Food is a Language
by Teja
“Stupid question—” I warn my partner— “How do you cut ginger? Do you peel it?”
He’s standing over my dining table, spreading out old pizza dough over one of my oven sheets, slicing cherry tomatoes in neat halves. A few feet away from him, I’m hovered above the stove (on a step-stool for good measure), caramelizing onions in preparation for a butternut squash soup. My cat’s birthday party is set to begin in two hours, and I am unshowered, my hair unruly, an old pair of chemistry goggles strapped over my face to keep me from crying. ​
He teaches me how to peel garlic cloves the way his mother taught him, pressing a blade flat down until the skin falls away, in one clean swoop.
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I think of how these past few months, he has coaxed me to unfurl like this.
To come clean.
Hours later, we shuffle past each other, putting dishes away after the party. I wonder about living with him one day, how this dance will be something we perfect over time. I don’t even mind the stray beer cans, the half-eaten bowls left around the living room, because it reminds me of how many people showed up. When I go to clean the soup pots, I see there’s nearly none left.
Ever since I moved here, I’ve been trying to figure out why I ended up in this place.
These days, it feels easier to name.
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My first semester in Bloomington was rough, to say the least. I was 21, lived alone across town from my cohort, and hadn’t moved states since I was 10. Which is not to say I was unfamiliar with moving—my childhood was made up of two countries, three states—but I’d just thought by now, it would’ve gotten easier.
For the first time in years, I had to spend time with myself. And I had time to spend with myself. And so I started cooking.
I learned how much I could do in a tiny corner kitchen, how to arrange space just right, to place the cutting board right around the corner from the stove, so you could reach both. I learned my chemistry goggles were effective for preventing onion tears. How to make groups of spices for different flavor profiles, which side of the stove wasn’t safe to use, and which burner would heat up every time you turned on the oven. How to smell when the flame needed to rise, and when to let it simmer. How to cook for one.
Sometimes I watch my forearms with a rolling pin and wonder how many of my ancestors did this movement, what my muscles might remember, or carry.
I always wanted to be like my mother, who could smell and taste her way through any dish, who never looked at recipes. Like my grandmother, who made fresh food every day.
My family is not the type to say “I love you” on the phone. I tried that a few times in middle school, when I saw my white friends ending phone calls this way, and it never quite fit. Instead, we bring each other fruit. We show up to other people’s houses with sweets in hand.
There have been so many times my mother and I weren’t on speaking terms, and I crawled downstairs to eat dinner, angry that the food was so good, despite everything we had screamed at each other only hours before.
Past therapists have told me my mother and I are not so different from each other, despite the well of hurt between us. Both of us are afraid of words, of losing each other to them.
My first night ever in Bloomington, my parents and I got into a huge fight on 4th street, right before we were about to eat dinner. I left them there and stormed back to my new apartment, crying the whole way. My parents returned an hour later with takeout boxes for me full of mutton curry, which they knew was my favorite, knew to order for me. They brought me enough to last a few days, while I would settle into my new place. My mother began making me a plate, like nothing had happened.
This is not to say my parents and I don’t love each other, that they wouldn’t give up the whole world for me, that they haven’t already.
But I learned to love food first as a peacekeeper.
The thing that stays objective, despite the hands that make it.
This weekend, I will bring my partner home for the first time to meet my parents. I’ve never introduced someone I’m dating to them, and I’m nervous about every part of it. My parents are the strangest people I know, and while my partner comes from strange people of his own, what if our strangenesses don’t match?
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What if my parents don’t approve of this part of my life?
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They are far too used to not approving of me and my decisions, and I am far too used to doing things the way I want anyway.
When I remember the way my partner cooks, my worries begin to fade. I remember him sprinkling fresh basil over the focaccia he made, carrying a large pan of squash pasta to my cohort’s Friendsgiving, stopping at the World Foods market for harissa and shallots, showing me how to turn an omelet.
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One day when my parents see the food he makes, I really believe they will understand what sort of love he is capable of.
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His attention to detail, his willingness to try new things, his commitment to giving, his dedication to getting it right.
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Being in my last year of grad school now, and already having to think about moving again, even farther away from my hometown and my family, I am preparing to survive a winter alone again. How can I use my love of food to help me build a new community?
