“I often picture myself living on a mountaintop, in the stormiest country (not the coldest) in the world. Is there such a place? If there is, I shall go to it someday and turn my heart into pictures and poems.”
This excerpt is from one of Kahlil Gibran’s letters, dated 1st March, 1914. I have always hunted for a reason for three things in this world: how in the same world, in the same year, here was Gibran writing this and there was the First World War about to begin; how my grandparents loved each other like they were seventeen; and how Maa finds the will to send me good-morning messages on WhatsApp at exactly nine every day with images of unknown children.
Maa does not realize that the space on my smartphone is limited, like the pyres in this city during the pandemic. She messaged me last week, “Look, Pakhi, I found your old diary while cleaning the cupboard. It had these words by Agha Shahid Ali, ‘It rains as I write this. Mad heart, be brave.’ Oh, and I learned to make your favourite Chinese food yesterday. Come home and see, I make it better than those restaurants that burn craters in your pockets.” Strangely, as I read this, I terribly missed her Kanda Poha. Maa learned it from my Nani and guards the recipe with her life.
I never thought of these three things as being about friendship. I thought the first was about the absurdity of history, the second was about the mystery of marriage, and the third was about my mother’s particular relationship with her smartphone and my limited storage space. It took me a long time, longer than I would like to admit, to understand that I had been living inside friendships my whole life without ever calling them that. I had other words for them. Duty. Habit. Love in its most obligatory form. The ordinary texture of a household. I did not have the word friendship because friendship, I thought, was the thing you chose. And nobody had asked me whether I wanted to be chosen by these women. They had simply, without ceremony or declaration, chosen me first.
This is a reality in all middle-class Indian families, but in mine, the only heirlooms one could find were jewellery and cutlery. These heirlooms were not always accessible to me. They were kept in those secret lockers in the bank or locked compartments in old metal wardrobes. As a child, I saw these heirlooms on very rare occasions when Maa was cleaning the wardrobe or entertaining some very important guests. Mostly I just observed the places where they were carefully hidden.
There is a kind of friendship that begins in observation, not in conversation. The child who stands at the door of a room she has not been invited into and memorises where every locked thing lives, not out of greed but out of a hunger she cannot yet name. I was that child. I stood at the door and I watched. I watched Nani’s hands on the lock, one turn to the left, press down on the latch. I watched Maa’s hands in the kitchen, on the casserole lid, on the curry spoon. I was watching for years without understanding that what I was watching was a friendship being extended to me, slowly, in the only language these women knew how to use, which was the language of daily life done with complete attention to the person they were doing it for.
The old metallic wardrobe was in my Nani’s house in Kolkata. It had a long mirror on one side and the door on the other. One had to put a key in, turn it once to the left and press down on the latch for the door to open. It would make a very creepy keeeeeek noise, as if it was screaming at you for disturbing its
sleep, and then you would be welcomed with the mothball scent that old things usually carry.
I loved that smell. Sometimes I would put my head in and sniff the sari stack. It had this spicy silky smell that made my heart feel warm.
I did not know, pressing my face into that sari stack as a child, that I was pressing my face into a friendship. I thought I was smelling old cloth. I thought the warmth I felt was the warmth of fabric and mothballs and the particular safety of a grandmother’s house. I did not know that what I was breathing in was the accumulated evidence of a woman who had folded her whole life into that wardrobe and was, in the act of letting me open it and breathing, saying: here is where I keep the true things. You are someone I trust with the true things.
Nani still lives in the hills, makes her own food and experiments with her spices now and then. After my grandfather passed away, we urged her to stay back in Kolkata. But she would not listen. That is the thing about Nani. She always knew what she wanted. Her old age, husband’s death, more medical bills, nothing could change her mind. She went back to her home in Darjeeling. The day before she left, I asked her, “Why won’t you stay, Nani?”
She smiled at me. “As long as that home lives, that bed gets made every night, the kettle is washed every morning, your grandfather lives. I cannot abandon him after all these years. I married him when I was eighteen. He was transferred to Darjeeling two years after our marriage. I was pregnant with your Baba at that time. I made my home there, from scratch.”
“But weren’t you lonely there? Nana must’ve been at work in the library during the day.”
“Yes, he was. And I was lonely. For almost a year. When your Baba was two years old, I started making sweaters. I’d knit these sweaters every afternoon, taking sips of chai and bites of onion fritters in between. At the end of the month, I gave them away to a local store that sold them to tourists.”
“And how did you spend that money?”
“I would buy movie tickets for myself and your Nana. I’d surprise him. He would be back from the library, take off his coat, wash his face, and sit in the old brown armchair in our living room in Darjeeling. You remember? He’d sit there, and the first thing he’d ask was, ‘How was your day, Monimala?’
