Outlet

My charger doesn’t fit so well in the outlets here. They are more rounded than the outlet allows them to be. I could very well buy a new one, exactly according to the standards of this new world.

But then what will I do with the connector that my father had me pack when I was leaving? The connector my mom was paranoid I would forget, so she asked me almost 10 times when set on an hour journey to the airport.

When leaving, she asked if it was in the right pocket so that I could access it before the battery runs out. The shape of the socket doesn’t match, and that is the only highlight. I mean, the color sure is a little off, but it’s a little old now.

I always carry it with me in my bag everywhere I go.

I was never this paranoid about batteries; what if my father, who rarely calls, didn’t go through? What if my worried mother calls and I turn the internet off to save the charge as I’d be getting off late from work? What if the guy I left thousands of kilometers away calls me, but my phone allows no calls that require internet with a charge below 5% to save up for emergencies?

While we are on that topic, can someone show me how to let my phone know that a call from your long-distance boyfriend is just as important as an emergency situation? ‘I cannot do this anymore’ one more missed call could knock the breath out of me; it terrifies me just as much as being hit by a bus while I jaywalk.

I breathe every day in this world that isn’t alien anymore but not quite home either, so that one day I could return to the world where I wouldn’t look at my phone screen to see the face of the man I love, where running out of battery would mean I am heading home sooner than I told my dad I would, where my mom won’t be paranoid when the calls don’t get through, and where my charger won’t need a connector anymore to fit the outlets on the wall.

The red chair

The red chair in the corner of the room used to bring me comfort. My dad, when I was 7, brought that chair home. It was a gift from his office. I agree that it’s a weird thing to give as a gift to the employees, but I was too young to notice that. It was the first chair with wheels and the one that roams around the whole room without having to walk. Pushing it while sitting on it was more effort, but I enjoyed it.

While my family sat on the dining table chairs, I sat on them during dinner. The red was a little dark to make the stains from the oily food that I clumsily dropped visible. Thank God for that, or else I would have lost the seat way earlier than I did. I lost the seat to him. With his baby face and havoc-wreaking tantrums. The chair, just by rolling, could calm the devil in the form of my brother. He loved sleeping in it. To prevent him from falling off, the chair was given walls and a gate made from the coziest pillows I owned.

It took me a solid couple of months to build a bridge between us, but after I did, the chair suffered. Now it bore the weight of two souls. We slept on it, ate on it, and played games with it. One too many afternoons pretending that the chair is a trolly and pushing ourselves while on it with all the strength I got in me across the room, which resulted in 14 vases and 2 mirrors in shreds, the chair was our very own adventure park.

On days when he would miss mom when she was off at work, I would wear the scarf the same way mom does, with nothing visible except for the bridge of the nose and eyes, only for that bridge to be hidden by the glasses. I would pretend to be her, and he fell asleep on the very same chair, knowing that Mummy was here and she’ll be here when I wake up. I became his sister through the chair; I became his best friend because of it; and I learned to be his part-time mother on this very same cushioned chair.

With time, numerous oily food stains and races from one end of the common room to the other, and an unhealthy number of naps that resulted in aching backs, we grew old. It looked like it had aged and been exhausted. It was us who were not letting Mummy throw the chair wheezing out of the house on the curb for someone to pick it up with damages on it beyond repair. It cannot bear our weight anymore; all of us have aged. The hardback became soft, the cushion was worn out, and the handles on the side had become loose.

Now he sits on it alone. He is too big for us to sit on it together. We have come a full circle. We again fight for the seat, though this time I don’t have to hold my power back. The cushions have returned, and the backrest has served its purpose to the fullest extent. The bond has only grown stronger with time: endless hair pulling, fist fights, and ‘mummy’ screams when I am losing. I’ve always won.

I left home, but the chair still resides by the study table that used to be mine. Now, every time he sits, it leaves him with an unsettling feeling. There is no one to fight with before sitting on it. Mom still wants to throw it out, but he won’t let her. The thing that strikes me: on the day upon my arrival, I found a desk sitting outside the room, still for me to make it mine, with a chair in deep red sitting next to it. It now resides in the corner of my room, with some clothes resting on the backrest because this one lacks the softness that home provided. Once, a room full of people sitting on the truth-revealing chairs migrated here. It doesn’t matter if you left years ago, so young that your home is merely a faint painting amongst the foggy memories of running around in the corridors, or if you left just months before this truth-promising session had asked us to ponder, ‘What is your home?’

Home is the red chair. Home is fighting with your brother, not to win (I win every time though), but just for the sake of it. Home is racing across the room in the most unsafe way possible. Home is spinning on the chair till your world starts spinning even after the chair has gone still. Home is taking naps that hurt your back and extremities. Home is the red chair.

To the Trinket that isn’t so small

Triggers: epilepsy, hospital, seizure.

It is white in color. It’s a little dirty now as it hangs on the chain of the bag, which I use the most. I think of washing it, but every time I do the laundry, it’s in such a rush that I forget to do so. It looks so much like Baymax, the one in the movie Big Hero 6. My Masi had gifted it to me, so there is no way she knew who that was, but she had gotten some or the other small trinkets for each one of us. Three for each of her offspring, and then one for two of the other Masi’s offspring, and then the other two for me and my brother, who is annoyingly the most loved by every single person existing in that room.

Baymax goes with me everywhere I go.

It was with me when I spent a whole 20 days in the hospital after having my first epileptic seizure, and no one knew what had happened. Mom had packed a change of clothes in that bag, and the trinket stayed with me until I left the house with an epilepsy diagnosis. The triggers remained unknown, and the treatments were still experimental. All I knew was that Baymax was the thing that brought me comfort. It stayed with me all the time, just like the narcotic-level drug that was supposed to cure me or keep me from turning into a self-destructive ball.

