Brown Baby

by Nikesh Shukla

  We needed to remember these things more. Not just the good times or the bad times, but the mundane times and the everyday times as well. How else would we retain the idiosyncrasies of my mum writing guacamole as she pronounced it, gvaaah-car-molay. Or croissant became cvaaaa-son. It was entirely the voice she put on for the phone when she didn’t know who was on the other end or when she was talking to a white person. She went posh. And those words became her Mrs Bucket-pronounced-Bouquet of trying to fit in. Or how she put her foot up on the bench to talk. Or that special way she cut potatoes into the palm of her hand. Something I had never witnessed anyone do.

  Or the way she sat, taking up half of the sofa, her legs folded next to her, a bowl of snacks or an empty crisp packet resting on the arm of the sofa next to her.

  When I visualize Mum, I think about that side profile of her, sitting in front of the television as I turn left from the stairs, or I enter the house. That was her throne, her domain. Dad sat on the other side of the room listening to old, old sad Hindi songs way too loud. To this day, your fai and I still watch television with subtitles on, because with your dad listening to music on the other side of the room, it was the only way to follow what was going on.

  That stack of shopping lists undid something within me. Maybe it was my composure. Maybe it was the wall of ice I had built around myself so I could get through the day. Maybe it was a loosening of a straitjacket around some part of me. Either way, my Ganga, my little one, whatever it was, it changed me. Again, I abandoned my search for Auntie Lesley’s number on the spot because I had this treasure trove of my mum and what she did for this house in my hands, and it was unlocking something with me. My phonecall with Auntie Lesley could wait. This stack of papers was an artefact that told us the story of our family. I spread the shopping lists out across the kitchen counter. I wanted to see if I could remember any of these weeks.

  The creased lists, the ink gathering a yellow hue around each letter, were so similar, I couldn’t differentiate one from the other. Even if they told the history of our family, each list hid the particulars of the weeks they corresponded to. I traced the letters of each word and tried to put myself in the moment of Mum writing them. My shoulders shuddered as I heard Dad come into the kitchen behind me. A man of silence, he opened the freezer and grabbed a fistful of ice from the loose tray in the middle of the unit. I heard the throb of the freezer kick in, that gaseous wheeze that would make me stir in the middle of the night.

  ‘There’s leftovers in the fridge,’ he said as he left me in the kitchen, uninterested in what I was doing. ‘But I was thinking takeaway.’

  I stacked the lists into one pile and put it in the back pocket of my jeans. I opened the fridge and stared at the leftovers. Takeaway containers with the same three-chilli chicken curry that dad insisted they make even spicier when he phoned in his order. Where you couldn’t taste anything other than chilli.

  ‘Can you make it Indian hot?’ he bellowed each time. ‘I’m Indian. Make it Indian hot . . .’

  There were some smaller bowls containing pinches of leftover shaak made by your dada’s cleaner. She had become his cook since Mum died. She tried her best to replicate Mum’s dishes. But she never salted her food enough. Dad added liberal sprinklings of salt, and had a bowl of chillies on the same plate. He also ate cereal with two fresh green chillies next to him.

  I didn’t want either set of leftovers.

  Hoping for something disgusting in the freezer I opened it, expecting to be greeted with bags of frozen samosas and chips. These I could work with. These would momentarily take away the pain. The freezer is empty.

  There is nothing there. A bag of frozen peas, frosted over with age.

  There are two old clear plastic takeaway containers.

  I open one and am met by a familiar smell. It’s Mum’s food. Some bhajias. And another container, this one has sweetcorn kadhi in it.

  The smell is so soothing. I can practically feel the coarseness of a cumin seed between my front two teeth. I don’t know what to do. There I am, in her kitchen, holding her food, clutching it like a second chance.

