What's on the plate?! #4
Love, Loss and Faisal's Aavakai Apple Pickle
A lot of times I am mistaken for being insensitive because of being non-emotive towards loss. I also get visibly uncomfortable if I have to console someone, however, close an acquaintance they are. Unsurprisingly, all that coping up is done through food. And I don’t just mean eating my feelings out! In my kitchen, you will find personal relationships in good measure. Feelings, tricks and tips carefully preserved in the form of ingredients, utensils and practices. More so, of people not around physically.
I lost my father almost a decade ago, but it is only in recent years that I have realized that we did not cook enough together in the kitchen. Or maybe that my mango market trips with him should have been a lot more. Whatever I can remember from our discussions around food and cooking, I try to preserve in my memory… but who knows how long it is going to last. The anxiety of losing foodways and kitchen practises in relationships is a cause that affects me a great deal and very recently, this anxiety resurfaced in a bitter-sweet manner.
Farahad Zama’s story But There Are Angels in the compilation Desi Delicacies: Food Writing From Muslim South Asia brings forth protagonist Faisal’s lamentation of lost homemade curries of his childhood. It is only after his divorce from his first wife and mother’s illness he realizes that:
“Sure, he could make a few, but they were never as good… His mother had learnt how to make those curries from her mother-in-law and had guarded those family recipes from everyone but her son’s wife. When his wife divorced him…she had taken away the children…by turning them against him. But, he thought, the loss of those family dishes - the curries, the biryanis, the breads and puddings of his childhood - were as great a loss as anything else. No one else made them quite the same way they had been made in his family for generations, and now he would never taste them again as long as he lived.”
The story starts and ends with Faisal and his second wife Katie visiting his mother (Mrs Ahmad) at the care home. They bring her homemade curd rice with a homemade apple pickle, made to replace the mango pickle they had run out of.
Mrs Ahmad doesn’t notice the difference in fruit because of her Dementia but she sure knows that the pickle tastes “a bit different.”
The paragraph quoted above hit a deep realization and I couldn’t stop myself from making the pickle. So here’s what I did with it:
