by Parul Shah
Part-1
We stopped leaving the garage door open when we were cooking because I told my mom the police were saying criminals had been stealing equipment from garages. My dad was away on an engineering work contract in Dubai like half the Uncles I knew, so we kids were left to help our moms with everything from house maintenance to legal compliance. Back then there was no internet and overseas phone calls to Dubai were expensive, so there were a great many things left unreported to the dads. To compensate for this lack of communication, my mom and all the Aunties dutifully reported everything and anything to each other, forming an Alief-wide Desi wives network. They’d spend several hours a day stretching the extra long coil of their kitchen’s wall-mounted phones as they tended to house work and the just-as- important work of informing one another whose husband was laid off and who’s contract was renewed, when Fiesta would be getting the next shipment of good mangoes, and where Coke was on sale this week.
Most aunties in Alief didn’t work outside the house, but half of the Desi aunties in Alief ran a side hustle from their home. There were several other aunties running mini catering businesses, like my mom. One or two had some kind of jewelry business because their family in India were in the business. You could narrow down which ones likely sold gold or diamonds because they had metal bars on their windows and doors. Of course not everyone who had caged their houses were brown jewelry dealers, some were scared white people who hadn’t yet moved to Sugar Land or Katy, those were emerging suburbs with fewer crimes and less brown people. A handful of the more self-assured aunties had secured real estate licenses and begun catering to Desi clientele who were also moving to Sugar Land or Katy. Then there was an auntie who ran an unlicensed beauty salon in her guest bedroom, mostly she threaded eyebrows and female mustaches. Bikini waxes weren’t a thing, at least officially, because nobody would go to a fellow Desi to get it done. Hell, just shaving your legs was a confession of interest in attracting the opposite sex, which was a super terrible interest to have. “Besharam!”, shameless!, the aunties would cluck judgmentally at Hindi movie actresses wearing shorts and tube tops. But I heard some Desis living here in Alief got more than their arms waxed, and I thought how they must be absolutely fearless to be so besharam. I secretly admired the beautician auntie who served the besharam among us, quietly and without judgement tending to whatever a woman needed done in order to feel good. I wished my mom was a beautician doing modern American things instead of a cook making Desi food as if we were all still in India.
My mom had lugged two oversized, overweight bags stuffed with jumbo stainless steel pots and masala from India in order to authentically cook naasta, snacks, and typical Gujju food like daal and tamaata-bataata shaak for people’s parties. Before going to India to visit her parents, she had fresh red chillies, ajwain, cinnamon, cardamom, black pepper, and other seeds and pods delivered to my grandparent’s rooftop back in Valsad so they could roast under the sun for a week. When she arrived, she called three women over for two days to ground all the masala using a giant stone mortar and pestle. She sat up there on the baking hot rooftop to supervise them, nitpicking about every little thing. I’d never seen my mom be the boss of anyone so this was interesting. Back in Houston she exhibited a stealthy fear of authority figures, and a lot of people fell under this category. White people in general, police, security guards, teachers, doctors, receptionists, and grocery store clerks were seen as people to be obeyed. But for her masala, she scaled her wall of fear and straight-up lied to the US Customs officer and said we didn’t have any uncooked agricultural products in our luggage. I wasn’t sure if the spices counted but I knew for sure the plant roots of half a dozen Desi veggies we had wrapped with some good Desi soil intact was definitely uncooked so I had tugged at her sari to remind her about that, to which she responded by stomping on my foot.
It would probably crack actual criminals up to learn that my mom feared them stealing her pots and fresh masala stored in our rusty old SEARS garage fridge, but I knew that to my mom this was a very plausible criminal plot. From within those steel pots she dished out her self-worth. “Eh-vuh-reee wun liked my kadhi soooo much,” she’d report to her children as if we had asked.
My mom had been married off a month before graduating from college. She met my dad once, they ate dhosas at a snack shop on their one and only “date” before their parents fixed a wedding date to fit within my dad’s three week wife-hunting trip to India. My mom had hoped to complete her degree in another month but his time was more important than hers from the start, I guess. So this vegetarian, non-English speaking, twenty-year old, high school graduate moved to America with a man she had known for two weeks. My dad tried to make her eat hamburgers in order to fit into America and also because back then there were no stores where you could buy Indian groceries. She resisted and figured out how to make Indian food by improvising with American groceries. Over time, she built a reputation and other Desis started asking her to cater for their parties. The steel pots were my mom’s gold. Of course she could imagine someone wanting to steal them.
The truth of why we cooked with the garage door closed was that one day when Henry Lopez and I were walking home from the bus, he had sniffed the air and groaned “EWWWWW!” and then pretended to gag and vomit as he shouted “Something smells like a gigantic FART!”.
