Swoon-worthy Salad
Decadently delicious
There is this child who feels that I still haven’t lost my touch and I can teach her how to score better in the IELTS, and she wants to meet me. She is no longer a child, of course. She is past twenty-five, but you know how teachers are. Every child I have taught is still my ‘child’, or ‘kid’.
The classroom, this time, is The Yellow Cup, the Salad Bar.
It is a tiny little, light-filled, airy place with no more than a couple of chairs and a table or two, with some high chairs looking out onto the street. They hand us a menu and a pen and we are supposed to tick the ingredients of our salad and then they mix it for us. There are categories like carbs and proteins and all kinds of hi-fi stuff which I have never paid attention to, in my life. Hence I choose all the fresh-cut fruits that I like the taste of, all the different coloured leaves I like the look of, then, all the nuts I like the crunch of, like walnuts, pecans, pumpkin seeds, balsamic vinaigrette, and honey mustard, and roast chicken.
When I am served with what I helped concoct, I feel slightly faint…the colours are so rich and variegated. The bowl is a huge white one, laid on a flat, wooden tray And then I have the first bite of it and am transported straight into orbit, without the need for spacecraft or satellite.
First, it is the crunch, and then the juices dissolve on your tongue and flow down your throat. The sweetness of the honey, the tartness of the vinaigrette, the gravelly feeling of crushed pumpkin seeds, the scrunch of roasted chicken, the fresh greenness of the iceberg and all the red, purple, pink leaves and the ambrosia of the juices that drip into the bottom of the bowl from the organic cornucopia that rests blissfully above it…
I swam and drowned and came up for air, and flew and sank to the bottom and floated into peace and joy so completely that it was a wrench to begin teaching Listening, Speaking, Writing, and Reading for the IELTS.
Sigh!
©️ 2022 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
Shoutout to Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) for this gut-wrenching and courageous story about an escape: and the sense of relief and self-affirmation in the last stanza, when she discovers that she doesn’t have to run away any longer.