The first day of university after the coronavirus outbreak. I was nervous. I had been to the university campus before but this was the first time being there as a student and I was scared. Just like a kid is on the first day of school so was I scared of the unknown people. Scared that I would get to call even one of them my friend today itself. the bag and Baymax had tagged along with me. My very own support group. Not that I would sit in the corner not talking to anyone but Baymax but it was comforting knowing that Baymax was on my bag and if Baymax is here I’ll be fine.

As I nervously walked in there was a smiling face looking at me. I smiled back. Thinking, ‘Oh so I made a friend already?’

“That is Baymax isn’t it? On your bag?” said the girl in a striped dress and rounded glasses.

“No, but it looks extremely similar doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. It totally does.” She extends her hand “Afsha.”

“Dhanu”

Baymax with that reassuring smile gave me confidence and a friend I today far far away call very frequently. The reminiscing makes us laugh about how it was one small trinket that ignited this friendship. Baymax is a little old now, from white to the journey till off-white has been completed but washing it feels like a sin. A sin only I will bear the weight of. The memories it holds and the loving hands that have touched it would seem lost if the color changed to white again. Feels a little too unhygienic but the thought of it not smelling like Afsh’a perfume anymore doesn’t sit right.

As I sit here on a wooden bench with nothing but the sea in sight, the initials of love-stricken people carved on the bench remind me of him, who very well did, in fact, call me last time to say, ‘I can’t do this anymore’. On land that is completely strange to me, thousands of miles away from Masi, the annoying cousins, and my mom and dad, I keep Baymax with me. He still rides the bus with me when going home from a late night at work or in the morning from the night outs, and I am still unsure if the things said and done are real or something made up. The water in the ocean ebbs and flows as I sit here to decide if I am sad, homesick, depressed, or about to get my period. Though I could squeeze Baymax in my fist, it holds my heart and health more carefully than life ever has.

A trinket that isn’t so small.

A cooker that whistles

This was one of the first times I had entered the kitchen to learn how to cook. Mom was worried I wouldn’t be able to survive if I were left alone because all I knew how to make was a very irregular-shaped roti and Maggie (instant noodles; its packet said it was cooked in 2 minutes, but it took me a solid 15 minutes to make them). Both things were enough for me to survive for a month at least, but to my mom, it was a close death call. I didn’t know how to make edible curries out of vegetables, which we ate every day. So I started the journey of my cooking lessons.

The first few lessons just included me making rotis and attempting to make them perfect in the shape of a circle. The easiest part, might I add? Then we started the chemistry lessons. Aka cooking vegetable curries, where the right quantity of spices is needed to be added at the right moment. Or else they would be overcooked and burnt or undercooked and would not release enough taste, resulting in the most sinful taste to exist in Indian cuisine: bland food.

The adding of spices was fun and games when I was just acting as a medium to put them in the cooker, and it was mom like a devil and an angel on each of my shoulders telling me when to add them in what quantity. Then, on the very second day, I was asked to do it all by memory. The curry was not the same, but the method was the same. I was scared not because everyone would have to eat imperfect food for dinner, but because when she tasted it, she would be disappointed in me, and I would have to bid my dreams of living alone goodbye once and for all. After heavy sweating and stressful cooking sessions, it was finally time to sit and eat.

It was Sunday, and everyone was already seated at the table and waiting for the hot food to be served. Mom had already tasted the uncooked curry and was happy with the taste. I can dare say she was proud of teaching me. I set the table and was left with the hot cooker without her supervision, and then came the blast. Blast that colored everyone a burning yellow. There were some on the ceiling, too. The sound was like the bursting of a firecracker on Diwali. The ingredients were completely different, I can assure you based on first-hand experience. I was scared, not because of the sound but because Mom had a confused look on her face, which I knew would turn boiling red. To my surprise, she cracked, laughed, and queued my father and grandma. I turned red.

To this day, after 10 months of living alone, I leave the cooker alone after 3 whistles, and then I turn the stove off. Let it cool down. Double-check, making sure there is no air left in it that could cause the yellow blast again. It was the first thing she had packed in my 20-kg bag. I was to fly 8000 km away from her, her kitchen, and her supervision. She was sure I would survive alone, make the curries, and not have any repetitions of blasts from the infamous Sunday dinner. A story she told Nani, Masi, and Kaku in extreme detail. Probably a better job than I am doing right now. This fear of Mom where I wasn’t able to cook and wouldn’t be able to live alone that too this far away got me to learn how to make curries. these curries have turned out to be the only remainder of my home that I can still have with me. As the days pass the taste of home, the taste of food made from the hands of Mom makes me homesick. Bit by bit.

The cooker’s bottom is black now. The insides are a little burnt and the rice I am not prone to burning while making the laziest food of all time is still stuck, refusing to be removed from the cooker. How wonderful it is that a cooker was more important to a mother while packing than a jacket that till now has saved me from one too many possibilities of hypothermia. As days pass the day when I receive a parcel from home comes closer. The day when I will have a lot of spices hand wrapped by mom so that my food would taste somewhat like what it does like when mom makes it.

The mental note of how many whistles it has been if  3 then it is time to turn the stove off for the rice put on, if 3 for the daal then wait for one more, but if there is one that you missed the food goes south. With countless afternoons spent in the kitchen waiting for the whistles while mom goes and starts with the laundry because she is late for work, my brother and I had a pile of games in the corner to play while we waited. For the cooker to do the dirty dance and whistle.

Later, I learned from Nani that when she was learning to cook, she did the exact same thing. The only difference is that she did it after her marriage.