Rotten brinjals and forgotten mangoes

For better or for worse, contrived or by co-incidence, I lack situational awareness beyond a point that helps me to work peacefully, do my research, design my online classes, and move on with life. A few things I look forward to everyday are watching the banana flowers sprout rows of raw bananas from my kitchen window every morning as I make breakfast, count the different sounds the birds outside my home make, and of course my cha and shingara every evening. I have managed to stay away from reading the deluge of emails where my colleagues are fighting and arguing everyday (unless they concern me, which they don't), the information overload due to people sharing dozens of COVID-related popular articles everyday, and constant online arguments over whether we should allow 900 students on campus this year or simply go online (or let them in and still teach online).

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I understand that we all have many unanswered questions, but arguing over emails everyday is not going to yield answers. When there were three COVID-positive cases on campus, people lost it and started sending all kinds of weird emails. All I can say is that I am glad I am not the dean or director of an institution right now and do not need to pacify people or reply to their strange emails (including a question like if one of the faculty gets COVID, who will teach the rest of the course?). "Stay home and don't get into people's business" would have been my standard template of a response anyway.

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My sister, however, has come to my rescue multiple times.

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"Didi, do you know, Irrfan Khan died. Rishi Kapoor died."

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And there I looked it up and spent the next few weeks watching Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor-movies after I read about the news of their passing.

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"Didi, your city has the highest death rate per million in India now."

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Me: "Oh, really? Let me read up!"

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"Didi, Sushant Singh Rajput died by suicide!"

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Me: "Oh, really? I just watched PK yesterday. Wait, let me read up."

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And now, "Didi, are you okay?"

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I thought she is asking me this question after I told her yesterday that two of the brinjals bigbasket delivered were rotten.

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Me: "Of course I am, I even made brinjal curry with the rest, why do you ask?"

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"Uff... there has been an earthquake close to where you live. Don't you know?"

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Me: "Ummm... no!"

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"Uff, what were you doing? It's all over the news!!!" she asks me, sounding very annoyed.

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"Err.... I ordered 3 kg mangoes and bigbasket delivered 6 kg by mistake and asked me to keep them all. So I shared some with the Myntra delivery man who was very surprised. I was looking at all the mangoes in the fridge and wondering what to do with them!" I replied, somewhat sheepishly.

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I don't think she thinks very highly of me anymore.

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Thod(a)-Thod(a)

A lot can happen over a banana stem (thod in Bangla) from the garden. Sunday morning, I saw my neighbor chop a few of the banana plants in the garden. No idea what he was up to. Although I love the thod that my ma makes, I did not know what raw thod looks like. The neighbor-lady and I were chatting in the backyard when the neighbor-man handed me a shiny white, tube-like thing that looked like a rolled calendar, which was apparently the thod he got from the banana plant.

He put me in a huge dilemma with his neighborly kindness. I had never seen raw thod in my life, forget how to cook it. I looked at them helplessly and confessed that I do not know how to cook thod. “I love eating it though,” I added shamelessly, hoping that they would take it back and cook it for me. Instead, he asked me to try cooking it myself, explaining the basic steps.

Thod in hand, I called 911-aka-Ma. I think ma was more worried for me than I was. She again told me the basic steps. Keep peeling the hairy extensions, chop it finely, let it soak for a while in salt to get the moisture out, yada yada yada. In the meantime, the neighbor-man showed up and shared with me a bowl full of cooked thod, smelling heavenly of ghee and coconuts. Here is a person whom I have only known as a fellow faculty-colleague, writing papers and teaching classes, who chopped down the plant, sickle-in-hand, removed the thod, processed it, cooked it and shared it with the neighbor, and I am panicking.

Armed with ma’s verbal lessons, I decided to triangulate the information with YouTube videos. The first few I watched did not show how to process and cut the thod, they gave long lectures about how thod is good for diabetics, has lots of iron, yada yada yada. Finally, I found a few videos of villagers who grow and cut thod, sans any unsolicited gyaan about its health benefits.

Armed with three sources of information (neighbor-man, ma, and YouTube), I fell asleep. The next day, off I went to work, but kept thinking of the thod sitting in my fridge. Looks like once you were able to chop it all, it did not take much time or drama. No onion or garlic peeling. No adding groom moshla or other spices. Simply temper the oil with mustard seeds and red chilies and cover and cook until done. This much, I could do.

I usually come home late (as late at midnight sometimes) but I was distracted. I wanted to bite the bullet and see how I cook it. By 3 pm, I was home.

