Savoring Hope
Days of lockdown would get anyone’s mood bleak. Especially one like me, a typical extrovert with a burning hate towards anything monotonous. But a year had already passed, Covid had killed and Covid had mutated. Covid had taken away a year of my campus life without any intention ever of giving me a taste of it again. As I laze from one day to the next switching between the same two apps on my smartphone, I realized I had lost something. Sure, I had lost purpose but that was an established fact by now. It was something else. I stared onto the rotating blades of my fan set forever at speed five and tried to decipher the answer to the question posed to me by my own brain. It seemed as if whole seasons were passing outside, night and day cycles, the flooding of the entire world followed by an ice age that destroys all life while I looked deep into the cosmos through the gateways opened by my Bajaj ceiling fan to discover the answer to what part of myself I had lost.
Thankfully, my savior knight — my grandmother who I call amooma came to shove me out of this dreadful trance unto which I might have been lost fore, if not for her then maybe forever. I looked outside and it seemed as if life had been reborn to the exact same even after the previous destruction that my mind had brought. Anyway, being brought back into my earthly senses, I started feeling quite hungry and so I hopped on behind amooma. In this world of repetition, she seemed as the last crusader determined to cling onto the old dying ways of unpredictability. There was simply no saying what she would cook for lunch. She could whip out curries and dishes effortlessly like a magician performing the most basic of any card tricks. Today there was a rather big smile on her face. Study of facial behaviors was among the many things I wanted to pursue in my life but had to be put on a halt due to the pandemic. However, that extra two centimeters of my amooma’s lips stretching wide definitely meant something. Sorry to be creepy there. Anyway, she turned sideways and pointed at a big vessel.
The sight was bewildering. It was as confusing as it was wonderful. Confusing because I had no idea how she procured it in a triple lockdown that has lasted forever and wonderful because I absolutely loved that dish. Having not fully recovered from my meditative trip to the cosmos via the Bajaj gateway combined with the shock I was experiencing at the moment, I did the unthinkable. I put my smartphone away. Then I carefully placed a good portion of the dish onto another plate and carried it sacredly to the backdoor of my house. I sat on the steps facing at my backyard and looked out. I took one piece and put it into my mouth. As my teeth chewed slowly onto the meat, I felt my senses awaken. My fingers could feel the masala and my tongue could taste it. My nose could smell the aroma and my ears could hear my chewing. It was not an explosion of taste in my mouth as you see in the commercials. I am reminded more of a river slowly and steadily eroding and clearing away the sand and rocks in its path. My mind was being cleared of the insecurities and mountains that stood in the way of a river of free-flowing clarity. With every bite, I could feel that mountain crumbling. With every bite I could hear the nature and feel the breeze. With every bite, I was receiving increasing levels of satisfaction. Maybe a simple mechanism evolved into some long-forgotten ancestor of mine who would have considered this the best day of his life. A day of peace where he is sitting outside his cave and eating his food while taking in the nature around him. He probably died right after he finished his food, eaten by something else but in that moment, he felt content. I felt lucky, and I felt blessed to be his progeny. My plate slowly went from full to half to only two pieces remaining. As I took my last piece and looked at it for a moment, I knew I was going to enjoy it even before I put it into my mouth. I knew exactly how it would taste and how I would feel after. It was as if Buddha himself decided to come down from his heavenly abode and possess me. Buddha before he relinquished meat I mean. I put the piece into my mouth and my god, did it taste exactly the way I thought it would. I could not have been more profound in my life than ever in that moment. All the heavens and hells seemed to combine. A microsecond where my taste buds and that godly powder seemed to combine to produce unknown chemical reactions within me. That was enlightenment.
I sat there chewing. My teeth working relentlessly knowing it would not work this hard the many coming eons. Slowly I seemed to return back into my body and I sat there chewing. I sat there feeling exactly what I had envisioned. I was human again, but the last mountains had already been crumbled and churned into the silt that my freely flowing river of clarity shall deposit on its riverbanks where new thoughts shall grow.
Somehow, I now felt that I could still survive it all. This is what I had lost. To want to survive.
