‘Baubles’ by Anita Goveas

The jewellery set arrives on your thirteenth birthday, the official transition from playing with dolls to planning what to name your children. Your nana is so traditional, Mother says laughingly, no one in this country will ask for dowry. It’s made of sparkles and stones that look like fire, and you want to touch it so much your fingertips ache. You manage to put on one bangle before it’s all whisked away into its red velvet-lined box. What is it for, you ask, for Christmas? Nothing you need to think about now, but we’ll save it anyway, Mother says, positioning it on a dark, high shelf.

Seven years later, you’re allowed to wear it to practice one month before the wedding. The gold and garnet studded collar pushes coldly against your neck, the chandelier earrings pull at your earlobes, and you don’t recognize your face in the mirror in the reflected light. You put the rest back in the case untouched, but you still feel the weight against your tender skin.

You find it again at the back of a cupboard when you’re clearing out your mother’s possessions, amongst the shoes to go to charity and the clothes to be shared out amongst cousins, nieces and nephews. In the semi-dark, as the sunset burns the sky into magenta and crimson streaks behind you, you pick up the collar, the earrings, the anklet and the twelve bangles. You adorn yourself unhurriedly, until you’re covered in gold and almost precious stones with only the ring finger of your left hand blessedly bare.

From issue 18: autumn/winter 2024

About the Author
Anita Goveas is British-Asian, London-based, and fuelled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. She was first published in the 2016 London Short Story Prize anthology, most recently by Atlas and Alice. She tweets erratically @coffeeandpaneer. Her debut flash collection, Families and Other Natural Disasters, is available from Reflex Press, and links to her stories are at coffeeandpaneer.wordpress.com