Peeling and chopping was the hardest part. My hands ached for hours, maybe even a day, and what came of it after chopping reminded me of my friend, G, who knows that I hate chopping vegetables, my fine motor skills are horrible. Every time I visit her in Seattle, during cooking all my favorites, she makes me peel and chop vegetables. Sometimes, multiple vegetables. Sometimes, vegetables for things she will be cooking in a week, just to torture me in the name of meal preparation. And when she runs out of vegetables, she makes me break and chop Thenga (coconuts). No matter how well I try to chop, she always looks at the chopping board and says, “Maadu kannu podardhu” in Tamil, meaning, “looks like the cow gave birth,” referring to how messy the chopping board looks. She asks me to chop beans and carrots measuring 0.1 centimeters. Which fully-grown, self-respecting mammal with permanent teeth chews such small pieces, I don’t know. She claims that the way something is cut determines its taste, but I highly doubt it and think she puts me through these cutting challenges to mess around with me.

After 30 minutes of working out my biceps and risking developing gout in my hands, I was able to cut it all. It still looked like the cow gave birth, but I didn’t care. I can chew the coarse pieces. I was half-dead after chopping and was contemplating going back to sleep. But true to what people said, after the chopping was done, cooking was easy peasy. And just like that, from not knowing what thod looks like, I learnt how to make decent thod in less than 24 hours. I was so excited that I shared some with the neighbor. After all, I had to return the bowl and according to tradition, we do not return empty bowls.

And with that, at 5 in the evening, instead of working in office, I enjoyed my first DIY thod, right from the garden, and became the first person in the world to have it with shingara. I did not wait to make rice; I had no energy left. When the neighbor-man told me a few weeks back that if he runs out of food, he will start chopping banana plants, I was terrified. I thought that chopping things from the garden is a terrible thing to happen. However, it was far from terrible, and quite an enjoyable process. The thod tasted quite ordinary, but for me, it was the best thing I had accomplished that day.

I portioned it off and left some for the next day before coming back to office. I really hope that when that mocha (banana flower) is ready, they do not make me peel it too. I have never made mocha, and I don’t think I can keep getting emotional about food from the garden.

Like my friend recently said, “It’s the time you have wasted for your rose (watering it) that makes your rose so important.” That’s why I wrote this post, for posterity, so that I always remember how excited I felt to cook thod for the first time.

 

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Activa(ting) talk

Imagine a day comes when you make an entry in your gratitude journal that reads like this: “Today, I was able to place an order with bigbasket.” It was truly a miracle. While making the online payment, I half-expected to see the familiar message that has been popping up on my screen all week, “All slots full. Please try again later.” But my order went through. After trying for nine effing days, my order went through. Delivery day was the day after tomorrow.

I was so excited, I called mom to share the news. Then for the next twenty-four hours, I kept staring at my order list, mesmerized. So what if they have stopped supplying meat and fish and eggs? So what if only about 60% if the items were available? So what if they showed delivery time between 6 am to 3 pm, which meant waiting in a limbo for the doorbell to ring and not being able to get to work in the morning? In forty-eight hours, I would have all these items in my fridge. The fridge that was starting to look so empty these days. I never thought that the biggest joy in my life would be to wait in anticipation for two kilo apples and two large watermelons to arrive.

On delivery day, the guy called and told me that the company has asked him not do a door delivery. I would have to go meet him at the main gate and get my stuff. The same order list that gave me a dopamine high not too long ago was now going to give me nightmares. Imagine lugging two kilo of apples, one kilo of pomegranates, two large watermelons, four liters of milk, one kilo of bananas, half a kilo of cucumbers, and other such heavy things from the main gate to home. No worries, I told myself that in this 42 Celsius heat, at 10 in the morning when the sun was already high up my head, I am off for my army-training. The kind of training they show you in movies where you carry heavy bags on your back and crouch and crawl on the ground. I can do this!

One look at the stuff and I knew that I cannot do this. In a bad attempt to use the poor defenseless woman card, I made a sad face and said to myself, loud enough for the security guards to hear, “No problem, I will make four rounds in this heat to lug everything!”

One of the security guards took pity on me and asked me to hand him all the stuff. He had a scooter (Activa) parked nearby. On a side note, I did not know what an Activa is when I moved here. Someone asked me if I have an Activa and I told her that I now eat Amul Masti yogurt (and wondered how she knew about Activia, the brand of yogurt I ate in the US). Anyway, the security guard was nice enough to drop my heavy bags home. That army-training I was fantasizing about never happened.

