How to Make Daal

Spread lentils on a rattan tray, surveying every single grain. Scan for tiny pebbles masquerading as lentils. Close your eyes. Feel with fingertips for hard pebbles amidst the suede of lentils.
 
Rinse once. Drain. 
 
Rinse again, watching bits of dirt surrender—the flotsam you wish you could cull in your life. Drain.
 
Rinse again. Wonder if it’s ever completely cleansed? Be reminded of scars. Drain.
 
Repeat till it feels redundant or clear, whichever comes first.
 
Cook low and slow in a silver-clad handi —stir in all the spices you can muster. Simmer till the tiny beans forgot they were tiny and turn into fiery silk. Lace with garlic slices fried in ghee. Entice everyone within one kilometer of the house.
 
Ladle two big spoonfuls of steaming daal onto an island of gleaming white rice. Your plate: cheery and hopeful. A ruse.
 
Suck in your breath. Brace yourself for the unabashed heat. 
 
The first spoonful is confrontational, the second, loud. The following are demanding—your mouth feels numb and your skin lets go of beads in apology for all you can’t go back and heal.
 
Remember—it’s punishing and delicious. Remember your childhood zeal for it annoyed your mother who made perfectly delicious daal herself, though hers didn’t try to pick a fight with the world; being so brash, like your grandmother’s.
 
Your mother’s daal: a well-constructed, post-colonial argument, checking off all the vagaries of politeness and repression. Her daal took the path of perfectly balanced civility in spices, tried to smile its way out of anger, tried to look to the ground to mask moments of rage. 

the author's Nani and mother on her mother's wedding day in 1975

You are definitely full. Ladle another big spoonful.
 
Because this reverie will end the moment you lick your fingers. You’d be back yearning for a home that never was.
 

- Saadia Muzaffar is a marvellous, brown, work-in- progress - trying to feel her way through life, friendship and love while fighting to stay angry.

Wine Trifle

Two weeks before Christmas, your nephew’s wife calls for a recipe. 

“Christmas isn’t Christmas without your trifle, Aunty Pauline!” she says. You agree.  

It’s your mother’s recipe. You make it faithfully each year, remembering her hands moving swiftly, the smell of her kitchen. You recall marvelling at how the cake, custard and gelatine kept obediently to their separate layers.

Your grown children remain stubbornly disinterested, and you’d worried who would carry this tradition. But this girl from another culture, another tradition, has called you. Heart filled, you recite;  

Use day old sponge cake, cut into squares. Spread jam over each one. Any flavour, but I like strawberry.

Dip each jammy square quickly into sherry. Don’t let it fall in, or rest too long. It’ll soak up too much sherry, and everyone’ll get drunk on dessert.

You can substitute 100% orange juice — for the kids and the wowsers.

Make up some custard with egg, milk, sugar. Thicken it with custard powder.

Line the base of your glass dish with the sponge squares, jam side up. Pour the custard over the top. Put this in the fridge to cool. That’s very important. You have to make sure it’s cool before you add the jelly or the gelatine’ll melt.

images by Asha Rajan

Use Port Wine jelly (or orange, for the kids’ version). Don’t buy the cheap stuff, you’ll taste the difference. Make it up, and let it set in a separate bowl.

When everything’s good and cold, when the jelly’s set, crumble it and fork it on top of the custard. Don’t mix it through. Separate layers are more festive.

“Give my love to my nephew,” you say, keeping your voice chipper, don’t let the loneliness interject.  “Tell him to call me once in a while.”

You put down the phone, and pick up your grandmother’s bible.  That too, you’ll pass on to your nephew’s wife.

- Asha Rajan

images by Asha Rajan

Dancing on Egg Cartons

Once upon a visit to my childhood home, my grandmother winced to watch me toss into our kitchen garbage bin an emptied Styrofoam egg carton (remember these? the shapely squeaky cups seemed to ask, no matter how matter-of-fact you fondled them).

I winced as I watched her reach under our kitchen sink, into the stinking trash to retrieve the carton—to bring it back into the light of use, but differently.  For she then set it on the floor, and stepped to it—stepping on it—each squelching shell popping beneath her small feet dancing, until the carton was a cartoon of itself, flattened. 

Now it could be trashed better, and she laughed to see me stunned by the world more neatly wasted.

(Of course she died—and as I write this I do believe she liked dancing this way: to think how much more good could come to fill the space [she] left behind.)

photo by the author

Years pass and compression complicates the matter.  Landfills rise to the surface of someone’s memory, sometimes beautifully.  My wife, born and raised in Tokyo, never met my grandmother of the farmlands of Cambridge, Ohio.

But in the first weeks after living together in an apartment, I laughed to see my wife better sort what I threw away: out into the same sun of my childhood came the egg carton (no longer Styrofoam, but cardboard compressed).  And down on the kitchen floor she danced over it, the same unlikely steps matter-of-fact, exacting the past and the future, the East and West of the curve, shaping the heaping land filled to bursting with the collective stuff of memories—

She danced this way over-and-all-through the thing, laughing.

"Universal waste like batteries and lighting equipment should not be mixed in with regular trash,” Terence Huber learned lately, and removed lighting equipment from his usual curbside pick-up in Lakewood, Ohio.  Out of the darkness, other works of his will appear or have been published in American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly and Great Lakes Review.

Macaroni and Tomato

“It’s so simple. Just cook some macaroni and pour in some tomatoes.”

Mama’s verbal instructions were simple. But there were so many variations.

Method 1: Combine cooked macaroni noodles with a jar of home-canned tomatoes. Talk to your little girl about when we all drove up to Aunt Char’s farm, and picked and canned them. Sit down at the table to eat with her. Tell her a story, or sing her a song when you’re done.

Method 2: Combine noodles and home-canned tomatoes as above. Call for your daughter to come to the kitchen and eat. She stays so busy now. Be gracious and understanding when she rushes off after eating to go spend time with her friends.

Method 3: Heat up a bowl of the macaroni and tomato you made the previous night in anticipation of your daughter coming home for the weekend. Listen while she tells you everything about college. Smile and keep it to yourself that you know she isn’t telling you everything.

Method 4: Use a store bought can of tomatoes because it has been many years since you could pick and can your own. Hold your new granddaughter in your arms while her mother eats a bowl of the best food in the world.

Method 5: Hold your daughter’s hand while she reminisces with you about how she always loved your macaroni and tomato. Laugh about what a simple thing that was. Smile and squeeze her hand a little tighter when she sheds a tear and tells you it is her favorite food in the world.

photo by the author

- Nena Gravil is a writer and an artist who works a daytime gig as an Information Systems Security Engineer to pay the bills. She shares a home in Nashville with two snakes, two cats, and one dog. Nena has one daughter, one girlfriend, and one best friend, and she understands exactly how fortunate she is. Sometimes she sings way too loudly in the shower and it's ridiculous.