Cecilia, my
aunt, is deaf and dumb. She makes a living by sewing nightdresses and
children’s garments. From the patches that are leftover after making these
clothes, she makes bags. These are colourful, useful, handy, soft, strong and
very eco-friendly. They remind us of a world gone by when old grandmothers
would bring us bananas in cloth bags and handkerchiefs.
Whenever she visited us, she gave me one of
these bags. They were quaint bags with beautiful circular shapes. She made them
in different sizes too. Slowly, as the eco-friendly spirit in me grew, I
started using these bags for all purposes – for carrying groceries, clothes,
toys, books. I would carry them with me whenever we moved to a new city and new
friends that I made there would greatly admire these old-worldly little bags.
And then last winter, Priya asked me to get
some bags made for her on my next trip home. She wanted to give them as gifts
to some of her relatives in the Netherlands and to her friends in Italy. She
said she would pay for them because she absolutely loved them. So I asked
Cecilia to make a hundred bags. Priya took most of them only leaving for me a
sample of each colour and pattern.
The trend
soon caught on and there were other friends who wanted to place orders with
Cecilia. Some of them wanted rectangular shapes, some wanted a particular
colour, some wanted interesting prints, some wanted them lined and some others
just wanted to be surprised with whatever Cecilia created. She is a very
talented lady and uses her aesthetic sense of design and precision to create
these wonderful bags which became so popular with friends from all over the
world.
The uses for
these bags have multiplied over the years. I sometimes use a particularly gay
one as a gift-wrapping so that the receiver gets two gifts at the same time. On
occasions when I sent meals for sick friends, the boxes were packed away in
these bags. I have the habit of always carrying one of these bags in my purse folded
neatly so that it seems just like a little handkerchief.
