There is something satisfying yet very isolating in the familiar smells of one’s home. Scents have a way of affirming identity while simultaneously setting olfactory boundaries (yes, olfactory – I was advised to use it at least once today by my word-a-day calendar, so here you go) letting others know where you begin and they end. Scents are powerful enough to draw us back in time, reminding us of events in our lives. As I deeply inhale the wonderful aroma of my wife’s fabulous Chicken Vindaloo replete (yesterday’s word) with coriander and cumin, I am at once taken back to a place and time when food and scent were my walking billboard. I learned that food shaped who I was and who I wasn’t.
I don’t have any vivid memories of when we actually arrived here as my young mind acted as a welcome buffer, blocking out any unpleasant memories of adjusting in those early days. I suppose I was like any other kid growing up in the holding pattern of leaving one home and moving to a new one. Children usually have a wonderful attitude of acceptance during the transition period because they are not yet tainted by the binaries of identity. So I was able to participate in pretty much any classroom activities thanks to my English lessons back home, trade my cricket bat for a baseball bat and even wobble around on my first pair of ice-skates.
I was just me; a kid enjoying being a kid without a care for the more difficult transitions my parents were facing. Adults make everything so serious! Really, they need to throw a few snowballs or watch cartoons and lighten up. My parents’ faces showed the strain of being old and tired, alone and excluded. Their transaction was a crash-course with little comfort by for the kettle filled with boiling water and the scent of a steeping cup of tea. Tea solved everything; tea took them home if only for a little while.
Most days mummy made my lunch and usually these lunches were uneventful unless you count the odd question from my classmates about what I was eating. Since most days I ate rice and vegetables there was little to worry about; despite being surrounded by a sea of peanut butter sandwiches lunches were brown-bag-ho-hum boring. That is until the lunch of all lunches and the meal that suddenly drew the lines of where I began and ended.
It was a funny coincidence that our lunch time began with the aroma of hard-boiled eggs as Jimmy unwrapped his plastic wrap – what a stink! Such an odd choice for lunch but Jimmy brought hard-boiled eggs from time to time, usually by the end of the month, and no one really cared. Soon, we were all making funny faces while holding our noses and singing “Symonds has stinky eggs!” But it was all in good fun and within moments Jimmy wolfed down his eggs and the scent dissipated. All was back to normal and when I finally stopped laughing I opened my thermos container. I let off a stink bomb bigger than any other in history.
“Ohmigod, what is that?”
“Eeewww, what a reek!”
“Oh what is that, what died?”
“I gand breed, oh by dose!”
Mummy had somehow thought some of last night’s leftover spicy chicken curry would make a good lunch treat, not realizing the Armageddon it would spur. Tears came to my eyes as I choked on the strong smells emanating from my thermos-turned-chemical-warfare-device. I was sort of thankful at that moment because there were other tears in my eyes as I heard the following:
“Oh that stinks!”
“Smells like a Paki in here!”
“Stinky Paki food!”
“Paki, Paki, Paki!”
“PAKI!”
I tried to put the lid on my Pandora’s lunch was never going back in, never dissipating like Jimmy’s eggs, and suddenly I was ethnically outed. I was familiar enough with the term but until now it had only been something I heard mummy and daddy talk about late at night. We weren’t from Pakistan but it didn’t seem to matter, we were labeled anyways. I figured it must be my parents’ fault as they still dress in the old ways and did little to be a part of this new world. I was fairly smug in my assessment that I would not have my dress or habits identify me. I never guessed I would be identified by food, and my parents’ food at that!
My home life evolved around my mother’s wonderful cooking and provided a sense of comfort in our new surroundings. Many of our favourites were impossible to find here, but mummy’s resourcefulness allowed her to improvise, retaining her cooking skills. She agonized over how to prepare something edible, familiar and permissible with our supermarket’s offerings (so much of the dinner time staple-ground beef was off limits for us) and scooted past the unfamiliar. Her resourcefulness also led to my silent avowal that day to never eat like this in public again of better yet, never again no even at home. I would try and send the “Paki” packing.
The rest of the day seemed normal enough as we struggled with our fractions, giggled at all the wrong times during yet another tedious NFB film and started to assemble scrapbooks that we would work on for the next few weeks. I even played foursquare at recess as usual, complete with a couple of tea-parties and went on being a kid. But something was different. The curry seemed to linger everywhere clinging to me like an oppressive shadow. I was still one of the kids but I was no longer one of them. My identity had shifted and with it so had some boundaries even if I couldn’t see them, I could feel them. When I looked in the bathroom mirror after recess I was still me. But why was Jimmy separate from his stinky eggs, while my curry and I were one?
With the taunts still ringing in my ears, I arrived home and gingerly placed my thermos on the table as it was a bomb that would explode any minute. How to detonate this? I began to play out some scenarios in my head about this curry-cum-nuclear-device when mummy came into the kitchen, scooping up my thermos. She frowned as she moved her hand slightly up and down. I was just about to warn her that any such movement could be disastrous when she grilled my with “why did you not eat your lunch today?”
“I am never eating this food again!” I cried. “I want food like the others in my class!”
She opened my thermos and I relived the nightmare all over again as my eyes teared up and my nostrils wished they could snap themselves shut. I was convinced that a huge cloud was billowing up over our house and threatening to annihilate our neighbourhood, and I pictured the hoards of people running, screaming, gasping, vainly attempting to cover their noses in the panic. I wondered if gas masks might be issued. Mummy’s voice shattered my visions.
