as it should be,
excerpts from my final submission for “writers on creative writing,” an English seminar I took in the fall of 2023 at Waterloo
A while ago, I ordered takeout from the only Indian restaurant left in Uptown Waterloo, something I don’t do often anymore because I have yet to encounter a South Asian meal in the wild that measures up to yours.
Take this chicken korma, for example. As I open my serving of “non-veg thali” I am immediately put off by a tinge of green in rings of oil that’ve built up in the gravy. I’m sure you could tell me exactly why that happens. And how to prevent it; they’ve used the wrong type of oil, or didn’t let their milk mix together enough. Not that I could tell the difference. I poke at the sauce; a few meager cubes of chicken bubble to the surface. Even without your culinary expertise on hand, I know with certainty that something is off with this dish, that the chefs at Empress of India had the audacity to call ‘chicken korma.’
Your korma gravy is always creamy, silken, perfectly opaque. It’s not too rich, but nobody would ever call it watered-down. It smells like coming home from school on a long winter night stuck on the 417-westbound, to a dinner table laden with my favorite Bengali dishes. It belongs nestled in between plates of pea pulao faintly perfumed with Ghee and tenderly breaded cutlets, sprinkled with cilantro. The ceramic bowl you serve it in almost overflows with chicken, mostly leg pieces, because you know those are my favorite. From an early age, I witnessed how you practiced treating food with love, and expressing love through food.
“A good meal is the secret to someone’s heart,” you used to confide in me, resting your hands against the island counter to relieve the pressure of being on your feet for hours at a time. We’d exchange a laugh, as if we were guarding some sort of clandestine secret and not the mantra of every modern-day vegan cookbook. Agents tasked with the mission of achieving the perfect look of satisfaction from each family member’s face as they bit into their dinner. You’d gesture at the study, chuckle. “What, you need proof? Just look at your Baba’s stomach.”
I never doubted it. Over the years, I have held onto this secret of your long-lasting relationship, adding the ability to satiate my partner to the sort of mental roadmap to love I’ve sketched out in earnest throughout my early twenties. Since moving out of Ottawa and into various budget-friendly apartments scattered across the continent, I did what I could to follow in your footsteps. I looked up recipes for the perfect banana bread and sprinkled the resulting (but admittedly misshapen) loaves with a dusting of cinnamon, as if that approximation of culinary care could make my baking feel as sacrilegious as the perfect bowl of korma. I grasped onto any opportunity I got to cook just a little bit more rigatoni than the recipe asked for, in hopes of luring a roommate into the kitchen to pull up a seat at the table. It feels like I have spent my adulthood so far trying to recreate the foundational acts of kindness I observed between you and Baba.
But it’s not the same; my meals today are fastidious, expensive, laborious, made for sustenance, and nothing more. Arms weighed down by grocery bags that I lug on and off the city bus, cheap produce that goes bad too quickly, fish filets burnt in the oven because a Zoom meeting went overtime. The very act of producing and then consuming and then cleaning up a meal, all by myself, has become cumbersome. Food has become the opposite of pleasurable, as I develop experiences with it away from the temple I learned to worship it at. The reality of setting out to follow your recipe for love has in fact soured my taste for it.
I feel so far away from the routines I expected to have in my adult life, now that I have begun to recognize their absence. For example, I have a bone to pick with the instinct that you instilled in me of being around the table by ‘dinnertime,’ which I would now argue is a made-up construct, at least for twenty-two year olds. Not everybody’s internal clock asks (or affords themself the time) for chicken and rice at five o’clock in the evening. These days, my table always ends up being set for one. No one is waiting for me before starting their meal. And yet I miss it. That’s the thing — I yearn for dinnertime now. It’s hard to admit that, if I’m being completely honest, I miss the love that was baked into this family tradition of ours. I regret resisting it in my teenage years, running away from the only three people who never needed to be convinced to share a meal with me. No questions, no conditions, no pursuit, no chase, just a table laden with glistening curries and aromatic bowls bursting with basmati rice, and us, gathered around the table in anticipation of the feast to come. What do I do with all these ideals for love that I seem so far from achieving? I sit with this thought, alone with a plastic fork in hand at my dinner table set for one, peering down at a dish that someone really believed could be called ‘chicken korma.’
Some could argue that I did it to myself. Characterize my lifestyle as ‘unnecessarily nomadic.’ To be fair, I did live in five different cities across the continent within a span of twenty-four months. But they don’t know that I’m a natural-born nomad! It’s in my blood, the same way that I was born with the taste for a perfectly flaky paratha. At my age, you and Baba were already a whole continent away from home, studying in a foreign country, months away from falling in love with each other and into a decades-long marriage that would take you from Australia to Singapore to Canada. Such is the legacy imprinted on an immigrant’s child. My great-grandparents lived in the villages of Bangladesh, so my grandpas decided to build bridges in the country’s capital city. You wanted to explore the world, so you became engineers in Canada, crossing several oceans within a generation. No one in our family has had a long-term working visa in the US. So what could I do next, except set out to conquer it? Just as I have been in pursuit of the perfect relationship like yours, I am equally unwilling to compromise on the perfect career (also, like yours). And so I have not stopped moving, and wonder if I ever will.
