It’s the second consecutive year I cannot be with my sister on her birthday, and dwelling in the intimacy of our memories, particularly our culinary experiments, is my way of having her present with me
Our Thursday morning ritual involved an imaginary television crew that filmed us as we narrated our recipes. Representation pic
This morning I woke up exhausted from dreaming. Once again that familiar trope. I am in a dark, dingy examination hall in a government-run school in Kurla. There’s a surprise test for which I am totally unprepared. The format is multiple choice and has something to do with general knowledge and I find myself asking the same question, to whom is this kind of knowledge ‘general’ or even ‘generic’. Everyone around me is cheating. I try but am unsuccessful. I don’t have the skill for it, but I remember feeling comforted by the gesture of someone assuming I might actually know something. I feel solidarity in my helplessness. I remember a New Yorker cartoon, a professor standing in front of a blackboard that has the words Final Exam underlined. He is addressing his students. The text reads, “I’d like to extend a special welcome to those of you who are joining us for the first time, as part of a nightmare you’re having.” I wondered, when I woke up, whether my dream had been triggered by my encounter with the cartoon a day ago, or whether it was a psychic manifestation of stress. It took me a while to really awaken, but when I did, mostly motivated by hunger, two words floated in my brain before making their way to my tongue—French Toast.
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As I walked from my bedroom to the kitchen, stopping, en route, to wash my dream-drenched face, I had already summoned the memory of my father’s version of French Toast. He always uses two bowls, one for the milk and sugar mixture, the other for the beaten egg, and he almost always used ladi pav, slicing it up, dipping it lovingly in the milk, then the beaten egg, then frying it until it was lightly caramelised, but not so long it stopped being juicy. I struggled to successfully recall the last time he made me this particular breakfast. I cracked open an egg, holding my breath for fear it might have already moved to an embryonic stage (my father-in-law’s farmer friend who keeps gifting us eggs told us his chicken had been sitting on this batch for three days). As I prepared the mixture in which the sliced whole wheat bread would be drowned before meeting the hot buttered surface of the pan, I thought of my sister. Through most of our school years she and I spent Thursday mornings experimenting with eggs. It was our thing. Thursday was when our school took the day off. We had the luxury of waking up late, unlike every other school day, when we would be up at 6 am and our mother cooked us breakfast, tied our hair, packed our dabbas and sent us off before leaving for work.
My partner likes to retell a story I once told him. I was probably about five years old, my sister a year younger. Both our parents worked while Mangala would watch over us through the day. One morning she was late and we were hungry. Being the older sister I turned on the stove, heated up a frying pan, and broke an egg. I may have also made a second one (we called them sun-eggs). I don’t know if Mangala arrived mid-breakfast or after. She was justifiably livid that we had turned on the gas on our own. Anything could have happened. She was angry and my sister and I couldn’t quite empathise with why. We had seen our parents turn on the gas every day. Nothing about it seemed especially dangerous. I like the story because it reminds me of my resourcefulness. But it also was the beginning of many narratives that involved my sister and I being partners in accidental crimes.
Our Thursday morning ritual involved two eggs, other ingredients, and an imaginary television crew that filmed us as we narrated our recipes. We tried out many different ways of scrambling eggs, making omelets, French toast, and other breakfast things. We were evolving our repertoire. I am not sure if either of us has ever stopped doing that. I know, for example, that I keep trying to perfect my scrambled eggs. Now I make them in a manner more in keeping with culinary school techniques, first whisking the eggs with butter in a pan over low heat, then gently adding milk to enhance their creamy texture. As kids we did it the way we’d seen my father do, first heating butter and milk, then adding the eggs which he would then scramble. While I like how my version turns out, I am still a huge fan of my father’s method. When I spent time with my brothers in Dubai some years ago, I felt so delighted to see my oldest brother making breakfast every morning for my niblings, alternating between scrambled eggs and pancakes. Sometimes, when I’m totally alone in our apartment in Tramin, I like to fry slices of ripe banana in butter till they are perfectly caramelised but haven’t lost their structural integrity. I pour over a dollop of cream and a pinch of powdered cinnamon. It’s one of the techniques I use to summon my mother.
It’s the second consecutive year I cannot be with my sister on her birthday, and dwelling in the intimacy of these memories is my way of having her present with me.
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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