How can I use food to take home everywhere with me?
When I knew nobody in town here and needed someone to watch my cat, I repaid my next door neighbor for cat sitting by cooking her meals. I learned over time what she flavors she liked—how she wasn’t the biggest fan of spice, but chicken parmesan and eggplant reminded her of her dad. I would usually try and make her enough to last a few days, and it was a relief to me to not have to cook for just one. I also made one of first new friends in town by cooking with them. We’d bring our spare ingredients over to the other’s house, and make something up on the spot together. They taught me how to make their roommate’s peanut sauce recipe, how to press tofu and fry it, and I showed them how to make ratatouille. We’d pick ingredients together at the grocery store and make personal pizzas, dressing them up differently, then trying a slice of each other’s. Both of us were depressed, it was winter, it was getting dark at 5pm, and we were struggling to take care of ourselves.
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Food became a way we could take care of each other, in more ways than one.
Two Novembers later, I look around my apartment at everyone who showed up to my cat’s birthday party. I watch my roommate, a dear friend from back home, interact with my new MFA friends. I watch her and my partner sing karaoke together in front of the TV, trying to guess the lyrics. In the kitchen, my roommate’s physics friends use a green marker to vandalize the fridge. My cat sits on the yellow chair in the living room, watching all the noise around her.
I think about how if I’d never moved here, I never would have gotten this cat, these friends, never would have met any of these people.
I look around the mess of this place, the many opened candles, the disorganized pantry, my darkroom prints framed on the wall. Somehow, I have made every inch of it.
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My parents were not particularly warm to my partner, or not with words, at least. But all weekend, we ate, and I watched him eat Indian food with his hands: omelets my mother made with green chilies, idli with rasam, coconut and tomato chutney, naan and saag paneer, dosas fresh off the pan in my mother’s kitchen. My dad cut apple and mango slices for us, lectured us about eating enough fruit. One night, I took my partner to a party with at least four languages flying around: Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, and English. There too, we were well fed, and my best friend hummed approvingly, said she knew I’d never date someone who couldn’t eat with their hands. We played charades, guessing movie titles from all four languages, sounding out the syllables. On Sunday, as I watched him drive away, back to Bloomington, my mother came to the front door.
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“He already left?” she asked. “I had just finished making chai for us.”
This year for me has been centered on relationships, or rather, figuring out how to have them, how to keep them. I entered my first serious romantic relationship, a new experience for both me and my partner. I am learning how to better love and appreciate my parents, despite our differences, how to witness and hold their tenderness in whatever way they are capable of offering. How to hold myself, even when I am the most alone. How to negotiate moving so often and so fast, how to nurture my relationship with this place, even if it’s temporary.
I asked my partner yesterday to teach me how to make omelets as well as he does. We stood in his kitchen as I cut cherry tomatoes in halves, whisked egg yolks with milk, crushed feta with my hands. He showed me a spice he buys from this Wisconsin-owned spice store, told me how his parents know the owners, and we sprinkled it over the eggs on the pan while they were still runny, as he demonstrated how to run the edge of a spatula beneath the circumference. He cheered for me as I turned the omelet over to reveal a golden-brown skin, as I grated parmesan and plated it for him. As we sat down to eat, I took a photo for my parents, texted them that Brian taught me how to make it. Later, I realized it was the first omelet I’ve made that didn’t break.
Bloomington is the first time I’ve lived a state away from my parents. I came here to do an MFA in Poetry, a very different path than what my mother, a doctor, had imagined for me. But with our new distance, I see us reaching for each other in new ways. We are each trying on new forms of tenderness. Though we haven’t learned yet how to talk to each other about our feelings, she texts me good morning and good night nearly every day. I text her photos of things I’ve cooked, and when I visit home, she is glad to restock my spices, to give me a new spatula or rice cooker.
This is a language we have come to share, one of the only safe languages between us.
I didn’t end up in med school the way she had hoped (and still hopes, to this day), and I didn’t turn out to be straight, or even really a girl, and I probably won’t get married for a long time, but when I send her a picture of the channa masala, or the tomato rasam, or the beans poriyal that I made, I feel at least in one way like the Indian daughter she prayed for me to be.