I had a little heart-shaped locket. I had bought it at the Heart-Shaped Locket Store. That’s not what they call it, it is just the name I have given it myself. My hometown of Karachi, Southernmost, ocean-bound, the city I grew up in, came with all these little idiosyncrasies I have yet to find in the other cities I have been to since. In Karachi, we have stores for everything, some so small that they can be picked up and packed away, others big enough to be buildings, all catering to your hyper-specific needs. There are ones that sell only red hair dye, others which sell only left-handed scissors, others still, which stock that one off-brand perfume. And this one sold only heart-shaped lockets.
The store was a smaller one, as small as you can be selling one type of locket, the size of your grandmother’s guest bathroom. And all along three of the walls were little hooks, and upon each hook was a locket. There was no harmony to their arrangement, they were not organised according to size or style or make. Rather, the overhead fluorescent bulb glinted off each one, making them loud, the whole store sort of yelling,
“We’re here! Take us, take all of us! You are not meant to pick one!”
We, the three of us sisters, had walked in and bought one each, so that we could put each others’ pictures inside the two little picture frames which the lockets would open up into. It is a little girl's rite of passage, I suppose, like annual diary-writing attempts, or pretend gymnastics, or candy lipstick. I remember, my left frame was to be dedicated to my older sister, and my right frame would be for my younger one, as soon as we found pictures small enough to fit. However, aged four, seven and nine, we quickly found something to be upset with each other about, and so that plan was quickly abandoned.
“MAMA! She said I’m short!”
“MAMA! She IS short!!”
“Well, you’re ugly!”
“You’re nothing special either!”
“I HATE you!”
“I hate YOU!”
Or at least some combination of these sentiments across the eighteen years we spent together. This would not be the first or last promise my sisters and I broke, but it is the one that comes to mind with the most fondness. As for the lockets, my sisters had theirs and lost theirs, content in entangling their belongings with clothes and toys and memories. Mine, on the contrary, I kept.
There was a girlish sort of pride in being the responsible one, the one who treasured our meagre belongings in a way my older sister did not have the concern for and my little sister did not have the patience for. Mine was silver, compared to their golds, with an engraving over the top of some generic vines and flowers. At the time, it sat perfectly in the palm of my hand, the cool metal warming fast enough to the heat from my skin. When I put the warmed locket to my cheek, it smelt of old coins and staircase bannisters. It did not come with a chain, so I had it around a white thread I took from my mother’s sewing box. Over the years, my locket changed just as much as I did.
By the time I was ten, there was a dent in it from when I had closed my jewelry box too hard.
By the time I was twelve, it had graduated from a thread to a leather rope to a silver chain.
By the time I was fifteen, the groves of the engraving were darkened and the shine was foggy.
But in all those years, there was one thing that remained constant. That it was always empty on the inside. You see, after having sworn off of sisterly affection, there was little else I could think of to fit in there. No family, that was for sure. I was also not keen on any friends, did not have any pets, nor was any celebrity that alluring. Nevertheless, I moved away from my home to try and find something worth fitting in it. I moved far East, to Hong Kong. Small enough, perhaps this time.
***
I moved to Hong Kong in the summer, and two more summers came and passed with the locket in my box. Compared to the people in this city, the locket looked more and more like what it was; a piece of sentimentality wrapped around an object which caught a seven year old’s eye. In other words, naive, worn and unfit to an adult life. And so I did not get enough opportunities to convince myself to wear it out. It sat in my room with all the other parts of myself I tried to grow out of. But in the summer of the year I turned twenty-one, something extraordinary happened.
I lost it. Let me tell you how. It started with five little words.
“Let’s go to the beach!”
There were other sisters I made in this new city, separate from my own. These girls liked to go to the beach, these new siblings of mine not afraid of darkening in the sun the way Karachiites are. And so we went to the beach.
This day, I had found the perfect necklace to go with my summer dress. I strung the locket on a shorter chain and clasped it around my neck. It sat against my chest, warming with my skin, and it felt like meeting an old friend again. It felt like going home. But as an adult now there is no room for nostalgia, so I practised my smile in the mirror before heading out to meet my friends. It was a long way to Mui Wo, and I was not going to let this itch blossom into yearning anytime soon.
The beach was warm and the sun was hotter, and the only logical thing to do was dive into the cool embrace of the green ocean. We stripped and plunged, taking the time to splash each other and steal floaties, and dunk each other under the water. Some ten minutes into our horsing around, a grey cloud rolled over the hill. So with our warm ocean came cool rain, and the unpredictability of a Hong Kong shower had us in hysterics. I walked out of the water after the rain, dripping and laughing and feeling lighter. Too much lighter. Through the giggling between us women, feeling again like children, my hand went to my bare neck. Nothing. I looked down to see an empty chain, sticking to my chest with grains of sand, wet and turning cold against the rain-cool air.
“Where’s my locket?”
“What locket?” One of my friends asked, wiping the stinging saltwater from her eyes.
“My locket, my heart-shaped locket, I’ve had it for years-” the panic was seeping into my voice, “I wore it into the ocean and it gone, it’s-”
Slowly, as if reluctant to say it outloud, my friend turned to look at the sea behind us. It waved and rippled, the way it always had, as if nothing had happened. As if my world had not just ended.
I had lost it. It was gone, and I was never going to find it again. My friends around me all shared glances of sympathy, all understanding my pain. All having been little girls before, having their heart broken through loss of a sacred item.
“It’s okay!” one of them said, “You can probably buy a new one!”
“Buy a new one…” I mumbled to myself as I felt the ball in my throat from trying not to sob. Who was going to tell her that there were no Heart-Shaped Locket stores in Hong Kong? No, there were proper stores, jewelry stores with rings next to pendants next to bracelets. The anklets share shelves with brooches like tenants pushed together in a public housing estate. There are several wares on one hook, and several types of adornments you walk out with, with plastic wrapping and a receipt and a dedicated bag, instead of shoving them into your overalls as you and your sisters hold sticky hands and skip back to your parents. The lockets don’t yell at you. They don’t even whisper.
Karachi is a city which acknowledges little and apologises for less, so different from the demure and docile Hong Kong I have come to know. Both cities by the sea, both with drastically different levels of domesticity. Being a girl in one and a woman in the other, there are less trivial things than lockets and sentimentality I have lost and won back. Being a locket sharing a hook with a pair of earrings and feeling out of place is not something Karachi taught me, but is something I have come to know in this new jewelry store. There are lessons I will keep learning. There are things the ocean will take from me and there are things I will give it. I suppose it was time to say goodbye to my childhood obsession, albeit there are kinder ways.
On the ride back home from the beach, the minibus groaned and trudged, and my hand came up to finger absentmindedly at my empty chain. And that is when I realised that I never put a picture in it. I hadn’t found the object I wanted to put in my heart of hearts and now it was buried at the bottom of the ocean. Maybe someone else would find it, washed up on shore. Maybe they would know exactly who to put in it. Or maybe, like me, they’d wear it empty for fourteen years, waiting like I did to be moved enough to immortalise their love.