I told this story to my family on the phone, amid much gasps and oo-maas and ahaares from mom and grandma. Of all the things, my dad asked me somewhat suspiciously, “Did you sit behind him on the scooter?”

“I can walk just fine,” I shouted at him. Ridiculous!

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That deadly concoction of motherly love!

One of the big, big things about living in desh (country) is that I am only one short, direct-flight away from baadi (home). Given the law of averages, this had to happen after 12 years of hopping trans-continental flights for 36 hours and going through multiple immigration and security checks. I have visited home about ten times in less than a year now, and every time, I come back with bags full of cooked food that lasts me a few weeks. If you ever want to know what you could and should not bring in an airplane, ask me! But more on that later.

This time, I came back from a crazy mom slaving in the kitchen for days to cook up a feast-to-go and running after me to take it all. My Aviation-IQ went up after a comically dark stint with the mango, and if there is one piece of advice I could give, it is to NEVER take aam pora’r shorbot concentrate (raw mango concentrate) in an airplane.

Amid a crazy morning after momma and grandma painstakingly packed me food for an army, she looked at me with puppy-eyes to take that raw mango concentrate that I was resisting, the one she had prepared with a lot of love and spices (pepper powder, mint, and a gazillion other things). I was arguing that I will not carry anything in a yellow water bottle with something she made to shield me from the 45 degree Celsius weather and prevent me from getting heat strokes. I have extremely low karma ratings as far as being a nice child is concerned, so I finally gave up.

I don’t know all the chemistry that went into whatever happened, but that bottle passed airport security miraculously. That same bottle would have led to a 3-hour long interrogation in a dark room in the US, leading up to them labeling me a budding terrorist and denying me entry for the rest of my life. But I digress here.

I boarded the plane and settled in with a rather steamy novel that I was going to read in the next few hours. As I was stuffing my backpack in the overhead bin, something prompted me to take that bottle out, lest it leaks. I imagined everything that could go wrong, and the worst circumstance that came to my rather unimaginative mind was a loose lid and spillage. I placed that bottle in between my feet while the airplane took off.

I knew there was a pop-sound as soon as we were airborne, but I thought it was someone goofing around and recklessly popping open a can of soda. Looking back at life in slow motion, most things often make perfect sense. Within the next 5 minutes, just when Jack was about to kiss Stella after 2 months of abstinence following a one-night stand, there was a louder pop-sound. This time, I looked below, and to my horror, the bottle had popped open with enough pressure to spit raw mango pulp all over my white clothes. An onlooker would have wondered how scared I was of flying that I could shit all over myself publicly in the middle of the day, the one of the semi-liquid kind, with telltale signs of the yellow spillage all over me.

I rushed to the restroom, the bottle in hand. It broke my heart to throw it in the trashcan, but I could not have salvaged it. I spent the next 20 minutes wiping the yellow goo off my clothes and sat through the rest of the plane ride shivering from wearing wet clothes as well as getting dirty, judgmental looks from the passengers. The swag with which I had entered the aircraft was all gone. I sat nervously like a mouse for the rest of the ride, praying that I do not hear another loud pop-sound from the restroom with some poor soul inside freaking out with their pants half-on and the pilot rerouting the airplane because there was yellow goo all over the ceiling.

Looking back, I can see why it was a bad idea to bring something that releases gas in a pressurized cabin. Mom does not fly, but I do. The rest of me and my food made it safe, and in case you are dying to know, it had chicken curry with posto, jhinge posto, potol posto, uchche bhaja, lau er torkari, lichu, jamrul, ruti, half-a-dozen gondhoraaj lebu, and even the bhaja jeere moshla for the mango drink. All this because I have a crazy mom who gets powered up listening to stories of people carrying things like ghee made out of barir gorur doodh (unadulterated milk from a cow someone keeps in their home), kilos of maach bhaja, and dhoka’r dalna, and tries to outshine them!

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Thinking out of the dabba

The dabba (boxed lunch) is back in my life after more than two decades and brought many memories of school. For the last 12 years, I cooked my own breakfast and lunch and dinner every day. I ate cold lunch at my desk or microwaved food made the previous day. I continued the tradition here because I love cooking my meals and have major control issues with anyone taking over my house or kitchen.

