The trunk that began the house

Long before the label had a name, there was a wooden trunk in the corner of my grandmother's room. Camphor in the pleats. The way the pallu was folded — borders out, always.

I was small enough to need a chair to see in. By six, I was already redrawing what I saw — flatter at the waist, looser at the hem, an extra line of gota where the original wasn't.

This is the first thing the house knows. Everything that has come since has been a kind of variation on what was inside that trunk.

We do not borrow from history. We continue from inside it.