“Just then, I’d walk up to him and say, ‘I was thinking of going to the movies.’
“He would ask, ‘Oh, but the tickets?’
“Back in those days, there was only one movie hall nearby, and the ticket queue was quite long in the evening. You had to stand for half an hour. The easier way was to collect your tickets in the morning. I would smile like a child, flash the two tiny tickets, and his face would light up. All the day’s tiredness would simply be wiped away at once.”
What I understand now, that I did not understand then, is that Nani was not just telling me a love story. She was handing me a map. She was showing me the grammar of a friendship that does not say I choose you but instead says: I got up this morning and I thought of you before I thought of myself, and I put that thought in my pocket, and I carried it warm against my body all day, and in the evening I brought it out and showed it to you, and your face did the thing that made everything worth it.
This is the grammar Maa inherited. This is the grammar I grew up surrounded by without once thinking to call it friendship, because friendship was supposed to arrive with more fanfare, with a moment of mutual recognition, with two people deciding at the same time that this was the thing they were doing. Nobody had told me that the deepest friendships are the ones where one person decides so quietly and so completely that the other person does not notice they have been chosen until years later, until a pandemic locks them in a flat with sanitiser-smelling hands and too much time, and the realisation arrives not as a revelation but as a grief: I have had this, this whole time, and I called it something smaller than it was.
Maa is allergic to prawns to the point that she cannot so much as touch them. It has been this way since she carried my brother in her belly. In an amusing twist of fate, my brother loves them. And for that reason alone, Maa asks our father to go early in the morning, because that is when you find the best, freshest ones. Then she quietly puts on gloves, separates the prawns from their shells and cooks them for my brother. When I tell her we are grown up enough to make them on our own now, she clucks and says, “You just go set the table.”
The gloves. This is the detail that stayed with me. She cannot touch the prawns. Her body has made its position on the matter completely clear, and she puts on gloves and touches them anyway. Every time. Not because anyone asked her to, not because it was required, but because her friendship with her children is of the variety that does not consult its own comfort before deciding what to do. It simply does. It puts on gloves. It goes to the market early. It shells what cannot be touched with bare hands.
I did not call this friendship. I called it mothering. And I was wrong, or at least I was incomplete, because what I was watching was something that exceeded the category I had put it in. What I was watching was a person who had made a daily, embodied, unannounced choice: your ease before my ease. Your perfect roti before my roti. Your flavourful curry before my question of what I wanted to eat.
Over the year that I stayed home during the pandemic, there are a few things I learned about Maa that I had never quite noticed earlier. They had just existed in quiet grace, just like her.
Maa places the bad rotis at the bottom of the casserole so we get the perfect ones. After we are done, she rolls up her roti from the bottom of the casserole, dips it in her tea like an unlucky man’s baguette and has it while she strolls among her potted plants in our small garden on the terrace.
I watched her do this every day for a year and I thought about the fish market. George Orwell once wrote about places where necessity overrides sentiment. A fish market is one of those places. Life is loud here, death is loud too, and nobody pretends otherwise. There is no real way to aestheticise a fish market. A lot of fish are still alive, while most of them are long dead: the flies, the cats, the crows and the dogs wait patiently nearby. This is where nature, labour, and consumption collapse into the same square metre. There is no clean separation, or distance, or any illusion that such separation is possible. There are hands that earn, hands that choose, hands that clean, and hands that cook. It is essentially capitalism without the abstraction. And unlike the supermarkets, where death is hidden behind plastic and lighting, here, it is regulated by visibility. You do not forget mortality here.
Maa’s kitchen was the fish market. The cost of things was always visible, if I had only thought to look. The cost of the gloves worn over an allergy. The cost of the bad roti eaten on a terrace alone with the potted plants. The cost of the lamp-seller in pitch darkness, who spends all day giving light and comes home to none. I had walked through that kitchen ten thousand times and seen only the product: the curry, the roti, the plate placed in front of me. I had not seen the labour. I had not seen the woman standing at the bottom of the casserole, taking what remained, calling it her portion and not her sacrifice.
The friendship was in the kitchen the whole time. I just thought it was dinner.
Maa calls me to taste the curry each time, whenever I am home. When I was a kid, I thought she did it because I was good at tasting. More salt? More jeera? More chilli powder? But I was gone for years and I do not think her curries had been any less flavourful then. Salt. Jeera. Chilli powder. A beautiful weave of spices and colour. Now I know she calls me to taste simply so she can have me stand beside her. She stirs, sets the curry to simmer and asks me to wait. We talk about people, the news, and the sale on Myntra, as she grabs a spoon, dips it into the curry and blows on it. Gently, she brings the curry-laden spoon to the palm of my hand and looks at me expectantly. I lick the liquid off my palm and nod. It is perfect, I say. She grins and turns back to stirring her curry, while the scent of spices swirls between us, filling up the spaces between the words we do not say to each other: it has been so long. I would like you to stay beside me for a while. I love you.
