Being heard

In the shade of a giant tree, in a neighborhood park, Susan tells me about her life. She talks about her divorce – it happened a long time ago – and about a son she doesn’t meet very often. She tells me her mother grudges her things she needs and about the jewelry from her grandmother that should have been hers. In her mind, not getting these things is somehow connected to her former husband.

At one point, I think she is paranoid. She weaves through the start and end points of incidents, mixing random events. She makes up motivations for why someone said something, why certain things happened. I don’t know Susan very well. She is, at best, an acquaintance. I listen because I know that she needs someone to listen to her.

But I feel slightly jaded. My attention flits away. I think, here I go again, playing my default role. What use will my listening be? Then, I think, not everything has to have a use. This is something I can give. I will myself to listen.

After she has talked for a while, Susan looks cheerful. I walk back home, realizing that it’s been almost two hours. For the last many weeks, I have been extremely resistant to doing any creative work, whether it’s writing or photography, and I have completely stopped writing my daily morning pages.       

It’s only when I start writing them again that I acknowledge what’s been happening. Writing wipes down the smudges, gives a clarity that’s threatening. It’s easier to just float along and think that everything is pleasant. As soon as something uncomfortable comes up, I shut down.

Given a choice between telling my own truth and displeasing other people, I have usually chosen other people and abandoned myself. Not this time, I think. I start my writing practice again, without scolding myself for stopping.

At the end of our conversation, after having got some of the gunk out, Susan told me she knew she got anxious. Maybe it was just the anxiety talking. I think of Susan - how she is both fanciful and lonely. Can not being heard make you go crazy. Can turning your imagination against yourself make you less than sane?

I decide that Susan is not crazy. She has just built up so much loneliness that she has entangled all the different things in her life.

The Flavors of Home

In my kitchen in the heart of Silicon Valley, I try to recreate the flavors of home. I simply call this "khaana" or food, while my equally Indian husband, having grown up in the Middle East and Canada, calls it "Indian food." 

I make rotis  (Indian bread) to accompany the curries, dals and vegetable side dishes that I whip up. To do this, I first knead the dough with my hands, and then make small round balls that I flatten using a rolling pin. Finally, I toast these on a griddle. Generations of women in my country have followed these exact same steps.   

When I started making rotis about a year and a half back, this laborious process would irritate me. I struggled against it constantly, blanking out as I wrestled with the dough. My marriage to this wonderful man had also landed me in the default role of an expat house-wife, "the house-wife" part of which I chafed at.

But I did my best. I expanded my knowledge of cooking beyond the basics. Apart from Indian food, I made soups and pasta sauces from scratch and baked muffins. And of course, I practiced my roti-making skills, wishing that there was a way to get through it quickly.    

And then, some friends lent us a tortilla press so we could try and make rotis a little more easily. I still needed to knead the dough and form it into balls. But I could try and shave some time off the rolling. I didn't know whether it would work, but thought it was worth a try. 

Weeks passed, and the little press remained unused. I always thought I would use it tomorrow, only I never did. Something in me just couldn't let go of the common thread that binds me to my mother, my grandmother and all the countless women before them. The vein passed from them into me and connected me to the marrow of my culture. 

That's why food is so precious. It grounds our memories and connects us to everything that nourished us in the past. So, even though it takes time, I bhuno (slow-fry) vegetables, cooking them in their own juices, instead of drowning the taste with water. I make chutneys, including a special tomato one using jaggery and a special 5-spice mix called panch phoron, just the way my mother makes. 

Now, I try to see cooking as a medium to create my new home. I use it to settle into the deep rhythms of the home that I carry inside. And try to synchronize that rhythm with that of my husband's, whose memories of "ghar ka khaana" or home food consist of shawarmas, falafels, and kebabs. 

With him, I have discovered other homes. This exploration has been full of surprising recognitions. When I tried Baba Ghanoush, a Middle-eastern aubergine dip, I immediately felt comforted. Its smoky, earthy flavor echoes the notes of the Indian baingan bharta.

Another delightful discovery has been the preserved ginger that comes with sushi. It tastes almost exactly like the wondrous ginger pickle that can only be found in small shops in the narrow alleys of Old Delhi's spice market, amid the shops that sell whole spices: star-shaped anise and buds of cloves. 

Although these discoveries have been wonderful, the journey of combining the different homes that we both carry inside has had its ups and downs. We struggled in the beginning. I thought I was adjusting more, cooking dishes that he liked. He thought he adjusted a lot, eating the mostly Indian food I cooked at home instead of the "2 or 3 days Indian" that he was used to.

The truth is that we both moved, we both adjusted. We still get wobbly, but through our sharing, I am catching a glimpse of what it would be like to have a larger, more expansive home - a home where I can both recreate the way home tasted and felt in the past, and also synthesize a new home - a home that we are both making together. 

All I have to do is let go of the idea that home is a static place, instead of this moving, dynamic space that opens up whenever I do. 

Magpie Happiness

I write a lot about feelings. I find them slippery. I get overwhelmed by them, and then behave in ways I am not proud of. I have found that they can be fleeting – passing clouds I shouldn’t pay attention to, that buried underneath them is objective truth. I have also learned that they are guideposts and they show me the way and I really should listen to them.

This afternoon, I read a column in which Natasha Badhwar talks about family, writing, life. In one of the articles, she talks about a family trip to Rajasthan, visiting cenotaphs and small towns, her daughters buying mirror-studded pens that they love and that she thinks of as trinkets. As I read, I enter this feeling in my heart that I know is the love for a place.

A big, glorious sun dips low in my mind. It almost touches the vast green fields on the outskirts of Jaipur. In Bombay, people roll up their trousers as they wade through knee-deep water. I watch from the window as the rain pours down. Later, we will go and buy rain-coats and water-proof school bags before my sister and I start school here.

We stop at the border crossing that separates Punjab and Himachal for our annual childhood trip to my paternal grandparents’ home. Where have we come from? We say Delhi, proudly. In Baroda, I hold my naani’s hand and we go to the small market in the refinery township to buy cream rolls. Coming back, we thread our way through the children’s park with the stone ducks that look like origami fold-ups. The house has a garden, from which I pluck flowers in the morning and carry them inside for the morning pooja.

All these are different physical places in India, but they fuse together in my heart. I don’t know where they end, and I begin. Here in the States, I sometimes get irritated when people first look at me through the lens of my culture. I am Indian first, and then anything else. That’s not all I am, I feel like saying. It isn’t, yet it is. I am not all the things I have seen and heard and felt and experienced. And yet I am.

Feelings of loneliness still strike me. But now I don’t struggle with them as much. I sink into their murky depths. I know I’ll get to the other side. I have done this before in the last many months. I think of all that I’ve been and all that I’m becoming. I unwrap a little of the labels, and I also unwrap a little of the love.