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Growing up has a strange aftertaste. I bite into each day fervently, holding the imagined sensations of what life could feel like in mind. But I’m left wanting. Nothing quite feels the same, loves the same, as I expected. It’s exhausting to hold on to these dreams and wonder if I’ll ever achieve it all at the same time. It is so lonely here without you, but it would have felt unnatural to stay with you. How did you survive alone, and how did you find Baba? And most of all, why isn’t my story turning out more like yours?
I have a confession to make. The truth is that everytime I walk off the plane and into one of these new adventures, I carry with me the tender hope of landing upon a love like yours and beginning the life I’ve dreamt of all along. I fold up and pack into my checked bag the well-read love story of when Baba met Mama in his first few days in Adelaide. His description of you standing across the room in a marigold salwar kameez at an adda held by mutual friends, as he imagined that you “had a line of suitors already waiting upon you.” The way Baba would call you on the phone at your hostel until the voicemail box was full and everybody was annoyed. How you pored over the average living costs of every country in the world to find a place where you could start to build a life together. The serendipity of two Bangladeshi engineering students finding each other and falling in love in southern Australia, of all places.
It’s funny what sticks with you as an adult. I know it’s not your fault that I carry these expectations with me. But at the same time, I wonder what life would feel like without them. I have been so occupied with chasing after this intangible future that I haven’t stopped to think about the life of my own that I built along the way. Last week, my friend Raewyn texted me with the news that one of our friends in engineering had recently proposed to his long-term girlfriend, at the ripe age of twenty-two, three months before convocation. You and Baba also got married in the semester before graduating from your Bachelor’s. In another life, I had pictured the same for myself. But in this one, the same age as you were then, I am instead months away from another expedition across the world, to start a new job in San Francisco. No partner, no friends coming with me from home, just me, alone at the dinner table. I wonder what it would feel like to move there without lugging with me the expectation of landing into a love like yours.
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No matter the city I move to, there is one place I always seem to find myself. Leaning back with my head nestled in the leathery salon chair of a South Asian esthetician, who will begin threading my eyebrows, share tips for healing my chronically dry skin and puffy undereyes, and ruthlessly skim the stray hairs from the most sensitive parts of my upper lip, all before I even get the chance to ask her how much extra she’ll charge me. It’s a universal experience. And yet, scary as these elderly women may be, I find myself sighing with comfort each time I walk into one of their strip mall salons. A DVD player in the corner rehashes familiar Bollywood movie plots, the room is perfumed with cumin and cardamom and garam masala, sometimes their husbands rest quietly in a corner of the room reading a newspaper with a slight grimace. Reminders of home.
The last time I went to get my eyebrows threaded was in Queens, in my last couple weeks of living in the city. I was tired. From work, working out, feeding myself, living alone. Maybe it showed on my face. My eyebrow lady relented for an extra millisecond before ripping the hairs out of my upper lip. She looked at me with kindness, maybe thinking of her own daughter.
“You are here in the city all alone? What about your parents?”
It had been a while since I’d heard that, and it gave me the sudden urge to call you. Dialing the digits of the only phone number I know by heart, I realized that I wanted to ask you for the recipe for your chicken korma. Lately, on nights when I’m hungry, I have found myself shuffling into the kitchen, cracking open my fridge, and picturing a bowl of it waiting for me, exactly as I imagine it should be. Here, two thousand miles away from home, I have finally started to feel brave enough to try it out for myself, even though it may not look anything like the meal I’ve come to expect.
When you grow up experiencing a life laden with one type of love, you end up believing that your own has to look the same. Feel the same, taste the same. I suppose I had to experience love like this first, though, in order to realize that my own version of it may end up nothing like yours.
I’m excited to experience that one day, and share it with you. In the meantime, though, don’t stop sending me your recipes. Who knows? Maybe those will just end up staying between us.
***
Something different to start off the new year! I miss my home more than ever, as I am now permanently based over 2868 miles away from my family. This was a piece I wrote for them almost a year and a half ago, as a culmination of a semester studying how writers use “objects” (material or immaterial) to frame and ground their recollections of the past. As a Bengali woman, food is central to every cultural experience I can recall — there’s never been a birthday, wedding, or anniversary celebrated without a bowl of biryani. South Asians households revere a good meal and the conversations that can be held over one — especially as open communication isn’t necessarily part of our traditional repertoire.
My world has changed since writing this: in many ways, it has stabilized. This now reads as a fragment of the person I was in my last year of my degree: unsure of what was next, but sure enough that it would need to be different than what I’d known so far. As I settle into my new role post grad, I’m looking to write about the world outside of my 9–5, a sort of personal reminder that I will never stop being curious about things that I don’t get paid to learn about. The act of writing plays a unique and highly present role in my new job, so finding a clean divorce between that and my writing here on Medium is one of my big goals for 2025. Here’s to a diverse and exciting range of writing I’ll be sharing here this year.
