Pistachios
During the Festival, we’re forbidden to eat anything except fruits. Sister points to the fruit tray and amuses herself by saying: it must be a weird family party when pistachios and mangoes meet because it would also include poison ivy from the evergreen tree family. She giggles. Luckily, it’s summer vacation, and we’re not having to cycle half a mile up Orange Hill to school these days on half-empty stomachs. When Mother isn’t looking, Sister steals one pistachio and quickly puts it into her mouth, though we aren’t allowed to touch the fruits until sundown. For five days straight, it’ll be like this: we will save portions for our aunts and cousins because we’re rationing. Later, we’ll eat to our content from the sacks of grain that the Harvest gods have allowed us, after we’ve paid the tax collector, and paid the transport, and paid the middlemen. But even then, after the family has had their fill, Mother will still find the rice pots cleaned out, and she’ll have to go hungry without any of us noticing.
Later, we hear about a shooting at a marketplace nearby, and Father tells us the shooter was a boy by the name Adam. I half-imagine a boy of the same name from school, who told me pistachios and almonds were the only two fruits that grew in the Garden of Eden. When I wondered how he knew, he said his father told him, adding that his father hadn’t returned since crossing the Gobi two years ago to trade in the fruits they grew.
I felt sorry for him then, as I do now. I tell Sister. She laughs: You aren’t a couple, are you? She catches me blushing—we’re forbidden to marry outside of family.
A week later, Father brings a woman home. She has an oxblood-colored mouth, and when she speaks, it surprisingly shoots a warm mini-gust of air like a conical flare, smelling like grounded pistachios. She’s to stay with us until she finds a home around here, Father says, and Father’s every order is to be obeyed without suspicion.
Sister and I stay away from the room on the terrace, where the woman has settled herself. Mother carries a tray of flatbreads during mealtimes and returns without conversation, but Father spends a lot more time in that room.
By late summer, the sacks of grain are hitting bottom again. Sister and Mother and I are only having one meal a day. Sister and I have started farm labor, eight hours on the fields drawing water from a bore well, as if the extra hands will multiply crop growth. In the afternoons, when I’m bringing back clothes spread out to dry on the terrace, I can hear shells breaking.
I wonder where she hoards those pistachio shells she’s obviously having many of. I’m told they are good as fuel, and if the woman is making a tiny mountain around in her room, we could get rich. Mother would love eating normally again—she hasn’t made a sherbet or a keema-daal for ages, and she is fast losing weight now.
When I return to school, thankfully, Adam is still in class, still wearing the serene smile that endears him to everyone. In Naaz Ma’am’s chemistry class, she’s teaching us natural toxins. Adam leans in, whispers that the toxins in pistachios cause nausea and vomiting, even death. I am stunned—mighty impressed how much he knows about the subject that we don’t. When Ma’am reprimands Adam for disturbing the class, he raises his hand: I was talking about aflatoxin, Ma’am.
No judgements here, but soon after, when I hear the woman upstairs retching while I’m on the terrace removing clothes, I’m secretly wishing she’s got liver cirrhosis from all the pistachios she eats, hoping she dies.
Only later, much later, I presume a huge nut cracked because I can hear a newborn’s cries in the house.
Neelakurinji
For Chor Darwaza Day, Joa Carzo and I have nothing to offer except bowls of ragi and besan bondas with freshly steamed discs of rice paste. Our children have long abandoned us, because this place is no good—impoverished land of beasts and ghosts no one has seen, except what’s around is the talk. People here say it is the region of the Chambal dacoits, who rob houses, steal the people they rob, and, on horsebacks across the ravines, take them back to their dens to deep-fry their fingers as crispy snacks or enslave them as they desire but leave their children behind. Joa Carzo and I were young children they left alone, thirty years ago. Once a year, we offer our gratitude for sparing us. Beside the food, we light camphor and incense sticks and burn a lone wicker lamp under the canopy of trees that leads to Chor Darwaza, where they say the dacoits hide. Though I have reservations, Joa Carzo is utterly convinced by what our neighbors say, and I don’t want to invite Joa Carzo’s ire.
I think Joa Carzo married me only because I gave Joa, my then six-year-old playmate, the Neelakurinji—a flower that blooms once every twelve years. The flower has a snake that lives behind the Chor Darwaza, protecting it, and they say plucking and giving it to somebody begets something-a-little-like-love. My mother told me that anyone who plucks it is cursed to ugliness, and I have not looked in the mirror since.
Since my mother is long gone, I can do as I please. I undress fully only once a year. It’s on the full moon night of Chor Darwaza Day, and I walk to the pond with its half-bloomed lilies and algal-infested water. I do not look at the water either—I might faint at the sight. In any case, I immediately disturb the surface and sing to myself when I bathe. I know the Chambal dacoits will long be asleep or dead-drunk if they exist, and besides, the whole place is so ethereally beautiful in the moonlight, I may as well pass off as a ghost if they came. I don’t know if they’ll steal me now that I’m no longer a child. I’m not sure they have a care for ugly women.
Joa Carzo claims he doesn’t care for my ugliness, makes me nice scarves at his hand loom, takes me to the market to buy what I like on my birthday. I ignore when he goes to his friends’ houses and stays all night or returns smelling of tobacco and rice beer. I don’t bother him with names that he tosses about in his sleep. They’re names of women who are neighbors, or women who came down from the neighboring Futsukh town to sell rugs here, or women I haven’t known yet. Apparently, I shouldn’t bother because saying someone’s name is just a stimulus, probably corresponds to seeing that person in the dream, only as impulses are recharged, memories are sorted, and that person appears, not necessarily alongside the dreamer.