And then, the knight in shining armor aka the dabba-waala showed up with his contact number and rang the doorbell. I still ignored him for a month. But the day I missed lunch because of deadlines and ended up chewing on raw bell peppers, I decided, enough is enough. I called the dabba-walla.

Sure enough, he was right on time with my lunch, freshly cooked and piping hot. Rice. Ruti. Dal. Curry. I had forgotten what it feels like to have a freshly cooked, piping hot meal delivered at work or home in a proper stainless steel dabba, sans cheap plastic. The food was heavenly. I had tears in my eyes.

Later that evening, when the dabba-waala came to pick up his box, he started gossiping in true Indian style. This must be his idea of bonding with the customers to make lifelong business connections. I didn't even ask him to sit, but he never took the cue. He stood in my office and gossiped away. I learned more about my colleagues through him than I would have cared to. I now know whose husband emigrated to Canada, what does the Dean like to eat every day, whose parents are visiting this summer, and where are so-and-so currently road-tripping. He tempered privacy in smoking hot oil and threw it out of the window.

No one who comes in contact with you in India will leave without telling you something about someone you did not need to know. Every time the driver picks me up from the airport, I learn which of my colleagues are currently traveling and what airline. This is so India! 

Lunch: 80 INR/$1.14

Gossip: FREE

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A fin(garlic)king tale of crazy things I’d do for good food

Over the years, I've taken many things back home. Fancy chocolates. Interesting kitchen gadgets.

This time, I took home two pounds of unpeeled garlic! Yes, you heard me right.

My visits to Kolkata mean lots of good, rich food. I sometimes eat two breakfasts or two lunches on the same day. And all that food means my grandma chipping her nails while peeling a lot of garlic. If you have seen the almost two-dimensional, stick-thin garlic pods in India, you'd know how hard peeling garlic is. On the other hand, the garlic pods in the US are fatter than almonds and walnuts. The best thing I could bring home was garlic (my idea, completely).

Naturally, people at the US airport were not happy, although they should not care, since I was leaving, not entering the country. They eyed the garlic with a lot of suspicion. They ran it through scanners, tested with litmus lookalike papers. They might have wanted to ask me to chew some of them too. In their long experience of all the weird things they have seen people transport, the humble, innocuous garlic had never made the list. They did not ask me anything directly, but were holding up the line and had mobilized a tiny army of people to figure out what the hell was all this garlic doing here?

“I am attending the holy garlic festival in India this year. Have you heard about it?”

I got skeptical looks.

“You should look it up. Very pious festival. They ward off evil spirits.” As I said this, I held out my hands in front of my eyes to do a nomoshkaar.

And so, they let me go without any more questions, and off I flew thousands of miles with all the garlic.

The amount of good food I got to eat increased manifold as a result, and it might not be entirely my imagination. It did turn out to be a holy garlic festival in India after all. My own, holy garlic food festival at home.

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Week 6: Visible-eaty

Read other posts with the label 52 small changes

I was craving ruti for lunch that day. So I opened the fridge, stooped, and retrieved the open but sealed packet of uncooked phulkas that Gundamma had packed me the last time I visited her. I had already cooked 5 or 6 out of that packet a while ago.

As I opened the sealed, plastic bag of phulkas and carefully took out an uncooked one, my heart sank when I saw a patch of green growing on the surface of the first one. Carefully, I peeled each phulka to see the patch of green on every single piece but the last, the patch increasingly getting smaller. I knew I could do nothing to salvage this, the green was a patch of mold growing on the uncooked phulka. With a heavy heart, I tossed all of them in the trash.

I felt horrible that day. Wasting food makes me feel like I have attained a new low in life. I had spent money on those, and since I am not familiar with the desi stores here, I got them all the way from Seattle. Since I had already consumed more than half the packet, I wondered what made me leave the rest uneaten. I knew that I was traveling, and before that, I was off solids for a while after my dental surgery. But I knew the main reason why I did not finish all of them.

The reason was because I had stored the packet inside the vegetable tray in the fridge, a spot that was out of my line of sight. Hence I had conveniently forgotten about it.

An empty vegetable tray 

So now, I try to store all my food in the fridge in my line of sight. I try not to store anything in the vegetable tray (see picture).

I try to do this with dry food too. Instead of storing them in some obscure nook in the pantry, I keep them all at eye level so that I do not forget about them. It often happens that I go to the desi store and cannot remember if I already have something. As a result, I have often bought multiple jars of pickle or ghee, multiple packs of spices or flattened rice or chaatu, and then they sit there and go stale. I am still learning to get better at letting things sit and go waste. When you do not see something regularly or do not have ready access to it (where you have to bend or struggle to find something), you tend to forget about it.

