My Friend's Mother Fed Me for a Decade
She never asked why I kept coming; she just added a plate.
For ten years I ate dinner at a house where nobody was related to me, and it took me most of those years to understand that this was the point.
The house belonged to my school friend Ashwin, but the kitchen belonged to his mother, and the kitchen was the actual country. Everything else, the hall with its plastic covered sofa, the balcony full of curry leaf and tulsi, the shelf of trophies from tournaments no one remembered, was just territory that the kitchen governed.
I started going in class eight. Officially, Ashwin and I were study partners. Unofficially, my own house had gone quiet the year before, after my father left and my mother took a second shift at the bank's processing centre, and quiet houses at dinnertime are the loneliest architecture on earth. The first evening, Aunty opened the door, looked at me for exactly one second longer than politeness required, and said, wash your hands, the rasam is getting cold.
Not, who are you. Not, does your mother know. Wash your hands. The rasam is getting cold.
I want to be precise about what she never did, because the nevers are the story.
In ten years she never asked why I came four nights a week. She never made a face when I reached for a third helping at an age when my hunger embarrassed me more than anything else about my body. She never once, not one single time, said the sentence poor thing in my hearing, though I later learned she had fought a relative in the next room for saying it about me.
She just added a plate.
The plate itself deserves a paragraph. Steel, with a faint dent near the rim, always the same one. I thought for years it was random... until the evening I came late and found the table set for four: Ashwin, his father, his sister, and a dented steel plate at the corner seat, waiting, before anyone knew for certain I was coming.
A place that exists for you before you arrive. I did not have language for what that did to me at fifteen... I barely have it now.
Some people ask if you are okay. The rare ones just set your place at the table and let the food ask.
Her cooking was not fancy. It was better than fancy, it was reliable. Beans poriyal on Mondays because the vegetable man came on Mondays. Fish only on Sundays, fried hard the way Uncle liked it and soft the way nobody liked it when his cholesterol reports came. On my board exam mornings, and only later did I register that she had memorized my timetable separately from Ashwin's, there was curd rice with a little extra sugar, because she had decided somewhere that sugar was courage.
She fed me through my mother's longest working years, through my first heartbreak, through the two months Ashwin and I were not speaking over something so stupid neither of us will now confess to remembering it. That detail still stuns me.
Her son and I were fighting, and the plate still appeared.
When I mumbled about it once, she said, my son is an idiot and you are an idiot, but the sambar is not involved in this, sit down.
I sat down. We were fine within the week. It is hard to hold a cold war across a hot table.
Here is the part I got wrong for a decade: I thought I was a charity case being tolerated with grace. So I overcompensated. I brought bananas nobody needed. I jumped up to fix their television, their mixer, their eternally dying inverter. I was paying an invoice no one had sent.
The turn came when I was twenty three, working in Gurgaon, home for Diwali. I went over with sweets, and for the first time in my life Aunty and I were alone in the house, two coffee cups on the table between us, steam rising like a small ceremony. And because I was an adult now and adults ruin things, I tried to thank her. Formally. I had prepared sentences. I got about one and a half of them out, something about how I did not know what I would have become without this kitchen... before my voice did the thing voices do.
She let me sit in it for a moment... Then she said, you think you were coming here for food?
I said, was I not?
She turned her cup slowly. Ashwin was a lonely boy, she said. You made him laugh. Those years his father was posted away, this house was too quiet at dinnertime. You filled it. I did not feed you out of pity, she said. I fed you out of selfishness. You were my second boy. Mothers feed their children. There is nothing to thank.
I had spent ten years thinking I was the hungry one at that table.
I had never once considered that the house might have been hungry for me.
She died two winters ago.
Pneumonia, fast, unfair in the specific way that deaths of strong people are unfair. At the prayer meeting I stood in a corner in my good shirt, unsure of my rank in the grief, whether a boy fed for a decade outranks a cousin or a colleague... until Ashwin's sister crossed the whole room, took my arm, and placed me in the front row with the family, where the sons stand. Nobody questioned it. The seating, one final time, had already been decided for me.
Afterwards, Ashwin gave me the dented steel plate. He did not make a speech about it. He is his mother's son; the objects do the talking. It is in my kitchen in Gurgaon now, and on bad days I eat curd rice off it with a little extra sugar, and it works, which makes no scientific sense and perfect sense.
I could not say any of this out loud for a long time, so I did what quiet people do: I wrote it. Badly at first, then less badly. A poem about her went up under family on a writing site called Writory, though it could just as honestly have been filed under childhood, because she is load bearing in both. When it was published in their Unheard Voices section, profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, Ashwin sent it to the family group chat with no caption, which in his mother's dialect of love is a standing ovation.
People talk about paying kindness forward, and I try. There is a boy in my building, thirteen, whose parents both work late shifts, who started appearing at my door with homework questions he could have answered himself. I know exactly what he is actually asking. So I do not ask him anything.
I just put the rice on, and I set out the dented plate, and I tell him to wash his hands, the rasam is getting cold.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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