Skip to main content

Dessert Day

First thing in the morning yesterday scrolling through my RSS feed, I read about National Dessert Day. Back in Kolkata it is Navami and had I been home, there would be no dearth of mishti on such occasion. All at once I felt a longing for Pujas past, not what I would run into today but the way it used to be when I was a kid. The friends I went pandal-hopping with, the rides on the fairground and eating street food until we were stuffed to the gills. Interesting that the pictures of blueberry cobbler and key-lime pie would act as a trigger for things so far and removed from them. But the remnants of that wave of nostalgia stayed with me past the work day and I made a run to the up and coming Indian grocery store in my town. No surprise that the place was busy and the parking lot almost full. People were shopping for Dussehra. Just the twenty or so minutes I spent there picking up some sweets, I had a chance to dip into the closest thing to the nostalgia that had got me here. 

I imagined most people at the store were recalling some time in their own past when they had celebrated this holiday with family and friends. They were all trying to recreate that feeling best they could. We were all there will common purpose and impetus even but that was all. I remained infinitely far away from Pujas of times past. I recalled our group of three that was once so tight. S lives in Canada- she married very young, even before completing college. N lives in Delhi and teaches at one of those New Age holistic schools. 

I have not been in touch with either of them for a long time. Part of me wanted to reach out tell them I thought of them and then realized people come to be at very different places in their lives and such outreach may be out of place. Even thinking about what I might write highlighted the absurdity of the idea. But against my better instincts, I did sent a short note to N and she replied with a single word skipping even the greetings for the occasion - the warmth of childhood was long gone to be replaced with something I did not recognize in the person who used to be my best friend in middle school.

So this post is for childhood friends who bring joy from memories they helped make long after we had drifted apart, become strangers to each other and have nothing more than a word left to say. 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more