Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 23/strong>
FICTION
by Rifah Tashfia
The cream colored bowl held the steaming, almost translucent yellow broth with traces of white, garnished by an array of green onions slashed in an angle. After a long day running with kids in the playground, a tiring day at college, a long day at work, through shivers and bouts of fever, this simple soup was what made it all better. This soup was there at her highs and lows. It brightened up her day like no other–until it didn’t.
The last time the cream colored bowl was served in front of her by hands that had turned wrinkly, she walked out the door with her bag over her shoulder, leaving it untouched. Maybe she would have sat on that wooden seat one last time and devoured it as her nanu watched her with kind eyes, only if she had known. That when she’d come home stumbling late that day, after 13 missed calls from the milkman, the neighbor, the shopkeeper down the street that her nanu wasn’t to be found and there was no answer to the knocks on their door, she would find the bowl as it was there–just cold–almost freezing in the temperature. Was it the weather, or just her heart that had started to turn cold, in fear of what she would find? Her nanu on her old bed, limp, eyes closed, and still smiling?
Grief sneaks in your body in many ways. It wraps around your brain and controls your motion. It makes your head go crazy and not see reason. The bowl would have remained in the spot forever if her aunt hadn’t wiped the place clean before family and friends came to mourn their loss.
Afterwards, despite a thousand tries, no amount of soya sauce, salt, pepper, broth, or green onions was enough to recreate the flavour that once healed her heart. Sometimes she got mad at her nanu for being selfish; for not leaving the recipe behind, for not slapping the back of her head and forcing her to finish the bowl before she left that day.
She gripped the edge of the kitchen counter tightly until her knuckles whitened. People leave us in many ways, but even after their exit, they linger in the air: their smell on their clothes, their bedsheet, the angle of the picturebook on the nightstand, the way their shoes remain perfectly aligned beside the bed, the empty cup of tea that must have rolled beneath the bed when it slipped their hand before they surrendered to eternal sleep.
Their phantom presence haunts us forever.