The spoon was brought to the palm of my hand. Blown cool before it arrived. This is the ticket flashed in the evening. This is the same gesture, handed from Nani to Maa to the kitchen I grew up eating in. “Not the tickets”, Nana had said. “Not the tickets,” Nana had said. “My face would glow, not because of the tickets. When you flashed them, your eyes would light up, and looking at you then, my heart would be the happiest. That is the secret of the glow.”
The spoon is not about the curry. I understand this now. The spoon is about having me stand beside her. The spoon is the ticket. I am the face she is watching for the glow.
She opens her almirah once in a while, runs her wrinkled palms over the frail paper, breaking into a strange smile. Nani told me once that she does this to remember the touch of those old memories.
“But why do you have to remember them? You can just open your almirah and take out the tickets when you want to.”
“Well, old people go through strange things sometimes, my child. The thing is, our sense of touch diminishes with age and we all lose touch receptors slowly over the course of life. I will, you will, your Maa and Baba, everyone will. When they are old, very old. Don’t worry, it is a long time from now.”
“Is it really true, Nani? I never thought I could lose my sense of touch.”
“Sometimes, you think that there is this one thing that you can never lose. You know it so well that you don’t ever question it or think about it. You are used to its presence. And then, one day, it is just gone.”
She was not only talking about touch receptors. She was talking about the specific danger of the things you are certain of, the things so close to you that you have stopped seeing them, the things you have misnamed and therefore, in a way, already begun to lose. I was certain of Maa. I was certain of Nani. I was certain of the kitchen and the almirah and the good-morning messages and the Gulmohar tree being watered in my absence. I was so certain that I did not look at any of it directly. I looked through it the way you look through a window you have stopped thinking of as glass, and I called what I saw on the other side by its most ordinary name, and I went on.
If heirlooms are things passed down in your family from one generation to the next, Maa says that I have my grandfather’s knee and my father’s brain. Her biggest regret is that I did not receive her nose, which is tall and straight, whereas mine is all round and blunt. However, more than Nani’s cooked meals and traditional jewellery, I had always drooled over the aluminium box with a glass mirror set at its top, which my Nani kept caressingly to herself. The box knows all the secrets to the heart of my family. It has become a legend now. Before we saw it, we often questioned its existence. But there it was, in metal and space.
The box had a mirror on its lid. I understand this now as the fish market logic of the object: before it shows you anything else, it shows you your own face. You must look at yourself before you look at what is inside. You must be willing to see who you are, the round-nosed granddaughter with the grandfather’s knee and the father’s brain, the one who stood at the door and watched and breathed in the sari stack and thought she was just a child smelling old cloth. You must hold your own face for a moment before the box opens.
Once, I was asked to choose first. If allowed, I would have taken the whole box. But I settled on Nani’s red cotton saree engraved with her name, Monimala, along the ends of the pallu.
“It was the first thing your Nana bought, when he went on a South India tour in 1976. Bangalore or Madras. I don’t remember anymore”, Nani would then gleefully boast.
The saree is a symbol of love that could not be. Now I know why she did not want to keep it anymore.
The pallu tells me the story of the first time Nani wore it, anticipating a compliment. Instead, she was handed: you look so fat. Stop eating all the time. The fall tells the story of the time she accidentally tipped over but no hand came to rescue. The hand was busy stroking someone else. The turmeric and oil stain tells the story of the night Nana did not come back home on her birthday. She ate alone, finding comfort and love in deep fried pakoras. As I used to examine the oil stain, Nani told me, “I can get it dry-cleaned.” But she decided not to. She kept the stain the way Maa keeps the bad roti at the bottom of the casserole: not as punishment, not as martyrdom, but as record. The fish market truth of the thing, unbeautified, present, held in the full visibility of what it actually was. The stain said: This happened. My birthday was eaten alone. Pakoras were the company. No hand came. The turmeric settled into the cotton and Monimala looked at it and thought about getting it cleaned and then decided that the cleaning would be a kind of lying, and she did not want to lie about what the fabric knew.
What I understand now, holding the saree that she gave me, is that Nani and I had been in a friendship the whole time she was in the hills and I was in the city and neither of us was naming what we were to each other. The almirah was the friendship. The mothball smell was the friendship. The box with the mirror that made you look at yourself first. The red cotton saree with the name along the pallu and the turmeric stain kept deliberately, offered to me not as a cautionary tale but as a true one: here is what I carried. I am giving it to you now because I trust you to carry it differently. I trust you to know what to do with the stain.