This is not only for food in the fridge or spices in the kitchen. I have often forgotten about clothes and accessories, the pair of jeans, a pair of gloves, and bought the same thing twice because things were tucked in an obscure corner of the wardrobe. Now, I try to put everything I have in front of me so that it is easier to remember how much I already have.

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Across the Atlanta(ic)

I am in Atlanta, GA right now. I have a MARTA metro card and take the metro to the conference every morning. I am really enjoying the perks of temporarily living in a big city where the metro runs well past midnight. I can hear the metro from where I am staying, and sometimes when I am up and working past midnight, I feel like I have company. In some ways, the little metro card that I purchased for some $20 and carry in my wallet everyday is my temporary connection to this city. 

When I am not busy at the conference, I have taken it upon myself to visit every Bangladeshi restaurant in town. It has something to do with food, but it has a lot more to do with the language. It feels comforting to be chatting with the restaurant people in Bangla while eating rui maach and telapia maach. It is comforting to read the menu card, with the names of the dishes printed in English font in Bangla. I did not even know that there is a dessert called Laal Mohon. And there is something about Poneer Tondoori that Paneer Tandoori does not have.

At Panahar today, there was Robindro Shongeet playing in the background. And at Purnima the other day, the television was playing Bangladeshi news channels showing Sheikh Haseena, looking graceful in a shaari. I am so used to seeing either Trump or Modi on television that this feels like novelty. The hegemonic influence of Bollywood is not lost on me. I have met so many people who think that Bollywood is Indian cinema. Bollywood is only a small subset of Indian cinema.

When I declined bottled water at Purnima and asked for a glass of tap water instead, the owner told me, “নীতিগত ভাবে আপনার সাথে আছি।” (I support you in principle). People here do not say “Goodbye,” “See ya,” or “Take it easy”- they say, “Bhalo thakben.” And it thrills me. People from Bangladesh are way more aware and proud of their linguistic heritage than the yuppie, cosmopolitan crowd of Indian Bengalis (including those living in the US) whom I meet. And I am/was among one of them. I know what Feb 14 is, but I did not know for a long time what Feb 21 is, and the contribution of Bengal to Feb 21. I only came to know of it when I met a few Bengalis in Virginia, originally from Bangladesh, who were celebrating Bhasha Dibosh or International Mother Language Day. One would think that Feb 21 is more significant in my life than Christmas, Thanksgiving or Halloween.

I continue to think of these things on my three-stop metro ride every day. I know that I am tipping way more generously than I do, justifying, “বাঙালি করে খাচ্ছে, খেটে খাচ্ছে, গর্বের ব্যাপার।” I keep meeting people from Dhaka and Sylhet in a different, far corner of the world. And I think of my need to belong to a city, albeit temporarily. Yes, I gave a few research talks in fluent English. But nothing makes me happier than a stranger making small, inconsequential talk, telling me a few lines in my mother tongue, Bangla.

On an unrelated note, I absolutely loved the Parsi food at Botiwaala too. I love food, and since there are only so many breakfasts, lunches and dinners one can eat in a lifetime, I want to eat all that I can eat from my land. This includes the filter coffee and the coconut rava dosai I had yesterday at Madras Mantra.

Life should be all about eating well, giving research talks, and building new experiences in new cities and countries.

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Sweet Therapy

I am having lunch with close friends, talking about a past traumatic experience when I get a text message from Gundamma (also known as G here).

Gundamma: "I got you shrink and ..."

Me: "What? How did you know...."

Gundamma: "No! Stupid auto correct. I got you shrikhand from the Indian store."

A therapeutic experience came only a few seconds from talking about trauma. That mango shrikhand was the last best thing I remember before leaving Seattle. 

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Week 2: Subscribe

Other than unsubscribing from a bunch of websites no longer useful to me (Week 1), I have actively subscribed to a number of websites and emails that are either useful or entertaining. The word "active" is the key here. I get daily or weekly updates from them and make sure that I read or watch the content regularly rather than pile them up and hoard them for future binge reading/watching. These are the resources that in Marie Kondo's language, "spark joy." Unlike the stuff I unsubscribed from, these are not deals or advertisements nudging me to buy things.