“Such good food I make for you and you won’t eat it! Ungrateful children I have! We try hard to make a life here and where is the respect? You just wait until daddy gets home! He will be tired from working in construction all day and will be in no mood for this nonsense!” She began dumping out the contents into a bag to show daddy, then filled my thermos with hot sudsy water to soak. But that stench! I had smelled it hundreds of times in our house and took comfort in it. But today the once inviting aroma transformed into a disgusting stink that invited everyone to steer clear of me. I was now an outsider in my own class, my own home, even my own body.
Mummy ordered me up to my room with no TV and to wait until I was called for supper.
Daddy’s arrival would seal my fate, and since I was a rule in our house to never utter a single word in your defence when in trouble, my parents’ had not heard my side of the story. It was an agonizing wait while my parents discussed my sins, sighed, bounced punishment ideas off each other and sighed some more. Mummy’s shriller than usual dinner announcement demanded lightning speed to my chair and let me know that I will be wishing I had been involved in a nuclear explosion. I barely heard my father assure her “I’ll talk to the boy” as I sat trembling in my seat. Mummy had actually made my favourite, butter chicken, but I really wasn’t hungry even though butter chicken is far removed from curry on the Richter scale.
I dutifully accepted the plate put in front of me, picked up my fork and tried to eat under mummy’s stern glare and daddy’s unreadable expression. He was tired but would have more than enough energy to punish me and I struggled with my food as I imagined prisoners at their last meals; why else the butter chicken? I chewed and chewed but the normally velvety smooth meat seemed to expand, threatening to seal up my throat. Maybe they ere trying to poison me with a slow death that wouldn’t look like one! Finally I could no longer breathe and began to sputter and cough trying to be dignified in front of the family; dignity in dying. Mummy couldn’t take any more, banished me up to my room again and warned me that daddy would be up shortly.
A few minutes later, I heard daddy’s footsteps accompanied by mummy slamming the kettle much harder than usual as she cleared the kitchen and made the after dinner tea. Daddy stood in the doorway but decided not to come all the way in saying “Let’s go for a walk” without a trace of emotion. I must really be in for it. We walked up the street where I imagined everyone in their homes eating something wonderful, normal and, it suddenly dawned on me at that moment, Canadian.
“Mummy says you no longer want to eat her food. I thin you are old enough to admit your deeds so let’s here it.” Maybe this was a trap as I had never been given this option before, but I told him the whole story including every last detail. I was absolutely certain that he winced when I mentioned the p-word. He looked up at the sky for a few moments and it reminded me of back home when he would stand in the apartment courtyard and look to the sky for advice on how to deal with another of his children’s transgressions. Only this time was different as he sighed a very long, very sad sigh.
“I am so sorry that you had to experience that and had to learn that being who you are is something some people think you should be ashamed of.”
“Mummy is very angry as you are too,’’ I stammered “I am very sorry to be so disrespectful.” I wished I had kept my mouth shut remembering the rule, but this was playing out so differently I think both of us were trying to write a new script.
“You were not disrespectful in the usual sense, you were trying to find a way to fit in and not be an outsider. I know what you are going through.”
My eyes were still reeling from the earlier onslaughts but opened up wide from the shock of this man who looked like my father but sure didn’t sound like him.
“Every day, the men I work with on the construction site buy coffee and snacks at break time. The first time they included me I handed Pete my money and asked for a tea. Pete looked at me a little strangely, but nodded and I thought no more of it, that is, until the drinks arrived. I was the only one whose cup had a silly little string hanging out of it! As the rest of them sipped their coffees, I felt all eyes were on me and my tea bag! And I did not know what to do with it; you can’t take it out and hang onto it, we were not near a garbage can so I had to leave the bag in, drinking my tea with this string flying in the breeze! The men, some were laughing saying how dainty I looked! This never happened back home where we all drank tea – and no bags I might add – it is manly to drink tea! But here, the guys drink coffee like men are supposed to!”
“Did they call you the p-word too?” This new form of post-sin communicating was feeling more and more like a grown up conversation.
“Oh that. Yes I have heard it, for reasons beyond the tea. I guess what I discovered is that I will never escape prejudice and bigotry completely, but at least I can make an effort to try and fit in. So from that day on I vowed to drink coffee at work and tea at home. Maybe it is a small thing but I have the two worlds to work with as my identity evolves. Coffee with double sugar at work, tea with lemon and double sugar at home. You’ll also figure a way to eat…I don’t know, maybe peanut butter at school, curry at home?”
Daddy and I walked back home just as mummy as pouring the tea and setting out a plate of sweets. Taking her cure from daddy’s facial expression, she motioned for me to sit with the family although she seemed a little disappointed that my sin had seemingly gone unpunished. But later I heard that while I was looking up bigotry and prejudice in my dictionary, beginning my life-long affection for vocabulary, my parents agreed that I had already been punished by my classmates for something I didn’t do and couldn’t do anything about. Their anger was because they felt helpless knowing they couldn’t shield be from life’s lessons forever, no matter how painful. Mummy told daddy she would hunt the entire store to find where they keep the peanut butter (top shelf I could have told her, everybody knows that!) on her shopping trip. I never did learn the fate of my thermos.
I am transported back to the present with my wife’s call for dinner and the wonderful aromas that fill our home with comfort; our sanctuary from the outside world. Ironically my children are forbidden to bring peanut butter sandwiches to school for lunch and the regale me with frantic lunchtime trades with their classmates; samosas for hummus wraps, veggie pizza for naan bread, tuna fish for yes, curry! Funny how the food that once relegated me to “other” status is now a staple of today’s lunchtime transactions; my kids’ classrooms have become a microcosm of the new order daddy and I laid the groundwork for so long ago. I sneak a peak at tomorrow’s calendar page word and smile: gastronomy. And the day after: inclusion.
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