“Maali se jaake kehna mauri taiyar rakhna/ mauri ko pehnan wala jug jiye… (tell the gardener to prepare the wedding headgear/ the one who wears this headgear should live long).” The songs from Raincoat are among my favourites. The above verses are from the song ‘Jug Jiye’. I was fascinated with the song when I first heard it because of the lyrics and the tune, typical of the wedding songs I have heard growing up in my family.Sometime in 2021, I was working on an assignment on vernacular literary traditions in the medieval period. An essay titled ‘Turki and Hindavi in the World of Persian’ by Dilorom Karomat looked at Persian dictionaries from the 15th and 16th centuries. One such lexicon, Adat al-Fuzala, mentioned the following description of the word basak: ‘a chaplet of flowers that [some] Indians call sehra and other Indians call maur’.Encountering the word ‘maur’ while writing an academic essay was as exciting as coming across the word in a song from a Rituparno Ghosh movie! It felt warm and surreal at once. Intimate, to an extent, which is strange. It is not a word of everyday parlance simply because it is not an everyday commodity. The maur is an integral part of weddings. However, despite its ritual status, the word is nothing special. It is mundane. Or that is what I have always felt. It is a recurring motif in wedding songs. I have heard my mother sing about it with her sisters, and her mother with hers. And I could tell their mothers did too.I had never thought about the history of the maur. But this chance encounter with the word, its presence in writing from some 500 years ago, compelled me to think in that direction. It is strange to say that a word has its own history. It has been used over hundreds of years, of course, but not in abstraction. Its literary presence as well as its usage anchor it in the lives of people, occupying a small space, mostly packed and stored with care. It must never be thought of as an independent entity, usually not-so-important but sometimes significant. I never paid any attention to it but now that I see its use intact in the same verbal form for centuries, I must give it some credit for its resilience.Things and places, much like individuals and communities, are often ascribed or acquire different names over a period of years. I live in Varanasi, also called Banaras and Kashi. In some texts, it is referred to as Anandkanan. They are all the same but also not. Differences lie probably in their geographical coordinates and the historical contexts of the changing nomenclature. But maur has retained its integrity over so many centuries. It could be because of its importance, but I doubt it. I would say, it is because maur is a small thing. Not insignificant, but small.Its smallness is only conceptual; in terms of the role it has to play in people’s lives. As an object, a maur is hard to miss. Its purpose is to adorn the bridegroom, to stand out. As I walk around the market lined with shops selling wedding paraphernalia, the maur draws my attention, as it would of anyone’s. It is usually golden, decorated with frills and laces, and other colourful figures. I wonder if, unlike its name, it has changed its shape and form. I don’t know if the maali who made the maur was allowed to wear it himself, since caste norms govern everything here, including wedding rituals. I think about what the maur would have looked like before it was mass produced. A market packed with ready-made nuptial commodities. Capitalism weds tradition. I wonder about the maur’s place in songs and the women who sung them. Wedding songs were passed over generations as an inheritance. Did the female performers who inhabited this market before they were relegated from the area in the previous century sing about the maurs too?Last year, I heard a rendition of a wedding song from Malwa, composed in Raga Jaijaiwanti by Kumar Gandharva. Ye main layi sehra banra ka, here I bring the headgear of the bridegroom. At this stage, without any adequate research, I can only speculate how maur/sehra found their way to the milieu of classical music, travelling via different categories of performers.In all its utilitarian smallness, and the layers of history it finds itself entangled in, the maur continues to sustain itself in name. And every time I hear these songs, this four-lettered word continues to remind me of its presence, evoking some strange joy, raising many questions.Suyog Raghuvanshi completed his masters in history from the University of Delhi.We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.Read the series here.