How to Make Curry

Start off by reminiscing for a life you’ve never lived, remember what it was like to be a small brown child sitting at the feet of your newly immigrated mother in the sweltering kitchen of a tiny apartment in Manhattan, smelling the pungent garlic and cumin permeating the air. Be transported back to this world as you begin to chop garlic and find the jar of curry powder and plastic bottle of cumin in your cupboard. Fill a pan with canola oil (since, at age 19, you’re too broke or cheap to be able to afford olive oil) and toss the freshly chopped garlic into the pan. Realize that you can’t find a clean wooden spoon and begin to toss the pan in a gyrating motion to stir the garlic as you simultaneously scan the kitchen for a spoon or spatula. Find a spatula. Shake the plastic cumin container over the garlic until it is covered to your satisfaction, and listen to the dried cumin sizzling in the pan, the garlic close to burning. Fill a spoon (or two) with curry powder, and add that to the garlic, watching the concoction turn from brown to yellow, from the turmeric which must be a component of the jarred powder.

Remember again the life you didn’t live, remember your mother in her thick Mumbai accent, explaining that while the turmeric doesn’t do too much for the flavor, it certainly adds the character of color to your curry. Remember being a small brown child, licking your finger and sticking it into the turmeric when her back was turned, watching your brown skin turn to yellow before sucking the strange-tasting spice off of your finger. Remember your mother catching you, and instead of reprimanding you, sticking a spoon into the garlic and spices in the pan and handing it to you to taste, telling you that the sum was much tastier than any of the individual parts, that that was what made this a curry, and that was what made you a person, and your family a family, and America America and so on.

Realize that in your distraction of getting caught up in false memories you forgot to cut up the tomatoes you plan to use or open the can of chick peas which is to be the major component of your dish. Turn the heat off and forget to move the pan, hope that the heat which remains won’t burn the garlic. Begin to cut up the tomatoes, remember the life you truly lived, when you grew tomatoes and egg plants and potatoes in the small garden behind your giant house. Remember being barefoot and pudgy and small and happy, pressing the dirt down between your toes and screaming when you stepped on and broke a snail, because you could feel the crunch of the shell as it broke. Remember sitting in the kitchen at the feet of your real mother, an older ex-hippie with graying hair past her shoulders as she explained to you how to season and how to mix spices to create a whole new thing out of smaller things. Remember her explaining this to you as a beautiful metaphor on life. Subconsciously wash the top of the can of chick peas before opening it, remembering your mother’s warning from another time about the rats that live in factories and dirty the tops of cans.

Pour the tomatoes and chick peas into the pan, watch the oil slowly turn to liquid as the fresh tomatoes cook down, wonder why anyone ever eats stewed tomatoes, this is just so beautiful and real. Taste a bit of the liquid, remember being the brown child, the white child, the everything anything whatever you want child, tasting the beginnings of a dish you were learning how to make for the first time, the second time, any time. Realize that every time you make any dish it’s still the first time you’ve made it. Add more curry powder, wish that you had cayenne, this will be bland.

Remember even though you don’t being a baby, a fetus even, imbibing the incredibly spicy foods your mother ate. Remember your strength and ability to consume garlic and spice and even ghost chilis, inherited from your mother. Hope that you also inherited her strength and ability to consume heartbreak and pain and to come out even more beautiful and creative and inspiring and inspired. Hope that the tiny brown child you never were and will never meet has the same strength. Hope that every tiny child can learn this from their mother, their father, whoever. Hope that you’ll develop this strength soon, worry that you won’t, pray that you have it already without realizing.