  If I eat her food, that’s it. That’s the last of it. That’s all there is. That’s all there will be. No more. Only memory. Only a space where it becomes perfect and not something I tasted. And if I want to experience it again, I will spend the rest of my life trying to recreate those tastes on my tongue. There’s no way I can recreate her food perfectly. I worry that Indian food to me will become restaurant food and the one chana masala dish she showed me how to make when I moved out after university. I could never get it to taste like hers. I could never instinctively recreate the amount of spices, oil, yoghurt, cooking time – each time I tried to recreate food in her own image, it was too thin. It wasn’t warm enough. It wasn’t quite there.

  None of that matters with this Tupperware in my hand, throbbing like the Tesseract (Avengers-capsule containing Infinity Stone edition).

  I defrost her food in the microwave for five minutes before plopping it into a saucepan and heating it up.

  As the food unfreezes, something happens. Like a swirl, a whisper, a groan, a warmth, the kitchen swells with that smell. Of mustard seeds and garlic and cumin and turmeric and frying and my mum. It smells like my mum.

  It’s like she’s there. In the kitchen with me.

  I wish I could wear this smell, just be enveloped by it, let it soak through every fibre and every thread in my wardrobe. I wish that I reeked of fried garlic and onions, of the burnt pops of mustard seeds, of cumin, of cardamom. I’ll bottle and spritz it on myself and call it my signature scent.

  I make a hash of some frozen chapattis. I sit down at the kitchen table. I find some of her favourite songs on YouTube and play them on my phone so the house sounds like her. It already smells of her. I can hear the squeak of your dada’s armchair in the other room. I can imagine him leaning forward.

  That first taste takes me back. In that taste, I can feel her bustling around the kitchen, the mish-mash of heat from the oven and cool breeze from the back door, ajar. In that taste, she is there, in the kitchen. She owns it again. It doesn’t feel so clean and sterile and unused. The flames are dancing on the hob. The sizzle of oil and mustard seeds is popping in my ears. The way the cabinets never quite shut annoys me as it always does. I try my hardest to eat that plate of food slowly to savour every last bite. But I can’t ingest it quick enough.

  I get a stomach ache. She always told me, ‘Nikesh, eat slower’, that eating quickly so I could get back to the television would give me a stomach ache. And it does.

  Your dada walks into the kitchen to get some ice for his next drink and he pauses in the doorway. He looks around at the mess I’ve made and he smiles with familiarity.

  I rub my stomach and sip water. I look at the saucepan, knowing there’s enough for your dada to have some. I want to eat more but my body is telling me to slow down for a second, take in the moment.

  She’s alive. She’s here. In this kitchen. Right now. She is here with me. The love she bestowed on this household. For a fragment of a second, a moment on the lips, a lifetime . . . on my . . . anyway, that smell. Something about it is perfect.

  When I return to Bristol, a few days later, to the new home we’ve just moved into, I’m hit by the smell. It doesn’t smell like a place where I live yet. It smells of the incense the hippy students who used to rent it would burn every single night. It smells of damp and it smells of paint from where we’ve started to update the interior. It smells of someone else’s shower gel, and soup other people prepared. It smells of carpets that have been trapped by a rental situation. It smells of spilled beer and maybe fags. It doesn’t smell like home. It certainly doesn’t smell like my space.

  On the coach home, I flicked through my mum’s shopping lists, trying to decipher them. I was unable to crack whatever code was within. What was she trying to tell me? I didn’t know.

  On the walk home, I run through one of the lists in my head. I had
been staring at it for so long, I had committed it to memory.

  On entering the house, the smell hit me. Of someone else. Your mum called out to me a welcome home from someone else’s lounge. I took my shoes and socks off and instead of rubbing my toes into the carpet, like whenever I went home, or when we both lived in North London, in that comfortable flat opposite Simon Pegg that we never wanted to leave. I rub my toes into the cheap carpet carpet vendors keep in the corner, for the buy-to-letters, the coarse stuff that could be 40 per cent plastic for all you know. It had the dull grey of a rich land baron’s cheek sewn into its weave.

  I knew what to do though. I had the shopping lists in my pocket.

  She was back in my head now. My mother. I knew exactly who she was. And how she could help me call this place home.

  The next day, I was standing outside the supermarket near our new home with the list in my hand.

  I looked down at the list.

