Perfect gifts come from the most unlikely pincodes

The universe holds many gift-giving personality types. Many of us know gift-givers who give us expensive, iridescent gifts that are awful. Their awfulness is of a special variety that they are too ugly to be ornamental and too ornamental to be useful. A seven-layer diya holder in royal purple with a mirrored base that is as tall as a two-year-old, for instance. If you think this is highly specific and based on a gift I was given, you are mistaken. This is just an example of the kind of gift you could receive and spend a corresponding two years to re-gift. You may conclude that the kind of person who gives these gifts is simultaneously tasteless and thoughtless. But that isn’t true. Sure, you may get such a gift in the mass-distribution moments of festival seasons or weddings. However, the person who customarily gives this kind of terrifying gift can be sweet and well-intentioned. And there lies the problem with gift-giving. When you give one, you are hoping that the person who gets it understands what you intended. When you get one, you are trying to X-ray the box and arrive at a cardiac reading. What lay in the red heart that wrapped this gift in pink?

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And then in this universe are the great gift-givers. I have an aunt by marriage who gives the best gifts. On my kid’s first birthday, she gave him a toy that he played with till he was 4. She gave me leggings that five years in still get me compliments. I have a stern and brainy friend who always gifts me books—a tricky task to execute. Somehow the books are not stern or worthy. They are always fun, gossipy and—I have come to realise—interested in the world, in the same way that she is too under her forbidding demeanour.

Does this mean that each of us are either good or bad gift-givers? I am inclined to think not.

I feel like gift-giving can also operate in unpredictable ways. You, an ace gift-giver, might still fail at giving gifts to someone who you adore. You dither, browse for hours, almost order, forget till the last minute, forget altogether or get something middling and then feel very sorry for yourself. When you do it more than once, when it becomes a possible annual feature, no one can be surprised at the pursed lips. The person who you love and gets these middling gifts may well wonder at the lack of care. You may wonder what is affecting your perfect score. “It isn’t me so maybe it is them?" Maybe. Or maybe the answer is elsewhere.

In Malayalam, I have heard the phrases kai-punyam and vayitu bhagyam used in the context of cooking. The former phrase praises the gilded hands of the person who has cooked the meal—someone who can turn any ordinary dish into a treat. The latter phrase is more interesting though, remarking as it does in a sardonic way about the person with the blessed belly. This is the person who whose first day at work is when someone gives a really good birthday treat. They are likely to be just hanging out at your house when you decide to try that tricky prawn pulao recipe again and it turns out marvellously for the very first time. They had vayitu-bhagyam giving you a kai-punyam that no one ever attributed to you before.

Recently I was witness to the aunt with the kai-punyam send no-occasion gifts for her sister. A series of gifts. Each one a hit. The recipient beamed and gleamed each time while also moaning, “I barely have to mention that I like something and she orders it." And you would think “aha. this is the answer" to her gift-giving abilities—a quick-trigger on the Amazon order button. It isn’t though.

For years, I have enjoyed the leggings with tiny gold skulls that she gave me but who could have known that I would. Only someone who put two and two together and arrived at “this person would like imitation zari memento mori on their thighs". The only person who would arrive at this extrapolation is someone who pays close attention like she does. And this realisation then leads us to a pain-pleasure situation. Love is attention, isn’t it? And looking at that embroidered wall-hanging-type saying might lead us to the kind of unhappy calculations about our lives that we are told we must strictly avoid during the holiday season. Strictly. Instead let us unwrap our shiny new material pleasures—small, big, beribboned, minimal, elaborate, tiny, shiny—and enjoy them thoroughly. Perfect love may not exist but perfect gifts do and they come from the most unlikely pincodes.

Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories. She posts @chasingiamb

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