Karma

I never could understand my aunt's preoccupation with Chitrahaar and Oliyum Oliyum every time she came on a holiday from Washington DC. She had moved over a decade ago with my uncle and two cousins. I couldn’t understand why they left. Christmas and New Year’s were always so much fun in Bangalore and I thought it unfair that we now had nowhere to go to celebrate. But that’s beside the point. She always knew the songs from the latest Hindi and Tamil movies by heart and never missed an Indian movie screening in DC. She sat glued to the TV watching the music shows and commenting on how Shahrukh Khan made her weak in the knees. I humoured her but never could quite understand why she was preoccupied by all things cheesily Indian. When she went back her suitcases were laden with Indian spices, the choicest ghee sweets from Shree Mithai and every imaginable Indian movie that she had missed watching. She once even took a 'health faucet' back with her. For those of you who don't know what this is, it's a rather Indian plumbing contraption that jets water out at a high speed so that you can wash your posterior. Very hygienic. Especially in the land of toilet paper. Mum said that this was all because she missed home. As a cynical teenager who lived at home all her life and never had to miss mum's cooking, I just didn’t understand how in this day and age someone could miss home. After all, I had heard that everything was available in Indian stores abroad.

I now live in the United Kingdom. Still mummy’s little girl but I’ve learnt to fend for myself. Food-wise and financially. All my previous cynicism about my aunt’s separation anxiety however has come to bite me in the rear. I constantly crave Indian food, especially paani poori and sundal, mum’s biriyani and rasam, an aunt’s vonkai koora and gongura pacchadi. I recently watched the latest Shahrukh Khan movie in which he plays your everyday white collar worker who is in love with his new wife. He marries her to fulfill her father’s dying wish when she loses her fiancé in an accident on the eve of her wedding. It was the first Hindi movie I had seen on the big screen in quite a while and as you would have it I laughed and cried at all the right places. It was all very embarrassing. Had I watched this movie in India I would’ve lost interest when the father died at the beginning of the movie and fallen asleep before the first song. But no, not this time. Not after two years away from home.

So dearest aunty, I empathize and understand how anything remotely Indian can tug at the heart strings in a strange country. Every time something spicy sets my now super sensitive taste buds on fire and as I make a beeline for the toilet, I will think of my presumptuous teenage years when I laughed when you stood over the basin after a particularly fiery bisibelebath. The next time we are both home lets go for a cheesy Hindi movie in which love is eternal and everyone has a singing voice. My treat.