Professional Development: The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity has a lot of good videos that train you to manage your time, resources and skills as a faculty. My institution pays for a membership, making it free for me. Every week, I try to watch at least one video and use the worksheets they provide. Academic Coaching & Writing is another website that is useful for me as a scholar.

Health: I have subscribed to daily emails from Livestrong that offers tips for a healthier life. I don’t take everything I read at face value, but they have nice, small articles, sometimes written as lists (for example, 10 daily habits to increase your productivity). I am a big fan of Rujuta Diwekar’s YouTube channel too, not because she has celebrity clients (although that is how I know of her), but because she offers simple, sustainable health solutions focusing on our cultural background rather than asking to drink juice for a detox diet or do a hundred burpees everyday. I especially love her "Fitness Project 2018" where she posts one health video per week.

Hobbies and Entertainment: I am subscribed to Bookbub’s daily update emails for Kindle books on sale, not because I buy them, but because I use the daily lists to get something that looks interesting from my library. Being a traveler and photographer, I often gawk at the amazing travel pictures hosted at Exposure. And my latest addiction is Grandpa Kitchen, a YouTube channel with millions of viewers and 1.35 million subscribers currently. I love that grandpa cooks and feeds others, cooking in the open where you could hear the birds chirping and cows walking around in the fields. I love his accent, and how sometimes, he will take a break when the food is cooking and start singing. And while you are at eat, check out grandma’s cooking too.

Other cool stuff I read include something called “Stat Newsletters.” They publish some thought-provoking articles on science and medicine. I also often check out the cool homes available for buying on Zillow, although that is a relatively newer and more time-consuming addiction. The rest of the resources take defined amounts of time to read or watch. Zillow is where I sometimes lose track of time and end up spending hours because it is so addictive. 

Between professional development videos and book deals, grandpa's cooking and Rujuta's health tips, I have managed to sign up for and only read/view content that speaks to me. It is like coming home to something waiting for you.

Do share any of your absolute favorite resources.

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Also read: 52 small changes.

The gas-pachu experience

The new city brought a new friend in my life, my first, real friend in bone and flesh and not an apparition from the virtual world. I am exhausted after my daily work where I am constantly either writing or talking or doing both. So, I cherish the silence that comes to me outside of work. As much as I enjoyed the silence this new city provided, with no social pressure of congregating during the weekends and making small (or big, or any) talk, my happiness at renewed real human contact knew no bounds.

And then, I got invited for dinner.

Like Anastasia Steele in the terribly written 50-shades-of-whatever, my inner goddess jived in excitement. I asked her if I should bring something too.

"Like what?" she asked.

It was a weekend, and I had made polao and chicken curry for myself. I could share some of that. I think I heard her mumble something incoherent on the phone. Something like, carbohydrate ... umm.. protein.

"Hello?" I asked, unsure.

"So you will bring carbs and proteins? Good. Then I will bring veggies."

Her comment left me a little surprised. Who dehumanizes food this way, reducing it to carbs, proteins and roughage on the same phone conversation where a dinner invitation was being extended? And what was this "I will bring veggies"? The Bengali in me only knows of kosha mangsho, mutton biryani, fish fry, roshogolla and pantua for dinner invitations.

We decided to meet at her place, not too far from mine. Even the prospect of eating roughage for a start did not dampen my excitement, the excitement of the culinary kind I felt every time I received a wedding invitation in Kolkata. It’s been years!

We met. I watched her take out some soup-with-a-funny-name from her Trader Joe's paper bag. There was a yogurt container with sour cream and some chips that looked like wood shavings to go with it. That's all that came out of the bag.

The optimist in me thought that surely, this must be the appetizer bag. A chilled soup with cucumber pieces floating was a rather bone-chilling sight for the unforgiving, wintry December (this happened last December). She heaped a huge tablespoon of cold sour cream as she offered me a bowl, calling it a healthy, summer soup.

"So what is this called again?" I asked.

"Gazpacho soup," she chimed with excitement. I took a spoonful and sampled it, starting to shiver as I did so. It felt like the soup had been sitting in Antarctica for a while.

I was about to take the second spoonful in my mouth when she blurted out another bone-chilling truth with innocence. "You know, I do not enjoy cooking as much as you do. So I cook in bulk and freeze it. This soup that you are having was made in August."

I froze and died a little bit inside. Cryo-preserved soup made in August being thawed and served with love in December? I was not even in this country in August. I was still in Germany, waiting to get a date for my visa interview. Was this soup made on my birthday? My sympathetic nervous system, the part that controls fight-or-flight instincts, had kicked in full on.

