Going Bananas

“This shit is bananas,

B-A-N-A-N-A-S”

-(Gwen Stefani, “Hollaback Girl”, 2004.)

Day 1:

Everyone needs a quarantine hobby, perhaps that’s why she took up baking banana bread to begin with. She’d tried other things, art, gardening, personal introspection and none of them seemed to really address the lack of direction she felt. So, she looks up a recipe and tries her best to replicate it, taking her mother’s help when necessary. The first loaf was fine, but it didn’t come out perfect or even close to the way Buzzfeed’s “Beautiful Bountiful Banana Bread to Bash your Blues” recipe looked.

Day 4:

She decides to try again. And again. And (to no one, but her local grocer’s surprise) again. She’d gotten pretty good at this point, the recipes came naturally to her, but there was still something missing. Maybe it was something political and righteous? She tries baking a loaf with brown sugar instead of white, and decides to use a natural vanilla extract- you know, not the clear kind. It came out tasting okay, but it lacked the right message she wanted to send.

Day 19:

After a few semi-successful tries to combine her previous quarantine hobbies with her current passion. And when art and gardening both failed, the former because of her lack of any artistic talent, and the latter because apparently it was against neighbourhood laws to start a plantation in their residential area. She then decides to try personal introspection one more time. While waiting for her 16th, or perhaps 19th loaf- she’d lost point at this count- she thinks about how she was creating real change. After all, wasn’t her lowly loaf a metaphor for an ideal society? It was just a combination of different ingredients from all walks of life combining together to create something as sweet and delicious as banana bread. And then, when the existential dread starts to inevitably seep in, she decides to prep another batch of bread, making sure to think only about things like crumb consistencies and the thought of going outside again.

Day 51:

A few weeks- or perhaps months (time wasn’t real anymore) later, this act of baking became second nature. She could bake in her sleep, and she did! Much to the astonishment of her parents, who saw their precious daughter stumbling through the kitchen as if possessed, muttering to herself about sugar to butter ratios.

Day 73:

“Why don’t you try something new?” Her dad asks, considerably tired of buying and eating all those bananas. Potassium had never felt so painful before, and yet, he couldn’t put her foot down. There was an almost scary, determined look in his daughter’s eyes, and with her hair- unbrushed, unwashed, and laden with little reminders of her baking journey- he decides to stay away.

Day 82:

Her parents try to distance her from the art. Taking away the ingredients never worked, she hid her stash in places they’d never think to look. So, instead they try to take away the oven and the microwave, thinking this could fix her. However it was mid July at this point, and the summer was hotter than precedented. She screams a thank you to climate change and the 4* C rise in temperature before directly pouring the batter onto the concrete outside their house, leading to a sun kissed, albeit strangely crunchy serendipity. She makes a note to maybe put the tin on the sidewalk next time- would easily avoid a few chipped teeth. As an afterthought, she considers planting multiple lines of banana trees (a plantaintion, she called it), as a sort of apology for the climate change comment.

“Please stop,” her parents beg. “We can’t keep buying all of these supplies. We haven’t eaten anything but banana bread in months,”

They were right. It had been exactly eight months since they’d eaten anything but banana bread, sometimes sweet, sometimes savoury, sometimes.. fishy? These experiments were getting out of hand.

Day 114:

At this point, her parents’ complaints didn’t seem to matter to her anymore. Her bread could save the world- but she had to find the perfect recipe. She’d tried almost everything with the recipe. Almost everything; there was just one thing she hadn’t tried, worried about the implications. Perhaps, this could be the thing that could make it perfect, everything else be damned.

She gives her parents a sidelong glance before picking up their cleaver — meant for special occasions and sometimes for carrots — and slowly approaches them.

-Sowmya Vaidyanthan