  Weetabix

  Pasta

  Cheese

  Tomatoes

  Mango

  Toilet paper

  Coriander

  Frozen spinach

  Lettice [sic]

  White rice

  Tea bags

  It was the most ordinary list in the world.

  Even though I knew the list off the top of my head, I held the slip of paper in my right hand, my left dangling to grab up a basket from the stack next to the entrance. I didn’t need these things. I didn’t need pasta, the taste of Weetabix had long slipped off my palate, the cheese Mum bought was always medium cheddar, tasteless, and this small supermarket with less than an hour to go before closing time was unlikely to stock frozen spinach, fresh coriander or a box of alphonso mangos. I could only try my best. Walking through the stacks, I felt a calm come over me. Like I was communing with my mum.

  We used to go, her, me and your fai, every week. And your fai and I took turns pushing the trolley while Mum gathered things from the shelves.

  I added things to the basket in the order she had written them, because Mum always visualized the layout of her particular shop when she made the list. It caused me to dart around my local shop seemingly at random, which attracted a security guard’s attention. He hovered at the end of each aisle I was in. I smiled at him. I had the list clearly in my hand. I could feel it curling into my fingers with my sweat. With a basket full of things we did need, things we already had, things I needed, I paid for them and piled them into bags, heading home.

  I put them away as quietly as I could. It was late when I got back. The house was still. I could still smell the faint heft of the hippies’ incense rising from the carpets. I was getting to know the creaks of the floorboards. Your mum was asleep. I knew that much. I looked at the shopping list and I then opened up the cabinets. I had bought a six-pack of crisps. I opened the bag and took a packet out. I ate it and sipped on a can of Coke as I stood with my back against the counter in the kitchen, looking at this new space. The cupboards now felt familiar. I knew what else I wanted to do. I wanted the kitchen to smell like that moment I had had at home, heating up Mum’s old Tupperware of food. That was the final piece of this alchemic art installation I was doing, recreating my mum’s kitchen in my own.

  Before I went to bed, realizing I had finished all six packets of crisps and two cans of Coke, I disposed of the evidence as discreetly as I could so that your mum wouldn’t know about my snacking shame.

  When your mum came home from work the next day and came downstairs for a snack, finding me at the table, on my laptop, looking up Gujarati recipes that were simple, she opened the fridge and saw double the amount of everything.

  ‘Did you do a shop last night?’ she asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. She held up the packet of cheese. ‘Medium cheddar? Not mature?’

  I shrugged, suddenly embarrassed by my compulsive act. I tried to explain but everything sounded nonsensical. Mostly because the truth felt too strange and unbelievable so my attempts at sounding like I was trying to be useful felt hollow. It would make no sense to say I had bought groceries as a way of communing with my dead mother.

  Eventually I told her and your mum rubbed the top of my shoulder. She didn’t say anything. She understood.

  But this is the absolute truth of grief. It is never linear and it is never proportionate or understandable. Especially to other people. It never happens when it should. It doesn’t seem to make sense to anyone else.

  I stood outside a pub with my friend Matt and his childhood friends, fifteen years ago, drunk and chatting rubbish. One of Matt’s friends had decided to grow a big bushy beard and it changed the entire look of his face. I can’t quite remember what I said, I was drunk, but I made some comment about the statement of the beard, how his mum would have been proud of him. Not even a good zinger or put-down. Not even something worth remembering. I was sarcastic but the comment was in passing. It was nothing more than a stopgap to move the piss-taking on. One of those comments where everyone is chucking out insults, all on top of each other, in a cacophony, and suddenly, yours is the last one, the audible one, and it pierces the sudden quiet and that’s the one that lands. And it’s the worst one.

  He grabbed and pulled me down the road. He pushed me up against a brick wall. I saw Matt laughing, like, ooops, you pushed the wrong button there, friend. He laid into me about my lack of respect for him. His mother had died. All he wanted was for her to be proud of him but she was dead and there was nothing he could do to salvage that relationship beyond the grave. How dare I invoke her name as part of a joke? He said he wanted to hit me. I asked him not to. I apologized and we moved on. The night carried on for another excruciating two hours even though it ended the second I spoke his mum’s name. His sister was furious with me for not being more sensitive. Matt, meanwhile, thought the entire exchange was funny. He knew better than to go near that subject.

