My Mother’s Diamond Heirloom Is Now My Ring — And It Was Once a Toe Ring

The story behind the now ring that I wear on my index finger goes back about four decades. My mother, then a young woman, still as beautiful and glamorous as she is today, bought herself a pair of two natural diamond bands to wear on either side of her engagement ring. To start, I think it’s important to traverse my mother’s very distinct relationship to jewellery. One that feels so different to mine, as her daughter. She started wearing diamonds very early. Married at 18, my mother was a young bride, wearing gold and diamond jewellery neck, ears and wrists covered in a mix of her own, her mother’s, as well as her soon to be mother-in-law’s gifted pieces. There’s a picture of her that I remember admiring every time I visit home in Mumbai and a dedicated afternoon of sifting through old albums is the only thing on the agenda. Because, why not. It’s in those moments that I look closer, almost screwing my face and scrunching my eyes, to recognise the woman behind the nose ring and hooded drape on her head. It’s a funny thing — recognising that your mother was once a girl with hopes and dreams of her own too.

Over the years, I’ve seen my mum travel the corners of the country, and like a magpie, pick up saris woven with the most versatile threads and fabrics, and jewellery — long and short, necklaces and bangles set with the most rouge of rubies and green emeralds and sapphires, constellating with the sparkle of natural diamonds. She has, for me, always been my fashion and style education.

When I was three years old, my ears were pierced (as is custom in India) and I wore two tiny gold hoops in my tiny ears. Therein began my journey — one that would move, as these things tend to, from gold to diamonds, from tiny hoops to something weightier. Two decades later, my first piece of natural diamond jewellery came in the form of a promise ring — a beautiful emerald cut solitaire diamond ring, where if you look close enough, you can see the angular steps of the diamond, down to its floor. I almost didn’t recognise my hand. I felt like with that one simple gesture of placing a beautiful diamond on one’s very important finger, adulthood had officially entered the chat. Of course, I had tried on my mum’s proposal ring many times over in preparation / desire for me to have a weighty and cool diamond touch my own fingers one day.

Soon after, my hand went through another upgrade, and of course for this one, I didn’t look too far from my mother’s own archive of beautiful objects. In the corners of her treasure chest (also known as the Godrej safe) I found a broken pair of natural diamond toe rings that she’d owned a long time ago. Now, you ask — who wears diamond toe rings? It sounds almost surreal, unimaginable even, to walk around the city with your toes gleaming under the hot Indian sun with two diamonds holding on tightly to your feet.

Truth is, I think there’s nothing chicer than a woman with toe rings. I think of Rihanna and her iconic pear-shaped diamond toe ring, Leandra Medine Cohen’s cool-girl stamp on the diamond toe ring. I think of wide-eyed, dark-haired women drawn in Raja Ravi Varma paintings, frolicking in the wilderness, wearing artful toe rings.

To dress your feet is such a wonderfully cultural act. For instance, in India jewellery extends to ankles — long considered an erogenous zone — and toes, and the tradition runs deep and wide. The feet, in Indian aesthetic tradition, are never an afterthought.

Later, it became distilled as something new brides wore in many North Indian traditions as a grounded declaration of her new life. But, when I look back at the women I’ve admired — on screen, in paintings, in family photographs — the toe ring, the payal, the anklet, has always felt like something far more charged than a marital signifier. Rekha, draped in a Kanjeevaram, her wrists stacked, her feet almost certainly adorned, always struck me as a woman doing exactly as she pleased, jewellery included. Similarly, Zeenat Aman in Satyam Shivam Sundaram (and I’m sure in other seminal films) adorned head to toe in iconic jewellery that personified her renegade outlook on life as well as Indian cinema. 

My mother wore her diamond toe rings in that spirit, I think. Not as a bride (she had long left that chapter behind by then), but as a strong woman who simply loved beautiful things and saw no reason to leave her feet out of it. That, to me, is the real luxury of natural diamond jewellery — it’s never just one thing. It’s so many emotions and moments wrapped into a singular perfect piece. A natural diamondheirloom doesn’t hold a single story; it accumulates them.

Which is why what happened next felt almost inevitable. The toe rings broke. I guess, the most honest thing you can say about a diamond toe ring is that it is the most impractical-but-perfect piece of jewellery imaginable. Glorious in Goa, but rather inconvenient when prepping for boots-weather in Glasgow. So there they sat, snapped and ready for a re-life in that Godrej safe.

When I found them, I knew immediately what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to restore them to their original form — not because I didn’t love what they were, but because that felt like trying to step back into a chapter that wasn’t mine to reenter. Instead, I brought them to a jeweller I trusted and asked him to reimagine them as rings. What came back to me was this: a delicate natural diamond band that now lives on my index finger, the stones the same ones my mother once walked on, now catching the London light from an entirely different angle.

It is, in the most literal sense, a diamond heirloom — and yet it doesn’t feel like a relic. It feels alive. Wearing it is my way of being closer to my mother’s inimitable jewellery style, of carrying something of hers while still making it entirely my own. There’s an emotional value to that which sits entirely outside any conversation about carats or cuts or the ongoing debate around natural versus lab grown diamonds. A lab grown stone, however perfect, cannot hold forty years of a woman’s life in its lattice. It cannot carry the memory of a trip to Rajasthan, or the smell of a Godrej safe, or the specific glamour of a mother you’ve spent your whole life studying. 

And who knows — perhaps one day, the story might turn again – a kind of plot twist where perhaps the stones make their way back down to where they started. I can almost picture it: a warm summer afternoon in London, Chanel slides on my feet, the diamond toe rings finally back where they were always meant to be. A proud nod to culture, to heritage, to my mother’s particular brand of glamour — worn, this time, by her daughter. I wonder what style I’d choose… Until then, I’ll wear it on my index finger and stand, as my mother always has, sure-footed.