We Found a 100-Year Old Instrument in the Attic
What we did with this amazing instrument
We found our grandma’s esraj, an Indian instrument, that she played as a young woman, in the depths of an attic. It’s at least 100 years old.
I knew my maternal grandmother played this instrument, but she never told me herself, nor did I ever hear her play it. It was something my mother told me long after she passed.
When I asked my mother why my grandmother never even mentioned playing the esraj, she said she wasn’t sure. But she surmised that it might be because Grandma was traumatized during the partition (India was partitioned in 1947), having seen many horrors of war and suffering many hardships including enduring a severe famine in 1943.
My parents were selling their property in India and emptying it was a massive undertaking, spread over weeks and months.
As we were going through their belongings, we found a fragile item wrapped in many layers of cloth. Unwrapping it carefully unearthed the ‘esraj’ pictured above. As you can tell, the esraj was in pretty bad shape due to being in extended storage and not in a temperature-controlled condition.
