Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 7: The grandmother’s piece
PRIYA
She found it on a Tuesday in the third week.
She had been working through the back of the third room, which was the oldest section of the collection and the least well-documented — not poorly acquired, nothing in the Singh collection was poorly acquired, but the earlier pieces had come into the family before the gallery existed and before the systematic catalogue, and their records had the quality of things that had been known rather than written down.
The piece was on a shelf she had not yet reached. Small — smaller than her hand — wrapped in cotton cloth that had been rewrapped at some point relatively recently, the fold precise and deliberate. She unwrapped it with the cotton gloves and found a figure: a woman, carved from some dark stone she couldn’t immediately identify, in a seated posture that was familiar from the iconographic tradition but not quite classifiable within it. The woman had both hands raised. The expression was not the standardised serenity of devotional work. It was something more specific than that.
She turned it over. On the base, in very small letters, a word in the old script her grandmother had taught her.
She put it down. She photographed it three times. She went to find Aryan.
He was in the front rooms, in a meeting with the gallery’s commercial director about the upcoming exhibition. She waited. When the meeting ended and the commercial director left, she said: “There’s something I need to show you.”
He came.
She showed him the figure.
He went still.
Not the controlled stillness of a man managing his response — the other kind, the genuine stillness, the kind she had seen in the gallery twice before on specific pieces. The stillness of recognition.
“Where was it?” he said.
“Back shelf, third room. It was wrapped.”
He reached out and then stopped, looking at her gloves. “May I?”
“Yes,” she said. She handed it to him.
He held it with both hands, carefully, and looked at it with the specific quality of a man looking at something he had not expected to see in this form, in this room. Something moved in his face — not the managed expression. The underneath one.
“Your grandmother’s?” she said.
“My great-grandmother’s,” he said. “I thought it was at the estate.” He turned it over and looked at the base. His jaw tightened slightly. “She must have put it here.”
“Your grandmother put it here,” Priya said. “With the bronzes.”
“Yes.” He set it down on the documentation table with the same care she had used. “She — I don’t know when. It was not in any catalogue I received.”
Priya looked at the figure. She looked at the word on the base, which in the old script meant approximately *guardian* — not the martial kind, the keeping kind, the word used for the thing that watched over rather than the thing that protected against.
“What is it?” she said.
“A clan object,” he said. “Old. The Singh women have been adding to the sequence — each generation, one object, in a specific tradition.” He paused. “My great-grandmother began it. My grandmother was the second. My mother would have been the third but she died before—” He stopped.
“I’m sorry,” Priya said.
He inclined his head. The controlled gesture, the management. Then: “My grandmother must have placed it here after. She couldn’t leave it at the estate without my mother’s piece beside it.”
“She brought it somewhere she trusted,” Priya said.
He looked at her. “Yes.”
She thought about a woman who had spent thirty years running a liaison network and building a gallery and managing a collection and deciding, at some point, that the safest place for her family’s most significant object was here, in the public space that was also a private archive, visible and protected.
“I’ll catalogue it separately from the main collection,” she said. “If you want it documented at all — this is your family’s object, it’s not my place to—”
“Document it,” he said. “I want a record.” He held her gaze. “You found it. That matters.”
She looked at him.
“The records kept by the Sharma family are part of the Singh clan’s record,” he said. “My grandmother knew that. What you find here is part of what you add to.” He paused. “The sequence she began — it waits for the next woman who carries it.”
She held this carefully. She knew what he was saying beneath what he was saying. She was learning his register the same way she learned every register — from the inside out, the cumulative sense of a person’s language assembling itself into something navigable.
“I’ll document it,” she said. “Accurately.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d expect nothing else.”
She photographed the figure six more times. She measured it. She noted the stone, which she now identified as a specific type of basalt that was consistent with the geological profile of a region in the Western Ghats that the Singh clan had traditionally used. She wrote the catalogue entry with the care she brought to the things that mattered in more than one register.
She noted, at the end of the entry, under *provenance:* placed in the Singh Gallery collection by Sunita Singh (1934–2016), date unknown. Object in the tradition of Singh clan women’s sequence. Guardian figure.
She looked at what she had written.
She thought about the sequence and the tradition and the woman who had placed the object here and the reasons she might have had for placing it here, and she thought about thirty-two years of planning and the pattern that ran in her family and the choice that was always made freely.
She thought: she put it here for a reason.
She thought: I think I understand the reason.
She saved the catalogue entry and went back to work.
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