Pushpita was named by her great-grandmother and that in itself is good fortune for how many of us would have had the opportunity of being born fourth generation with the first to bless us in person...

Pushpita was named by her great-grandmother and that in itself is good fortune for how many of us would have had the opportunity of being born fourth generation with the first to bless us in person. As such, Pushpita came into this world decorated with the flowers of love, wisdom and pansophy of elders for whom to see their ‘puti’ is a surplus fulfilment they may not have considered in terms of such blissful longevity and which imparts their senascent life a special meaning.

Pushpita is young, very young. A graduate in fashion design from NIFT, she’s immersed now in vernacular culture and folklore which she’s made the subject of a formal study. Through such discipline, even if sapid, she finds time to watch classic Bengali and Hindi films and gets in a fair amount of reading in Bengali, especially Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay whose work she loves.

We were introduced to her through Sananda in which our advertisements she ardently followed, and it’s that charm which drew her to come and commission us this choker, a part of her wedding jewellery.

We’ve decorated the goyna with flowers. Thokai-wire vines scroll across the spacer-bars, and the endpieces are filled with leaves and little round fruits. Six lines of specially selected natural pearls stretch between these, emanating from the ball-bordered medallion in the centre. Here, you see pierced naksha come into play, the flowers and foliage splendidly articulated within the disc. A Thai ruby sits in the middle, the sole colour besides gold and iridescent white, of the ornament.

Also, note how a rope, chased into the gold, marks the edge of the circle, while the ball-border frames it; and how gently raised the naksha is.

We haven’t named a flower, simply because there could be many to decorate the choker with and the wearer can imagine those herself. And about Pushpita : she’s a millennial with great feeling for art and culture, and for whom sentiment is not just nostalgic reflection but a deep sense of what’s enduringly meaningful to her through the lived lives of all who she cares about and who care about her.

It is perhaps this uncommon depth of consideration that made her order with us this genteel but powerful choker in which the medallion, spacer-bars, and endpieces are all different by way of their infills but spectacularly congruous in the ornament, coming together with fearless conviction.

Crafted by daydreaming hands, albeit those of significant expertise, this guinea-gold jewel is a rare exercise in combining full naksha and full katal in separate parts of the ornament and then presenting them together as a choker of infinite charm –– The spirit of India, Calcutta and Pushpita coalescing as a recherché jewel that will, in time, become a much-loved and treasured heirloom.

These flowers are forever.