The Last Supper
The first thing I notice is the bouquet of flowers, perched in a vase at the center of the table, a somewhat jarring cacophony of unnaturally vibrant shades. I lean forward to smell the petals, unable to identify them from only sight, but all I get is the slight metallic aroma of dried paint and wilted paper.
“They’re not real,” she admits, shifting awkwardly on her feet.
“Oh,” I respond. “That’s fine.” I’m a little disappointed. Today, of all days, we should have gotten real flowers.
I lug the bags of groceries into the kitchen. She tries to help, but I keep swatting her hand away, telling her I can manage. She should rest. Relax. Enjoy the soft jazz drifting from the Bluetooth speaker that’s plugged into the wall. She doesn’t protest too much, watching carefully as I pull the ingredients out of the bags.
Turmeric.
Garam masala.
Cloves.
Coriander? Or is it called cilantro? I’m not totally sure of the English word. “You really didn’t have any cloves already?” she teases me. My cheeks flush crimson. “I don’t usually make Indian food,” I answer. I’ve always found it too difficult to
understand her recipes, which usually call for “spice to taste” and “as much salt as it takes to be just salty enough.” I like the certainty of measurement, the precision of recipes printed in cookbooks. Cooking with intuition scares me. I might burn down the kitchen.
She chuckles as she turns to start the flame on the stove. I catch her wincing, but she thinks she’s hidden it from me successfully, so I don’t make a comment. It doesn’t seem worth it.
There’s a soft expertise to her motions, not learned in any culinary school or at the elbow of some famous chef. She’s trained under a mother, practiced with a family, and perfected her skills over the years. I watch as her arms move about, pouring the lentils into a pressure cooker in a way that seems too choreographed to be natural while simultaneously keeping an eye on the cumin seeds, popping and jumping as if frightened of the heat below them.
Despite everything, she minces the garlic into pieces that should have been impossible to create with only the human hand and a knife. I feel useless, standing next to her. I wish I had learned this earlier. I wish I could preserve it all somehow, keep this moment in a freezer.
But the pressure cooker whistles. And the inevitability of time comes for my throat once again.
“Chop the onion,” she instructs, handing me the misshapen purple vegetable I’ve purchased at the store. I know she would’ve dug deeper into the crate, found a more perfect one, but she doesn’t comment on my choice.
I’m clumsy with the knife, chopping haphazardly. I can feel her gaze boring into my thick fingers, watching hawkishly for any sign that I’m about to injure myself. But somehow, I lumber through the process until I have the onion in acceptable pieces. I throw them into the pan, where all the masalas are oozing over the blue flame as the mixture heats up.
She takes over from there, whirling about as she adds in tomato. We watch the pieces melt over the heat, juices seeping around the contents of the pan. When the lentils are a texture she deems sufficient, “just mushy enough,” which once again means nothing to me, she stirs it all together. The fragrance brings tears to my eyes. It feels like comfort. Like a hug. Like home.
I wrap my arms around her waist from behind, eliciting a tiny “oh!” as she gasps in surprise. We stand like that in silence, neither of us knowing what to say to the other. There isn’t really much to say. That’s why we’re here, making food, instead.
“W-we should make the tadka,” she stutters finally, and I release my hold. I wish I could summon tears, but I’ve never been a crier. I suppose it’s better this way, just basking in the heat that emanates from the surface of the stove.
I’m startled as she melts ghee in the tiny tadka pan. As it begins to smart and bubble, she drops in cumin seeds and two dried chillies. It’s silent in the kitchen except for the sparking ingredients, almost flying from the pan as they fill my nostrils with flavors reminiscent of a less complicated past.
She adds garlic, that stuff I once again don’t know the English name of (“it’s asafoetida,” she tells me when I ask), and red chili powder. It’s almost overwhelmingly nostalgic. Painful. Bordering unbearable. I want to throw it all against the wall and watch the stains of oil streak down. I want to do something violently out of character, something that will make God realize He should stop playing such horrible games with my heart.
But I don’t. I just watch her face as it breaks out into a smile. She pours the tadka from the tiny pan onto the top of the dal mixture, a few tiny bubbles appearing as the oil and water fight for dominance on the surface of the dish.
I slip mitts onto my hands and carry the pot to the table, where the rice is waiting in a self-warming cooker of its own.
She brings over two plates and two spoons, but I tell her to put the spoons back. “We should eat it the right way,” I say, and her eyes widen slightly. I’ve never wanted to eat with my hands before. But today, I do.
She spoons a bit of dal onto her plate first, just a dot, because there is some superstition we’ve been told that says the first thing on your plate shouldn’t be rice. But superstitions are meant to ward off bad luck, and that’s been a spectacular failure as it is, so I go ahead and plop down the rice first. It feels like a big fuck you to the universe. I don’t feel any better after doing it.
We eat with our hands, the right way, pulling the rice and dal into small balls and shoving it all into our mouths, sighing with the closest thing to contentment that can be mustered right now. There’s something grounding about feeling your own fingers deliver the food to your mouth, something earthy, something that reminds you of the ancestors who existed thousands of years ago, before there was something called utensils. The ghost of those ancestors still exists in each bite I take. It’s the kind of thought that feels like a warm blanket, especially today. “It’s good,” I say, feeling a burp form in my chest. She only smiles.
“Do you want water?” she asks me. I shake my head. I am thirsty. But I don’t want her to leave. But what I want doesn’t really matter. She gives me a reproachful look and pushes her chair back, holding her right hand facing up so none of the bits of dal dribble onto the floor.
“Drink water,” she admonishes as she sets a glass in front of me. I obey her command. “I got artificial flowers on purpose,” she says as I set down the glass, a bit out of the blue. She turns to look out the kitchen window, where the splotchy beige-green grass of the yard stretches until the treeline in the distance.
“Why?”
“I want them to last a long time. So you don’t forget this day,” she says finally as we watch the last golden rays of sun dip below the tops of the trees. I look at her face, serene in its acceptance of the emptiness of tomorrow. The vast unknown that awaits her, and the terrible
known that awaits me. The great big her-shaped hole that will be left in my universe before the sun comes up.
What she really means to say is, so you don’t forget me.
Pooja Joshi is an Indian-American writer from North Carolina. She lives in Boston, where she is pursuing an MBA/MPP at Harvard University. Her work has been published in The Bombay Review, The William & Mary Review, and The Ilanot Review, among others. You can find her at www.pdjoshi.com.
