The Hindi-Bindi Club by Monica Pradhan Page A

eyes cross, so let’s stick with this abridged
Hooked On Phonics
lesson and take my word that Bengalis have their reasons for pronouncing
sandesh
as
shawn-dhaysh
.
    I tweaked Mom’s family recipe for my own taste. The
sandesh
I had when we visited Kolkata commemorated my cousins passing their exams. Sweetened with newly harvested paundra sugarcane, shaped like conch shells, and packed in rice for freshness. I subtracted those steps and added chocolate—I find anything and everything tastes better dipped in, or slathered with, chocolate.
    Making
chhana,
I try to think happy, pleasant thoughts, but a gnawing desperation claws at me. What if I can’t do it? What if I can’t produce what’s expected of me?
    Art is my life’s purpose. Without it…I shake my head. I don’t want to go there.
    I concentrate on the
sandesh
. I roll the truffles in cocoa powder and crushed pistachios. Drizzle on melted chocolate. Make another smoothie. Add a splash of rum. Then a more generous splash. Go to my studio. Try to work again. Create stuff only my mother could love. Return to the kitchen. Do a shot. Get toasted. Still, nothing worth keeping. Flop onto the love seat. Fling an arm over my eyes.
    I want my mommy.
             
    W hen I was little, I was my mother’s shadow. An only child, I was the center of her world, and she was mine. I followed her everywhere. If she shut me out of the bathroom, I sat outside the door and cried, whined, or wiggled my fingers under the crack until she came out. Every week she took me on field trips to the park, the library, the grocery store, and the fresh fish market.
    I loved to watch her prepare Bengali food. When she cooked, she removed her rings and set them on the window-sill in a bowl of salt water. On her left hand, she wore her wedding band—gold with seven channel-set diamonds. On her right, she wore a white sapphire on her middle finger and a red coral called a
paula
on her ring finger. When preparing a large quantity, she sat on the kitchen floor and impaled such legumes as cauliflower, potatoes, and eggplant over a
bonti
—a contraption with a curved upright blade that served as an old-fashioned, manual food processor. Different dishes required different shapes.
    “When I’m a grown-up, I’ll chop all the vegetables, Mommy,” I said, puffing out my chest.
    “Okay, but until then, you glue your bottom on that stool.” She positioned my stool at a safe distance, and I wasn’t allowed to get up until she put the serrated knife away, out of my reach.
    She let me stand on a chair at the counter when she rolled wheat dough into perfect rounds for
luchis—
puffy fried bread. She would give me a little ball to knead and flatten with my mini rolling pin, which was better than Play-Doh because I could eat it, though I never got the hang of shaping my dough into a neat circle. The odd shapes I created made my mother laugh and say, “If you hope to marry a Bengali, we’ll have to work on this.”
    Fish was the singlemost recurring item on my mother’s menu. Fish in a sweet mustard sauce was her specialty. She never ate or prepared beef. She said that for her, eating a cow was like eating a dog or a horse. “If one day you move to another country where people, given plenty of options, choose to eat dog burgers and horse steaks, could you learn to do it?”
    No, I couldn’t. And neither could she.
    If not for my father and me needing a bit more variety, she would have served fish every day, every meal, even for breakfast, she loved it that much. Sometimes when Dad or I complimented her on a particular fish dish, she would say, “One day we will visit Calcutta, and you will taste
hilsa,
the best fish in the world.”
    My father would pat her hand, hug her, or kiss her cheek. “We will, honey. We will.”
    We didn’t go to Calcutta until I was ten because, after my mother eloped with my father, her father said she was dead to him, and as long as he was alive, she should never come