The Foods That Bind, by Insia Dariwala, Mumbai
Born, raised, and currently residing in Mumbai, Maharashtra, Insia is a filmmaker and activist who, like a turtle, carries her home with her, journeying through millions of stories– at times telling one, and at times becoming one.
April 12th, 2020: While most of the world was celebrating a virtual Easter, and hope struggled to blossom in Spring’s red and yellow tulip blooms, somewhere, on a six by three steel bed in an upstate New York hospital, my dearest Aunt Shirley breathed her last. She died alone.
October 16th, 2019, was when I last got to touch her. At that time, my mom Denu was battling for her own life in a New York hospital, and I remember how Aunt Shirley, a petite, five feet two inches of a woman, had somehow managed to hold all of my fears, anxiety, and grief in those tiny arms of hers.
She hugged a crying me and said, “Don’t worry baby. I am here for you. Nothing will happen to our Denu. She will fight this.”
I wish she had believed the same while fighting lung cancer in an isolated COVID-19 ward. Cancer and COVID-19 make for a deathly combination, and this puny, one-hundred-pound woman was no match for them. She surrendered to her fate. I am still holding on.
My last day at her house still keeps playing on a loop. She had fed me like there was no tomorrow. Tilapia, a fleshy, freshwater fish found in some parts of the world, and found many times in my aunt’s kitchen, simmering on a stove smothered in Indian spices lovingly ground with years of wisdom, was found that day, too. She kept heaping my plate with white rice and juicy slices of fish in a tangy gravy.
My hands tried to stop her, but she insisted, saying, “Eat. You need strength, okay?”
Smacking my fingers, I had then asked her, for what may have been the 50th time, “Aunt Shirley, how do you make this so yummy?”
I used to love her recipe stories.
Animatedly, she would sit up, her childlike eyes sparkling with glee, her arms flailing in thin air, excitedly clicking her fingers to show how easy it was, and then using her favorite words to seal it, “Boom Boom Boom and it’s done.”
I laughed heartily at the “Boom Boom.”
Today, October 12th, 2020, marks six months since she left us. As I write this story, I come across a video of her singing and dancing last year, and I ask myself, has she really gone? I didn’t see her leave. No coffin. No shroud. No witnesses to her death. Nothing. Shouldn’t death get validation?
My heart suddenly feels knotted up, somewhat like the woolen blankets Aunt Shirley wove. The grief is ready to spill over.
I look at the clock. It’s 11 a.m. I call up my local fisherman and ask him to get some Tilapia for me. Today, I will cook my aunt’s fish curry with a special ingredient in it: my tears.
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(This story was prepared for an “Imagine Another World” online storytelling workshop held October 28, 2020.)
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