It's me!
When we were growing up, we spent a lot of our vacations right in our vast Goan “backyard”. We either went to hotels, used a family friend’s timeshare, went to the beach or to another family friend’s wilderness hut where 10-15 adults and kids slept in close quarters to the sound of rushing water from the stream behind the house. Sometimes, we went to shop in Bombay.
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I sprained my ankle at the beginning of June. I was hiking and the sandals I was wearing didn’t hold my left foot very comfortable. As a result of all that walking + weak hips, I twisted it just a little bit. It was enough for me to tear a ligament but not as badly as if I fell right on top of it. I managed to catch myself (thank you shoulders) and it was all good.
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I factory reset my phone 2 weeks ago. It alerted me that it would stop working as a phone should if I didn’t. I made all the necessary saves and uploaded all the selfies I didn’t want to lose. I made sure my WhatsApp was backed up so I would never lose the few messages my dad sent me since I got this phone and he got WhatsApp. That’s all I cared about, really.
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I recently wrote a personal essay/review of Priya Krishna’s new book Indian-ish – a book she wrote with her amazing mother Ritu. The article made it to the Everett Herald, a local newspaper here in Boring land. Oh sorry, I meant Boeing.
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My memory has gotten so much better and so much worse with time. I attribute the latter with how much I use my phone. When I’m on it, I cannot piece together parts of a conversation I just had. I can’t complete my sentences and I genuinely feel lost until I put it down and yes, forget about it.
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My nephew (two years old in less than three weeks!) does this thing where he covers his eyes tightly when faced with something he deems unpleasant. At one time it was a person who half-chided him for doing something he wasn’t supposed to at a get-together. For the rest of the party, my sister said, every time Jacob came face to face with him he covered his eyes. More recently, it was a bowl of mixed fruit. He wanted only the papaya so he shut his eyes while he was being fed anything other than what he wanted….
I sat at the dining table, my grandmother diagonally across from me that evening. A woman of 70-something, she hated to be alone. She would complain about it a lot when we had to go back to school after mid-term breaks or summer vacations. After I moved to Bombay to study, it was the same thing. That fear was part of her mental illness that consumed her every day. I didn’t notice it enough. I was young and self-absorbed. But that evening – like many others – she opened up about more than her insecurities.
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The season of summer always feels like a fight against time, a race to accomplish, a bucket list to tick off. I usually succumb to it all but not this year. This year my goal has been to take pleasure in the simple daily privileges I am afforded to grieve, to rejoice at growth and to discover what has always been in front of me. I have been lamenting (to myself) the lack of inspiration I have been feeling when it comes to food. The one thing I most relate to feels like a burden. I have so much respect for all the Vietnamese, Salvadorean, Japanese, Thai, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and so many more immigrant-owned restaurants who work hard daily (and are forced) to keep their prices low so that I can feed myself without guilt from time to time. I have respect for them for various other reasons but this is a top one. Tip well, folks….
I’ve been wasting so much time getting this pizza dough recipe to your kitchen. I’m happy to report that the wait is over. I don’t know how it feels for the rest of the world when it comes to completing tasks but I usually build them up so much in my head that I want nothing to do with them when the time comes. That’s not to say that this recipe is all hype. It’s been a vehicle for lots of delicious toppings and it’s now ready for its international debut. I thought of keeping the recipe for my future cookbook (which is a dream, by the way) but what the heck. I have had too much anxiety over dying in the last few months. Enough to not wait to share the good things with you.
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