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| mom's lovely garden |
25/04/15; 8:00 am: My sister and
I sit in the little patio in my mother’s house, which looks out to the garden,
with its emerald green grass dappled with buttery golden morning sunlight,
sipping tea and chatting. Ammumma my grandmother, reads us little snippets of
news from the Malayalam paper, which catches her fancy. Amma pops in to ask if
she should start making dosas, and it seems to me at that moment that “God is
in His heaven All’s right with the world” (Pippa’s song by Robert Browing)
02/05/2015; 11:30 am: I am seated
on the wide kitchen counter biting into the sweet yet slightly tart baby
mangoes, which my aunt brings for us every summer, from her garden. Our cook,
who has been with us for over 30 years, is peeling the mangoes to make a ‘mambazha
pulissery’* while chatting with me.He stews the peeled mangoes whole, along
with a couple of slit green chillies, a pinch of turmeric which clings to his skin
like gold dust and some salt. He then adds a silky paste of freshly grated coconut
and some earthy cumin seeds, brings it to a boil and takes it off the heat.
Then comes a splash of some whipped homemade yogurt.
He deftly heats up some coconut oil and splutters mustard
seeds some dried red chillies and fresh curry leaves from the garden which he
pours on top of the curry. I close my eyes and inhale the fragrance which
permeates the kitchen as the spice infused oil hits the tangy sweet sauce and completely
agree with Harriet Van Horne who said "Cooking is like love. It should
be entered into with abandon or not at all."
15/0515; 5:00 pm: My son and
nephew are engrossed in a game of cricket with their grandparents. You can hear
their excited shouts all the way down the street. Someone hits a ‘sixer’ and
the ball is tossed out of the compound onto the main street. A lady on the
street, whose head the ball missed by a few inches, politely asks my dad if he
should really be playing cricket at his age. Amma meanwhile is busy pretending
to field, while trying to photograph the boys, who seem to defy gravity, as well as their their mothers'.
Ammumma is trying to coax the tulsi plant not to wither
away with water and words in equal measure. I stand apart, etching this scene
into my memory, forcing my brain to take in every detail, the neon green
cricket ball, the tinkle of ammuma’s bangles as she waters her plants, the look
of love glazed with a tinge of pride in achan’s eyes, when one of the boys bowls well, and I
want this evening never to end.
20/052015; 9:30 pm: We are all in the
bedroom, our little sanctuary from the unrelenting summer heat. The room is
cool with a bed big enough for 5 people to lie down quite comfortably. My
sister and I are getting our daily soap fix with big bowls of amma’s tender
coconut pudding. Ammumma is on one corner of the bed, her fingers busy combing
out my sisters hair. The boys are huddled together in another corner of the bed
with my father enthralling them with one of his hugely popular stories and amma
is blissfully asleep, curled up like a kitten. I look around the room and realize that this is one of those rare moments where I am, exactly where I want
to be.
“What would we have been doing
there, at this time amma?” asks my son tears threatening to well up in his eyes,
barely a day after we have returned from my mother’s place. I hold him close
and whisper “we would have been creating memories, one second at a time.”
*mambazha pulissery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dQm52yprNw