There is no way I was going to have this soup. Not that there was anything else to have. What I suspected as the appetizer was her contribution for a non-potluck dinner where she was the host and I had only volunteered to bring in something. What was that name again? I had never heard of it until today. All I could think of was gas and pachu (a term of endearment for the ass, usually in baby language, and by ass, I am not talking of ass-the-animal).

She happened to be quite enjoying the polao and the chicken curry, wiping away tears and her nose in the process. It must have been a tad spicy for the average American taste bud.

"The soup is fantastic," my fight-and-flight inner goddess finally found her voice. "Could I pack it and take it with me to enjoy at home? I'd love to have it with bread tomorrow. You are welcome to keep some of my food for your husband too."

She was thrilled. She even helped me pack the soup, blobs of sour cream and all, profusely thanking me for the food I offered her.

With the dilemma of food behind us now, we started to chat and chatted up for the next few hours. I didn't have any appetite for the rest of the evening though. We spoke of US politics, travel, movies, and a whole lot of nothing. The next day, she told me that the husband loved the polao and the chicken curry. Ever since, we have become good friends. As I get home from work, I see a box or a jar of something at my doorstep once in a while. A jar of turmeric. A set of pyrex bowls. Such random acts of kindness thrill me, to know that someone is thinking of you and offering you something. However, I never had the courage to finish the rest of the "manufactured in August and served with love in December" gas-pachu soup. Forgiving her for that one incident, I forged a new friendship in this new city.

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Thank you for showing up

I rarely eat out these days. I love the discipline cooking at home brings in my life. But once in a while, the craving gets the better of me.

I had been daydreaming about Ethiopian food for a while, and after subduing it for a week, I ended up at the only Ethiopian place I knew in town. I had only been there twice before, with friends, and had loved their lamb preparation. This time, I was on my own.

When I showed up at 5:30 pm, the place was fairly empty barring a few tables that were occupied. Yet, my server looked around uncomfortably, wondering where to seat me. I looked around too, noticing tables for four and two. I asked if I could sit at a particular corner for a table for two. My server hesitated, asking if I could grab one of the tables outside the restaurant. It was a public corridor inside an indoor mall, and a fairly busy one too. I did not want to eat in the middle of a thoroughfare. Hence I politely declined, asking if I could sit inside the restaurant. So she found a corner and asked me if I could sit there. That corner did not have tables and chairs, only stools. One would have to stoop and eat unless one was sitting on the floor (which was not an option they provided). It did not look like a comfortable spot. I asked her what the matter was since so many tables were empty. She said that there was a major concert nearby starting at 7:30 pm and she was expecting a lot of people to show up for dinner before that. She did not want me to hold on to the tables for two and four.

I told her that I was on my own and I was going to eat quickly and leave since I was going back to work. I would not be lingering around. I had even looked up the menu online before I arrived and was ready to order right then. She did not look convinced and reluctantly gave me the spot of my choice before disappearing inside the kitchen.

I had barely settled in my chair for two minutes, placing my heavy backpack by me when the owner showed up. She told me the same thing, only more authoritatively. People would be crowding up for dinner soon, and I should choose that corner they were offering with stools instead of where I was sitting. I did not want to argue, I was hungry and was already beginning to feel humiliated. This place was bang opposite to the direction of my home and I had changed two buses to get there. All I wanted was a quick dinner before moving on with my life. Reluctantly, I dragged myself and my backpack out of our spots and took the seat she gave me. My hunch was right, the stools were uncomfortable, the food table was lower (not higher) than the stool and one needed to bend at a weird angle while eating.

I did finish my meal as quickly as I had promised but lingered for a while to see if the fictitious crowd showed up. However, I already knew the answer to that. Yes, there was some inflow and outflow of people. However, just like when I had entered, most of the tables remained empty. Instinctively, I always knew this is what would happen. When my server came with my bill, I told her the same. She smiled at me sheepishly and disappeared inside the kitchen.

This episode made me reflect on an aspect of human behavior I have seen many times- an attachment to the perceived idea of everyone showing up at the cost of failing to respect those who actually showed up. This is not the first time that I was witnessing it. How many times have we seen the host of a party constantly calling those who haven’t made it rather than spending time with those who actually did? Or someone planning a trip and then constantly sending reminders to those who do not want to join the trip rather than planning with those who said yes? Guess what? Those who did not RSVP or reply to that email or haven’t yet shown up at the party on time are not likely to. Yet, people remain attached to the idea of larger crowds, full attendance, filled up rooms, sold out shows, large numbers as an indication of success. When a meeting where only 10 people showed up is delayed by 5 minutes because the others did not, we actually waste 50 cumulative minutes. It doesn’t matter how many did not show up. The time you waste waiting belongs to those who showed up and not to those who did not.