Movie tickets and my grandparents went a long way. My grandparents met in a Bombay movie hall with soft yellow lights, a wide screen and the magic of Gulzar. The curfews were early and the pocket money came late. However, amidst staring at the screen, there were glimpses, grinning, stolen kisses and Kanda Poha in a steel tiffin box. After fifty years now, ten years since Nana’s death, all those movie tickets, some torn and some faded, sleep safely inside Nani’s almirah. She opens her almirah once in a while, runs her wrinkled palms over the frail paper, breaking into a strange smile.
The tickets. The saree. The recipe for Kanda Poha that Maa guarded with her life. The Gulmohar tree watered in my absence. The spoon blown cool and brought to the palm of my hand. These are the tickets. These are all the same ticket, passed from the Bombay movie hall to the Darjeeling living room to the Kolkata kitchen to my sanitiser-smelling palm in a locked-down flat, which finally, finally understood what it was holding.
Recalling this old conversation soaked in my childhood naivety, it hit me that it has been almost a year since I have visited Nani and watched ‘Aandhi’ with her. ‘Aandhi’ was my grandparents’ comfort movie. An hour before the local channel would play Aandhi, Nana would wipe the TV screen and Nani would chop onions and potatoes for Kanda Poha in the kitchen. I could strangely recall the smell of the spray of Colin, mustard and green chillies all at once. Meanwhile, my own palms reeked of sanitiser as my fingers swiped my six-inch plastic screen to find a message from Maa. Touch was a distant memory now and I finally realised the urgency in Nani’s palms, trying to grab all that she can, trying to
remember, to save, to hold on to, to live. I understood Nani’s hunger to remember, I understood Nani’s loneliness.
When I wore the saree on my birthday night, she told me that I looked beautiful. I told her she too would have. She smiled and her face lit up. I am dry-cleaning the stains, one yard at a time.
Not removing them. Tending to them. Learning the difference. Because the friendship is not only in the beautiful things they gave me: the recipe, the glow, the warm feeling in the sari stack. The friendship is also in the stain. In what they kept and what they quietly handed over. In the story the turmeric tells and the story the oil tells and the story the birthday alone tells, offered not as warning but as inheritance: here is what I could not change. Here is what you might.
It was thirty-three minutes past nine and there was no good-morning message from Maa. An hour ago, I had read in the newspaper about a man from Kolkata who sang Tera Mujhse Hai Pehle Ka Nata Koi through a video call to his dying mother in the COVID ward. I read about a girl who jumped into the burning pyre of her father because she was not allowed to touch his body after the virus took his life. I left Maa fourteen angry messages and ten phone calls.
Suddenly, my phone vibrated.
What happened? I was watering your Gulmohar tree. Good morning, my Pakhi.
Nothing, Maa. Good morning.
Someone is turning into her annoying mother. Half an hour late and I get flooded with all these texts?
I broke into tears and whispered to myself, “Mad heart, be brave, mad heart, be brave.”
The lockdown here ends tomorrow. I am coming home, Maa. I am trying this week. I have to get the tickets.
Ah, at last! Come soon. What do you want to eat? I will make some Kanda Poha for you.
She was watering my Gulmohar tree. The tree I planted and left. The tree that had no way of knowing I was gone, that there was a pandemic, that its owner was sitting in a flat that smelled of nothing in particular with palms that smelled of sanitiser and a phone full of unknown children and insufficient space. She was watering it. Every day. This is the friendship I did not name for thirty years. Not the dramatic kind. Not the kind that arrives with a declaration. The kind that simply shows up in the morning before you wake, puts on gloves, shells what cannot be touched, waters what has been left behind, saves the good roti for you and eats the bad one on a terrace alone, and when you finally call,
breathless and fourteen messages deep, says only: I was in the garden. Good morning. What do you want to eat?
This is the mother I grew up watching. I grew up watching her cook for everyone but no one ever asked her, what do you want to eat today? Her kitchen reminds me of a poem where a lamp-seller sells lamps throughout the day and returns to a home of pitch darkness.
After booking a ticket to Kolkata, I wrote down Nani’s Kanda Poha recipe, whatever bits I could recollect. When I returned home, I made Maa a plate of Kanda Poha and as I squeezed a lemon on it, she gently squeezed my palms. My mother, my tired mother, with the hunger of a hundred years, sat at the table. I buried my teary face in her soft cotton saree and asked, Maa, was the salt okay?
The salt was fine. It is always fine. But the question was new. The question was the beginning of me learning to speak the language they had been speaking to me my whole life, the language of the spoon brought to the palm, the ticket flashed in the evening, the saree chosen first from the box. The language that says: I thought of you before I thought of myself. The language that has no other name except, now that I finally know what to call it: friendship.
Found, at last. Not lost. Never lost. Only unnamed, only invisible the way glass is invisible when you have lived with it long enough, only waiting for the morning I stood still in the kitchen and finally, finally looked at what was there.
