family – Page 2 – Mimi Mondal

20

I think houses are salvaged by windows thrown open and the sounds of laughter and good music ringing through the rooms. I’m impatient with my interest and awkward in prolonged company but complete isolation depresses me. I think I would be happiest left alone with a book in a room, balcony, staircase, windowsill, corner of the terrace with a party going on next door, content in the knowledge that people I know are having a good time but not quite requiring to circulate. I never really can decide if I am a people lover or a recluse. I enjoy people but sometimes I think I enjoy them only as a concept, in my own time and at my own pace, like people in the books. Sometimes, that’s not really a bad thing.

People in my house have always known how to leave each other alone while miraculously never quite losing track. (Sometimes, that’s not really a bad thing.) The miraculousness of it strikes me more and more with every day I spend in the ‘outside world’, with its elaborate rituals of calling-backs, returning visits, replying emails and the constant terrifying back-and-forth, back-and-forth of everything. I want to lie down in a field of long grass in the rain with my eyes tight shut to the world and my iPod plugged into my ears except that I’m sure that the rain will ruin the iPod and my maid will complain about mud on my clothes and Ma will chase me about for days with gentle reproach and cloying cough syrup and these nagging fears with never let me drown in peace. Why do we always have to come back to reality, why?

I also have to finish cleaning my room which has been only half cleaned which means everything from the shelves has been crashed down on the floor. *Sigh* and *sigh*.

This is a post title.

210710210710 Miminality4 Comments

Yesterday Baba made narkol diye ilish machh (Borishaali, apparently) for dinner. I love when Baba cooks and doesn’t forget that I cannot eat jhaal, so the red chilli powder (or ground pepper, or slivers of chopped green chilli and variant thereof) begs to go easy on, despite the compromise of culinary integrity incurred therefore (a great sin, as far as my father is concerned).

It made me smile the way Baba prowled happily around the dining table radiating a triumphant halo while we ate and occasionally nudging Ma: ‘Borishaali, hNu hNu baba, Borishaali, bujhechho?’ The recipe was doubtlessly off a book or magazine, but it reminded me of a long time ago when my parents just couldn’t come to an agreement about whether the day-to-day food at home should be cooked the epaar Bangla way or the opaar Bangla way. I grew up around steadily lengthening lists of “weird things your Baba’s people eat” and “weird things your Ma’s people eat”, most of the items on which I don’t even recall because what I was demanding all that time was pizza. I half-suspect there’s a secret mutual list of “weird things the children eat”, topped off with the incomprehensible mantra that either cheese or chocolate makes everything better.

Hmm. Baba is very devious, in subtle ways I always failed to observe when I was younger. (He’s also energetic and explosive, and energetic and explosive people turn me into a completely puzzled neurovore). I think Baba doesn’t want me to go away to Dilli, though verbally he is being very encouraging, nearly runs off to buy flight tickets. I think I will let him cook a few more nonchalant dinners, Borishaali or otherwise, as long as he doesn’t find out that I’ve declined already.

11

190710040810 MiminalityLeave a comment

My youngest niece was born on my birthday, in a small suburban town in midwest America where my cousin and her husband live. I have not seen her. My (presumably) oldest niece has recently got admitted to my university with some kind of engineering. I do not know her name. This girl too I have never met or seen in any photograph, or known of her particular existence till a few minutes ago. I am a woman rich in unseen (unmet, unknown) nieces.