My father’s house, my mother’s kitchen

I walked into my father’s house after a long flight from Texas with my son in tow. I told everyone I was here to visit my dad and to spend time with him as his 80th birthday approaches. But really i wanted to escape my isolation in Texas that my mother’s death had highlighted. My own birthday was spent in hiking oblivion, far away from work, cellphone network and wishes of well wishers. I felt nothing but pure agony on the days leading up to my birthday and on my birthday I had to escape. Once it had passed I was alright. I just didn’t think about my birthday and in the end I had a peaceful day. I could fathom the same agony my father may experience and I had decided I would come. For if Ma was still here, we would have had a gala celebration for him - my sister and I. In fact I remember messaging my sister while at the hospital with Ma that if she made it through this, we would have a big party. My sister said how she would have loved to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. But we were robbed off all of this. 

On the first night at my fathers new apartment I was looking for my mother’s soft cotton printed nightie. I remembered the frenzy in which I had put away all her personal belongings and given them away. At that time I thought that I was helpful and had to do it for my dad who wouldn’t be able to do it. But now I yearned for that soft cotton black and white printed nightie to give me comfort from my travel-weary, grief ridden body. For the first time in my life I walked out of Mumbai international airport, into the city of my birth without my mother. The city where I was born, without the woman who gave me birth, hummed with motion and frenzy as if nothing had changed. Every trip from years past came flooding back - particularly the ones when I was in graduate school and coming home was a dreamlike luxury that I waited patiently for in my homesickness. I had been feeling the same pangs of homesickness after all these years. 

I cursed myself mentally for not having saved some of her belongings. Everywhere her personal stuff was non-existent. Not a comb, or a face cream. Her toothbrush, her clothes. They were all packed away, trashed or donated. 

It was only when I entered the kitchen that I found her again. The old, old steel ware, the crumbling pots and pans that she had used for decades, an old Hawkins pressure cooker, the KitchenAid peeler I gave her from the US, stacks of ziplock bags. They were all there. I could hear her clanging the steel khunti against the aluminum kadhai. How could someone feel so alive around these old pots and pans? To know that you’d have to know my mother. She had spent 10,000 hours or more in her life as a Bengali housewife. Her existence is meshed into that metal. She gave us her love and sustenance through her cooking. She co-existed with them as an artist might meld with her paint. The loss I feel is beyond that of just her. It’s my childhood that I sought in that kitchen. The familiar smells and sounds and the comfort of knowing that she was in the kitchen, while I lazed in bed reading a book or working on homework through hot days. I let my son loose, and he pranced around and played just the way I did, while I cooked the things my mother would have cooked. I make shuktho, potoler dalna, murgir jhol and doi maach. I sweated in the heat, burning my eyes with the heat of onion paste, scalded my fingers with sputtering mustard oil. In that experience I feverishly imagined what it felt like to be her all through those years, making all that food for my father and us just as I made it for my father and sister. I don’t know why I did it but I cooked like a woman possessed. It made me feel her presence in a way I hadn’t felt except when I’d been out hiking alone. And slowly I forgave myself for giving away her black and white spotted cotton nightie as I found her again in her pots, pans, ladles, dishes, cups and bowls. I touched the contours of the rounded steel bowls in which she drank her milk after dinner each night. The old steel curved mouth glass in which she drank water with her dinner. The grooved bowls in which she took her daal, fish. The steel plates in which she ate her rice. The Milton hotbox in which she stored chapatis for decades. I find her again and again in the kitchen that she never stepped into, but she lives through all of her possessions.