Vignettes from Home | DESCENT Issue #4

TAMANNA SOOD

Perfect proportionate purple pieces. She cuts onions like a machine. The last time I picked up a knife to help her she laughed at my pathetic attempts to mince the onions. She cuts vegetables with the knife facing her. Every swipe through the onion, the knife hits her thumb, digging deeper into the indentation that has been growing for years. She works at the speed of light with the knife cutting at a rhythm. The stench of the onion burns my eyes, but she’s unphased and disinterested. She takes twenty seconds from cutting to check on the three other dishes she has laid on the stove.

I greet her with a hug and kiss on the cheek. The distance between us on most days is 30 miles, yet I feel as though I’ve traversed a nation when I see her. Her hair is grayer than the last time I saw her and her eyes are tired. Yet her hands are as fast as they were when I was a child. Cutting, cooking, and cleaning up as she goes. The system has been the same since I was born.

I’m back home after only a couple weeks, but to the blind eye, the feast being prepared for me would suggest I was returning after a war. Aloo Phaliyan, Kadhi, Pulao, and Chicken Karahi. All my favorites.

“We don’t eat dinner anymore. After you left, this is the first time I’m cooking so much,” Nanima said. “Mumma is going through another phase. She’s intermittent fasting. She does eat from 18 hours. She’s gonna get sick,” she says in an aggravated tone.

These days the house is quiet. She spends silent days on lonely couches waiting for the door to open.

These days she breaks the hush of solitude by watching dramas and making up for the sleep that escapes her during the night. What she doesn’t say through words, my Nanima prefers to say through meals.

“ I missed you. Have you been well? Are you staying strong? You know I’m here for you,” The aroma of each dish whispers to me. “Don’t worry. I’ll eat enough for everyone to day,” I reassure her as I set my plate down. Each bite at home undoes a knot of anxiety and exhaustion. The constant deadlines in my head meltaway as I sit down at a dinner table for the first time in weeks. For days, the only other face I saw while I ate was that of a character in a passive Netflix watch.

“Eat more. This is nothing,” she grunts at me. I try not to see the hypocrisy in this comment and ignore how she mentioned how “healthy” my figure had gotten when I had walked in through the door.

I continue to scarf my meal as she fills me in about the random drama that is occurring in her friend group. I’m always surprised at how much more interesting the lives of her 80 year besties are in comparison to mine.

“You did the right thing. She’s crazy and her son is a creep,” I add oil to the fire. She nods, her eyes bright and excited, and picks up her bedazzled cell phone to show me the “gaudy” outfits her nemesis wore at the last event.

The doorknob of my house has been broken for three years now. Every so often, the door’s lock jams and doesn’t close properly. My dad figured out that if you take a fork, jam it back into the hole of the lock at the right angle, and wiggle it with enough force, the jammed lock will revert back. For this reason, I generally avoid opening the front door of the house.

Today, like every other day in the San Fernando Valley, it’s dry, hot, and windy. The door keeps slamming open and shut because the jam hasn’t been loosed today. It’s the fourth time I’ve walked back to shut the door. Dad’s not home and no one else, except my brother, seems to know what angle to stick the fork in. The door doesn’t like women I guess.

“It just needs some oil. I need to buy some,” Mumma says again for the umpteenth time in three years as she continues to shuffle through recent Bollywood movies to find something we can watch together.

I’m laying on the new couch she bought after I bought it and I left for college. It’s white. She and nanima spent two weeks sewing covers so they would feel comfort able leisuring on it. I think I’ve found a new favorite place on this couch as I realize it allows the sun to hit my face and warm my cheeks because it doesn’t block the window like the old one. My eyes are closed and I feel the lull of a post feast nap coming upon me. The sweet scent of pine sol, the musk of agarbatti, the aroma of the day’s feast

intermingle and kiss my nose whenever I’m home. They say that each house has a distinct smell that no one in the house can smell. Every time I’ve come back home, I’ve been hit with a whiff of nostalgia. And a reminder of the time spent apart.

My mother swats my arm and forces me to open my eyes. She’s showing me the new table to match the couch.

“Say goodbye to this table,” she says. I wave at it and she laughs. The table was made out of a cheap marble material that seemed to seep into it every spill and memory that occurred on it. I stare at the spills that mark the day I lost my first tooth and the spill of the day I got into my dream school and silently say goodbye.

My favorite chai pot has an orange plastic handle that is supposed to curve at the end, but it’s misshapen and melted from the time I accidentally let her face the flame. The whole house smelled like melted plastic that day and the wrath of my Nanima and mother reigned against me for a week. She’s my favorite pot for multiple reasons. She has a spout that allows even an amateur like me to pour chai without making a mess. She has a pretty voice too. She sings when the water inside her has come to a boil. She’s the most reliable friend to make a per fect chai. No other pot compares.

On average, chai is made three times a day in my house. Five times on the weekends. The pot of chai makes seven cups of chai for four people because my dad and I drink two cups worth every go. Our cupboard is filled with mismatched tea cup sets as everyone in the house has a favorite cup. Most are chipped from the top crying to be thrown out.

My dad’s and my mugs are different. We bought each other our favorite mugs. They are large - almost too big. His mug is a deep blue cauldron with its own spoon that I bought on a trip in Vegas. My favorite is a mug dec orated with the letter T which he bought from Target. Both of the same size, large, and made of porcelain. Sometimes we switch off.

I hand him his mug at his computer desk and drag a chair to sit next to him. He’s scroll ing youtube and watching movie reviews. Movies are our favorite topic of conversation and politics are our least. His headphones are broken from one side and he’s holding the right side of the device to ear to hear the review properly. Most probably this is attribut ed to the fact that he has never spent over 20 dollars on a pair.

He drinks his chai piping hot and in long gulps. As a kid and even now, I wonder about how his mouth didn’t burn when he sipped it.

His thumbs are large and can’t fit properly in any other teacup, but sit comfortably in the handle of his mug.

He’s a quiet person. Soft spoken and generally introverted. In comparison to the tsunami that exists in my mother, my dad is a leisurely tidal wave. Most of the conversations he holds are with himself. It’s a habit of his. I often find him speaking to himself.

“You would like this movie. It’s about folk stories and revolution. Let me look at tickets,” he says as he sees me peeking over his shoulder. I nod and ask him more about the film. My dad and I are alike in multiple ways. We love our chai, our books, and our movies.

His eyes and mine hold the same dark circles too. He’s been working weekends lately. He goes into the office for at least a couple hours everyday. Having his own business blurs the line between home and work for him as all his time is spent dealing with his clients. He dawdles about the house leaving a trail of dirty socks in each room. He’s faced the anger of my mother and I for years about it, but he refuses to change.

Today, he walks barefoot on the cold floor again, quietly mumbling to himself, stomping on the tile all the way to the stove. He opens the cabinet, picks out the orange handled pot, fills it with water, and sets it to boil on the stove. Another cup of chai is to be made and I am to make it..

He returns to the computer. His dirty socks lay hidden underneath the desk beside his overfilled backpack which he drags to work everyday believing that he will be able to peruse every document in it.

He won’t.