Thresholds

So Daljit and I have been in the reserve collection at MAA a few times now, opening boxes and generally getting excited at what we find. This is easily the best part of my job. Every time you lift a lid it is a new discovery, that makes a new connection or brings to mind something you may have forgotten you knew.
After our triumph with the long dice, this time Daljit is looking for toe rings to enrich his vision of the sights and sounds of Indian epics. Some of these objects haven’t seen a human face, or a human toe or ankle, for years. I don’t exactly feel like an expert in this, but its amazing what the encounter with these objects brings to mind.

As we look at heavy metal anklets, some mightily solid and some made almost entirely of little bells, like a Bharatnatyam dancer would wear, I remember a story told to me more than ten years ago in Calcutta. It was a ghost story, which isn’t itself unusual in Bengal, about a haunted museum. Although the details are cloudy, the sight of the anklets instantly brings Mrs Majumdar’s voice describing the sound of a woman’s ankets jingling as she walked: “choom-choom, choom-choom”.

Museums aren’t just about seeing things, or even about touching (or please-do-not-touching). That sound, forgotten for a decade, comes back involuntarily – straight into my head and, inevitably, out of my mouth as I try to explain it to Daljit. He looks at me like I’m weird. Not the first time.

It’s still in my head now. Like the curatorial equivalent of an ear-worm. Choom-choom. Choom-choom.

Mark Elliott, MAA