Glass panes and dingy metal storage boxes. Museums and lost corners of the bed. They hold priceless objects handed over centuries.

As a kid, I never understood the point of museums – large halls with old things people pretentiously pointed at and talked about. For me, history would mean tales of average people, like my grandfather, who lived on the margins and died therein. They weren’t part of the independence struggle or the partition. They were born in a remote village in the remotest state of India and perhaps lived their whole lives in the 100 km radius of where they were born. They don’t sit behind glass panels in museums, nor do they leave artifacts so previous to be saved for generations to come. Their lives were so ordinary that if an archeologist finds a scrap of the only upper cloth they owned in their entire lifetime, they will move it aside and keep digging.

But today as I stand in front of glass windows carrying treasures someone found worth preserving, I don’t see objects anymore. I see kings and queens and courtesans and chariots – humans who lived and breathed in these very objects that lost their luster along with its owners. Wars and domestic disputes, treachery and love, all passing through the fibers of these brittle leftovers. Deep in there, they would have been ordinary people too – maybe not as inconsequential as characters in my conceivable history – people torn between duty and morals, life and love and so much more. And yet in hollow halls of museums we hear echoes only of extraordinary tales, until one looks closer.

Up close you see the sacred threads almost broken, the jewelry missing stones – perhaps the victims of a short-tempered sweetheart and the little words of endearment embossed on the leftovers of royalty. And as they descend from the pedestal you see the irony – the alive watching the possessions of the dead, paying to photograph them, treating them as objects of wonder, not realizing the flow of time can move us to the glass boxes too – if worthy. If not, we too will stay lost in the abyss and shoved out of the way to dig for something more precious. In a way, the glass boxes are the ones who made it, possessions that learned to stay alive. In the longer journey of time, most of us staring at the glass boxes are just passing through, the antics I did were just that – antics, not a story worth retelling.

Written: December 2021 at Waari Book Cafe, Pune