I return to check on the offerings in the morning. They are still under the canopy of trees, untouched. That means the dacoits weren’t impressed with what we placed. We will have to live in fear for another year.
Joa Carzo wakes up at noon, and when I tell him about the offerings, he says, “Don’t bother.” Like he’d rather they take us away to their hideout, fingers and all. Does he not worry our two children, eleven and seventeen, who work in the city, laboring away at the bangle factories, will be orphaned?
In the evenings, I talk to the snake that visits me, for it is not very busy—the Neelakurinjiis due only next year. Today, I ask it if the dacoits didn’t favor what we offered.
It shakes its enormous hood and slides away.
On other evenings, the snake and I talk about the weather, or the year of the drought, or about my siblings, but today’s meeting is rather brief. I think it keeps visiting me because it likes my ugliness—brings me soot and ashes, dry roots and blades, tells me to put them on my hair.
I never tell Joa Carzo about the snake.
When Joa Carzo returns to pick up his wallet, I do tell him I worry about our future. He says it’ll be okay and leaves with the women who have been waiting outside. I think they’ll go to the Neeshan hills, eat dumplings and peanut chikkis from the stalls there.
I pick up the broom to rid the yard of fallen leaves, wondering about the dacoits, the snake, and the flower among the rustling sound. I think we will keep it this way.
Fermentation Rec
When the mailman comes to collect a bribe because he delivered a packet of Sichuan pepper the other day, as if it’s banned here—It is not, I insist—what can we do? We’ve just arrived, and if there’s a commotion, we’ll be thrown out of our rented apartment. To ward off unfortunate episodes like this, Woama, Aunt Cheema’s mother and my grandmother, has made a tidy corner where she keeps the crocodile teeth inherited from our ancestors. The teeth, tucked safely under rugs and embroidered quilts, protect us three women in this quasi-foreign land. Before I leave for the shoe factory, I pray in our corner shrine, though I know there’ll be no floods here, no more escaping in the dead of the night from our Dimapur home. Our men, even if they’re dead, and the crocodile teeth they collected will bless us with jobs and meals. Aunt Cheema and Woama join in. We chant and fan the camphor lamp in turns. Aunt Cheema, who rolled bidisback at home, begs to differ when I say she’ll find work soon: There are no tobacco factories here. No one smokes in Delhi. Aunt Cheema isn’t aware of what I’ve just learned: that tobacco can be used as a spice rather than a smelly leaf that people smoke. My accidental boyfriend, Roca, whom I met on my daily commute, claims to run a restaurant in Girona, Spain. Roca is on a tourist trip here with his three brothers and says his best-known creation is called “A Trip to Havana,” which looks like a burning cigar, complete with ash. I wouldn’t know—I have never touched cigarettes, but Roca says this dessert is best-selling, the flavor of burning tobacco in ice cream, and the feel of ash on the tongue. Tobacco isn’t a common spice, he adds, but it loosely is; it definitely becomes one when you’ve used it as an additive in sweet and savory dishes, in chocolate truffles, and in a sauce that contains pigeon’s blood. I somehow get the feeling that I’m that spicy additive in Roca’s brief stay. I don’t object or question. Aunt Cheema is still speaking, standing against the door, which is better closed. The heat at forty-three degrees Celsius is getting on our nerves. She says she’d be better in the Garo Hills. Woama agrees with Aunt Cheema, nods in approval. What can I say? Woama is seventy-five, looks older because of our troubles. Every morning, she takes out her ghost bibelots and her handmade trinkets from the cloth bag, hopes they’ll sell as good as they did among the tourist crowd at Dzüko Valley. Only, if only, she found ways to speak the language here. I know they aren’t happy. I know that the comments are aimed at me. Woama begins to complain about the Naga Chilies. I already know we’ll run out of them soon. She speaks tangentially, and I imagine that the chilies are stranded in traffic and will make it here soon. I say I’ll find some, hiding the fact that I’ve no money left to have someone parcel them here. Instead, I say: How about Hinkejvu curry for now? The recipe is simple: mustard leaves, Colocasia roots, plus water. No oil at all. No spices, no seasoning, except a little salt. No chili or turmeric to add some color. And yet the result is delicious. Bland, of course, to a palate trained on chili and spice, but are we not making do anyway, like things on autopilot?
The shoe factory can’t be automated. Which is why I found work here. I can shut my mind off when my hands work. I don’t need to worry if the leather is from snakes or crocodiles, ones our family hunted for the meat, ones we smoked and flavored with akhuni, fermented soyabeans, grated garlic and ginger, and fermented taro leaves, then consumed with relish with rice.
At dinner, Aunt Cheema serves me pickled Sichuan pepper and Hinkejvu curry. For at least this day, we’ve managed to add heat and color to our meal. We eat silently. Except the sound of slurping—holding itself lovingly within the precarious walls of the room. I can’t help but wonder what it cost me: the herbs in the pickle, the oil and spices, the money I bribed the mailman for the Sichuan pepper, the complaints I am used to hearing every day, as though they are essential ingredients to a bland, impoverished life in a displaced home.
***
Rumpus Original illustrations by Dmitry Samarov