The moment my server got nervous and told me that the restaurant would soon start to fill up, I instinctively knew that it would not fill up (not that I wanted it that way), not at least until I left. But she was attached to the idea of seeing a full restaurant, rather than taking care of that one person who actually showed up. I have been recently planning a trip and on asking four people, only one of them said yes. So I thanked the other three and started making plans with the one who said yes. Yes, a group of five would have been great. Actually, no. There is no evidence that a group of five would be great. It is my attachment to the idea that a group of five will make a great trip. In this case, only two of us traveling will make a great trip, because both of us are willing and invested in the trip. It does not mean that the five of us will not have an awesome trip in the future. Just not this time.

Businesses suffer. Relationships suffer. Families suffer. All because of the single-minded attachment to a larger crowd showing up (indicating greater perceived success) than being thankful to those who actually showed up. The inability to let go of what has slipped from the hand than holding on to what is still in hand. Think about how happy a customer I’d be had they let me sit properly to enjoy my meal, the one meal I was eating outside after months. Yet we continue to pine for those who did not show up rather than honor those who actually did.

When I paid for my meal before walking out of a still empty restaurant, this is what I wrote on the merchant’s copy of the receipt- “I wish you’d let me sit more comfortably and enjoy my meal.”

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Glassy tales

That day, when our order of drinks arrived at the restaurant, I caught G staring mesmerized at them. One look at those two glasses and this is what came out of my mouth-

"God, I can't understand this trend of serving drinks in mason jars. It feels like drinking directly out of a Horlicks bottle."

Needless to say, the magic moment was gone for her. G was irate. She could not understand how I found mason jars aesthetically repugnant. There is something about their perfectly symmetrical, broad cylindrical shape that put me off. They look like a dhol. A vertical “paash baalish” or side pillow. Something I could see storing my Horlicks powder in, but would never drink out of.

She was further annoyed, and seriously so, when I added that a few weeks ago, my landlady got me a set of six mason jars to use, which I most respectfully refused. Confused, she left my place, leaving behind only two out of those six jars. I never used those jars. I tucked them away in a corner of the cupboard where I could not see them and had to stand on tiptoe to get them. The conversation at the restaurant ended with G telling me that I do not have a good taste and I do not understand aesthetics. It is quite possible.

So I came home and brought those jars down, looking at them to understand what was so special about them. The jars reminded me of simple geometry problems, the ones where you calculated the volume, total surface area and the curved surface area of cylinders. However, I try to keep an open mind while trying out new things. That day, after I had made my cold coffee, I decided to drink it out of a mason jar. Maybe I'll feel its magic once I drink from it.

I was wrong. It didn't feel like drinking out of a Horlicks bottle after all. It rather felt like drinking out of a Yankee candle jar. Judge me all you want, but I am not doing it again. I want my old glasses back.

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A summer- in transit

I am in India this summer, as a visiting faculty. Campus life here comes with the comforts that are not a part of my everyday life. My home to my office is a good 3-minute walk. I do not have to take buses that run once in half an hour. I do not have to wade in the snow. I do not have to find parking. And then, just like all good things in life boil down to food, I make my pilgrimage from my office to the canteen four times a day- for breakfast, lunch, a meal in between lunch and dinner, and dinner. Meals are heavily subsidized, in price, not quantity. Suddenly, I do not need to go grocery shopping, cook, or clean up. And yes, breaks in between 3-hour long classes also come with tea, coffee, and sandwiches. Made. Served. All I do is show up, sit with my meals, and observe people. Some known faces. Mostly unknown faces. Some now-known faces that were unknown until yesterday. I continue to have trouble remembering names and putting them on the right faces. I just forgot that the canteen guy and I used to speak in Oriya many years ago when I first visited until he recognized me right away and started speaking in Oriya. But all that is irrelevant. My three main priorities these days boil down to teaching, remembering to hold Skype meetings with my colleagues in the US, and making that pilgrimage to the canteen multiple times every day.

If this honeymoon could last even a few weeks every summer, I'll be a happy academic.

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