The Perks and Curse of Inheritance

My grandma’s closet homes
cotton sarees and communist biases.
She deliberately makes Orwell
sit next to Gandhi,
on her bookshelf.
As if dystopia and optimism
go hand-in-hand,
like her silk scarves
and rusty ornaments.

She hounds me for wearing
a shirt too tight
or wanting
a ‘little too much’ in life.
Yet blushes like an autumn rose
over a cup of tea,
as I tease a girl from the 40s
who eloped with her outcast lover.
Oh, such scandalous matrimony!

Her wine-glass assortment
adorns the cherry-red mantle.
I heard the best one is still reserved
for her eldest grandson.
They don’t talk anymore,
now that he likes boys better than girls.

The makeshift doll-houses, I guess,
inherits the younger one.
For she wasn’t lucky enough
to get the biological benefaction
– a straight-bridged nose,
as Grandma remarks.

My grandma insists
that I learn how to cook well.
For history’s witness to temptresses,
wooing men,
not through their lilac-scented bodies
but their fragrant bread.

To think,
my grandma’s heirloom
is filled with material goods
and ideologies alike.
I wonder what we all get to take,
And really, who’s to decide?

Sanchita Sahoo is an English and creative writing major who doesn’t love long walks on the beach.

Featured image: Pariplab Chakraborty