India Company followed quickly, and then our visionaries and leaders. While the latter were comparatively recent mints, the others dated from 1800.
“Are you taking leave today from work?” My husband surfed the coins-strewn bed, looking for a place to settle down with his newspaper. I was reluctant to return the coins to the box, unwilling to shove back the memories in nooks and corners. The coins were excerpts from the life of a father and his little girl, walking hand in hand in the bylanes of Kolkata’s crowded Sonapatti area, rummaging through glass showcases. My father loved collecting old silver and copper coins. He had borrowed my mother’s orange velvet pouch for it.
As I was the oldest of his children and the other two were too busy loitering with friends, he would take me on his treasure hunt and weekly escapades to the silver market, refuelling his childhood passion. From one tiny shop to another, as we scoured the gullies, he would ask the silver smiths if they could procure a particular coin. When they handed him one, he would caress it, read the embossed writing over and over, and explain it to me. He would then pause to remark, “Are you tired? Shall we quit and go home?” I would vehemently nod in disagreement to prove I was equally excited about the treasure.
What started as a means of becoming papa’s favourite child has now become the most precious possession of a middle-aged “daddy’s daughter”. I am transported into a world of love, trust, and security whenever I open the box.
Upon my first visit home as a married daughter, my father asked my mother to hand him over the orange pouch. Sitting beside me, he took out a handful of the silver coins and gazed at them, gently turning them over. His voice was weak and laboured as he mumbled, “Remember, this we bought from Ramesh Bhai. But he always charged exorbitantly. That chavanni was the oldest. I should have purchased it. You were so sleepy that day, remember? And then I had to buy your favourite kaju barfi to keep you from falling off the stool.”
Papa went on for a long time, picking one coin at a time and painting quaint pictures of the days spent hopping on cobbled Kolkata roads in unison.
Each purchase was hooked to some beautiful moment that magically anchored our relationship. He handed me some of the most precious ones. I hesitated. He insisted. I caved. Whenever I visited home, he gave me a few when he saw me packing my suitcase. At the altar of love, the same beautiful ritual where we would sit next to each other and remember a young father and a little daughter, curating not just coins but ever-lasting memories.
It has been years, but he still asks me where I misplaced the copper annas that were my grandmother’s gift to him and that I managed to wangle out for myself! I smile at the thought of the child-like ownership I felt for everything that tied papa to me.
And here I am, sorting the stuff in the drawers, sieving beautiful memories from the junk I have hoarded: endless lines of clothes, jewellery, purses, and shoes randomly purchased for social appearances, long forgotten.
I plan to preserve all the coins in an album. One of my children would cherish the heirloom. I saw in a flash how as a child, he often pulled things from my drawers in search of something to wangle out from me. He tried to persuade me to give my coins but with no success. Finally, he appealed father, and the court ruled that I must hand him the silver coins one day!
I still remember all the pens my son deliberately made me buy. I have packed them all in a brown cardboard box from which I shall hand him some time and again. A sleek piece that cost me a fortune just because he would not budge from the shop. Then another that looked like a gun. And this one with the laser light we purchased from a local fair. He gleefully walked back the long distance to the parking lot, pen tightly held in a fist, oblivious to his hunger pangs and the crowds pushing us around. As the car pulled up, I had to carry the sleepy child to the room, hands across my body, with a tightly held pen. With time, he has moved from home to a boarding school to college. A part of us continues to smile back from the brown cardboard box.
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