  I didn’t understand that reaction until years later, Ganga, when I found my own switch points. I joked, often, to make people uncomfortable, that my mum was dead, as my way of owning it. But then the wrong comment, never with a consistent throughline, would enrage me or make me check out of the conversation, because how dare these people not be sensitive to the death of my mother.

  ‘Why did you buy medium cheddar?’ your mum asked later when she looked at the list. ‘It just says cheese.’

  ‘It’s what she bought. I don’t know. It felt more authentic.’

  Your mum held up the bag of pasta.

  ‘I guess I know what’s for dinner,’ she said.

  That evening I continued to flick through recipes online. None of them were right. I had to start somewhere though if I was going to make one of Mum’s dishes. That way I could commune with her through food.

  ‘What’s the simplest dish to make?’ I ask your nani, three weeks after it happened.

  ‘Why do you need to cook?’ she replied. ‘You have me.’

  ‘You won’t be around forever,’ I reply. ‘I should learn myself.’ This makes your nani cry.

  We are in the immediate fallout of my mum’s death. Everything carries weight and nothing is safe from her memory. I am insensitive telling her that she, like my mum, like me even, is mortal. Tensions run high in the years after my mum’s death. I apologize and rub her shoulders till she relaxes her forearms and she cuddles into the nook of my neck, her eyes wetting my skin. I ask my question again. She smiles at me and rubs at my hair.

  ‘You don’t have to learn to cook, beta. You have me,’ she repeats. A bit more desperate now, to show me she’s here.

  ‘I know. But that smell. That taste. If I can recreate it, it’s like she’s here with me.’

  ‘If I teach you, it’ll be me you think of. It won’t be her.’

  ‘Show me the basics,’ I say. ‘I can remember what everything she made tastes like. My job is to get better and better till I’m doing impressions of my mum, cooking like she used to. And if the house sounds like her cooking and sm
ells like her cooking and tastes like her cooking, it’s like she’ll be alive again.’

  ‘But you have me,’ your nani says, looking at a vase of lilies your mum has bought. ‘You have me,’ she repeats. As one of the matriarchs of the family, she is ensuring her relevance.

  ‘I know,’ I say.

  ‘You have me,’ she repeats, quieter, looking back at me, in English this time. To show she means it.

  ‘I know. It’s important to me,’ I say.

  She thinks about it for a second. ‘I suppose you could start with khichdi. It’s the easiest dish. And it was one of her favourites. Come, let me show you now.’

  We’re in Mum’s kitchen. As your nani reaches into a cupboard to get out the big yellow saucepan, the familiar clatter of metal on metal sends a shiver down my spine.

  This is how it always was and how it used to be. It can be how it is now.

  Our family subscribes to the oral tradition of cooking: you learn by your parents reciting the recipes down the phone or with you in the room. The kinaesthetic tradition of cooking: learning by doing. Nothing’s written down, certainly no measurements. Your mum and I were given a book of family recipes on our wedding day. I asked my mum why the three she had written – paneer curry, jeera chicken, chana masala – had no measurements. She shook her head and shrugged. She didn’t know. She was a vegetarian. She didn’t eat roast tandoori chicken. It was instinct. The others were her favourites. She could cook them with her eyes closed.

  Your nani talks me through the simplest recipe for khichdi.

  She says, ‘You can’t mess it up. Do you want to write it down?’

  Khichdi is a rice and lentil dish that, much as I love, I associate with death. When someone dies, you mourn for twelve nights. The first night, when the death has occurred and people descend on your house, there’s an onus on you as the host, despite the grief you may be feeling, to feed those who have turned up to mourn with you. Khichdi has thus become synonymous for me with wakes. Because it can be mass-produced, because it’s filling and delicious, and it can be made by anyone who might only have a cursory knowledge of your kitchen, taking charge of feeding people because you’re busy mourning.