 |
| ISSUE NO. 562 |
| This week's newsletter comes to us from Sharanya Deepak, a writer and editor from - and currently in - Delhi, India. She is the winner of the Wasafiri new writing prize for her essay "Seamless", published by the magazine in Spring 2021. You can read more of her work on her website: www.sharanyadeepak.com. ON A WARM MORNING IN EARLY MAY... I found myself in the kitchen, formulating an unusual ritual. I would brew my morning coffee, and then walk to the fridge, take a clove of cardamom out and drop it in the cup with milk and sugar. The first time I did it, I found my mother glaring at me from the back of the living room. We were both locked into the house and recovering from our mild, but stressful experience with Covid-19. I quickly realized her concern leaned towards my flippant use of the expensive spice (there was a reason for it being in the fridge, and not on the shelf for routine use) which we sometimes used in tea. Coffee, we always made in her South-Indian filter, and drank dark with sugar and boiled milk. I realized I was recreating a memory from my friend’s flat in Glasgow, Scotland, two years ago, when he had made two milky cups of coffee with ground cardamom as we woke up after a long night. I expected this is how they sometimes drank it in Baghdad, where his father is from, and the smell of the spice nestling in my own cup transported me back to him, his fast movements around the kitchen, the memory brought back like a shaky film on a projector screen. While the pandemic may have crumbled our visions for the future, it also weakened the strength of our pasts, the ability of memories to create worlds to hang onto, to anchor us in worlds of those we love so we can move forward. Shut into the four walls of my own, the friendships I had forged in other places began to feel like lives lost. … These were all contemplations of relative comfort. My mother and I are only two of the more than 29 million Indians that have been diagnosed with the disease in India, most of which occurred during India’s “second wave”, or as many have called it “India’s Covid tsunami”. More than 3.5 million people have died since March 2020, their lungs collapsing outside hospital doors, perishing as they waited for hospital beds. The last few months have seen a grapple for oxygen cylinders, and families torn apart from one death after another. Outside those with middle-class privileges, the pandemic has ravaged employment, and torn apart structures of those that work within India’s large informal work sector. Rural India, and villages where healthcare is unavailable, have seen the sick and dead pile up, with no one accounting for them. In her piece on the pandemic, Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, wrote of the travesties, calling these occurrences ‘a crime against humanity.’ “These are villages where people die of easily treatable diseases like diarrhoea and tuberculosis.” She writes. “How are they to cope with Covid? Are Covid tests available to them? Are there hospitals? Is there oxygen? More than that, is there love? Forget love, is there even concern?” All the while, members of the ruling party in governance have held election rallies, started building a palatial home in the capital, and supervised thousands as they flocked to the Kumbh Mela, the largest Hindu gathering in the country. Muslim healthcare workers and frontline workers at crematoriums have remained at risk and under-paid, putting their lives on the line to grant dignity to a country that does not return them any. In the last three months, Indians throughout the country have gasped with breath, and endured a lasting symptom of the virus – all-encompassing grief. … While grief is amorphous and can take uncertain forms, its brutality lies in the strength of its presence. For me, the death of acquaintances and friends led to a deep-set isolation of being locked inside the country's tragedy, obscuring the people and places I had known. Moments of joy, hope, and desire that had been accessible before seemed now like figments of my imagination. My friends, even when they tried to communicate with me, appeared like stained photographs, unable to grasp what we were going through. The ritual of cardamom in my coffee helped me visualize a life outside the one I currently know. To cook in the memory of those I cannot feel or touch, but are part of my life, has helped me counter the brutality all around me, to imagine a world outside it. In remembrance of my childhood best friend, I began to grate potatoes into omelets the way her Iranian father did when we were little. Thinking of my friend in Nagaland, I pasted Raja Mircha, the ghost chili pepper, with fresh herbs and tomatoes into a chutney I ate for weeks straight. For many, recipes and culinary heritage come from family heirlooms, parents and grandparents, but my most memorable lessons in food have been from the tables and kitchens of my friends. While the pandemic threatened to snatch away the last living specks of hope and memory, I decided to cook in the memory of those I missed — some waiting on the other side of this tragedy, others dissolved by distance, and some taken from us before we could fathom that they were gone. A week ago, my father’s best friend - a man whose youthful, jovial energy contrasted my father’s stark demeanor of duty - succumbed to Covid-19. To us, this was an unnatural tragedy. How could someone who looked forward to life more than most of us suddenly be deprived of it? On the day he died, my father stocked our shelves with eggs, boiling them one by one, like his friend used to, and sprinkling onions and chaat masala, a spice mix, cutting them into halves and eating them slowly as he prayed. My sister called me in the evening, weeping, telling me that she had cooked “anda curry,” a spicy egg stew which our uncle considered a staple. We sat on the day he died, our plates full of his favorite things, even though we had no preference for them. With eggs on our plate and memories of him in our hearts, we held on for a bit longer before we said goodbye. . . .
We are thrilled to have collaborated with Sharanya through our Share Your Voice initiative, an ongoing effort inspired by the #sharethemicnow movement. Yours in food, justice, and food justice, |
tidbits by Sharanya...resources on anti-racism, environmentalism and food culture AKA stuff we're reading / listening to / watching / noticing / thinking about / captivated by this Tuesday . . . |
 |