Old Marwari Sanduk, Iron Clad Chest

The Marwaris of this region built India's great trading houses and long before there were banks in every town, what a merchant family owned lived in a box like this. The sanduk was the strongbox and the dowry chest in one, timber for the body, iron cladding for fire and thieves, brass rosettes because even a strongbox could be handsome and it travelled with the bride to her new home and with the merchant to his new market. Every old Marwari household had one and most still remember where it stood.

This is a genuine old one, not a reproduction. The wooden carcass is wrapped completely in iron, plates and straps riveted across every face and over the iron march rows of brass rosette bosses, dozens of them, the pattern the smiths used to turn armour into ornament.

A long iron hasp drops over a loop at the front for the padlock, the way these were always secured and the whole chest stands on shallow bracket feet cut from the iron itself. It carries its years openly, the rust bloom on the straps, the dents where it was moved a hundred times, even an old chalk mark from some long-gone godown and none of it has been polished away, because a sanduk without its history is just a box.

Where it goes now: as a coffee table with a story, at the foot of the bed holding the winter quilts, in a hallway as the bench everyone sits on to tie their shoes or in a study as the one object visitors always ask to open. It was built to keep a family's most valuable things. It still can, whatever those are now.