Rani's Nachos by Geetha Pathanjali
Rani’s Nachos
The yellowing pedestal fan emits a faint but rhythmic clicking that Rani isn’t sure how to fix and everyone else in the family is yet to notice. From the kitchen, she cannot see or hear the television in the adjacent living room, but she knows that it is on, much the same as she knows that she will turn it off at ten forty-five this evening after her husband, Bharath, has taken himself to bed.
It’s a thick and sticky evening. Inside their flat, thicker and stickier. The block of tasty cheese is cool in her palm as she presses it to the grater, letting it snag on the curved, metal lips. Shreds tumble into the plastic bowl. Like snow, Rani thinks, though she has only ever seen snow in Hollywood romance films, watching them on the couch with Bharath after their daughter, Neela, was snug in bed, and tiptoeing to the master bedroom afterwards, their minds singular with carnal intention. That was before they stopped talking to each other, and that was well before Bharath went deaf. Now, Neela is fully grown, living in her own apartment with her son, Benji, and the master bedroom is used only for sleeping.
It’s nachos again, the fifth evening in a row. Exactly five nights since Benji had seen them eating it on one of his Mila and Poppy YouTube videos, and placed a single and expectant watermelon-slushed finger to the screen of her phone. Failing to find the thick and orange triangular chips she’d seen on Benji’s show, Rani had picked out a couple of packets of crinkle cut potato chips. For the salsa, after staring into a bubbling saucepan of unseasoned chopped tomatoes for some time, she had thrown some onion, garlic, mustard seeds and curry powder into a separate pan then decidedly tipped the mix into the tomatoes.
It was with apprehension that she had waited for her grandson’s verdict when she placed her Frankensteinian culinary creation in front of him. To her delight the toddler had not pushed the food indifferently about his plate but was instead enraptured by the chip-and-sauce-based balancing game offered by his dinner, and had demanded it every night since.
With this memory in mind, Rani watches the cheese pile up in the hollow centre of the grater, light, yellow and abundant. There would even be enough for Neela when she came home, but she knew, that like every other night this week, Neela would wrinkle her nose at her mother’s attempt at nachos.
‘No wonder she is so skinny,’ Rani had said to her friend Yalini that morning on the phone. ‘She stands on her feet all day waiting on that china karan dentist boyfriend of hers, and then she never eats any of my food.’ Yalini had hummed in agreement.
A key turns in the lock to the front door, as if summoned by Rani’s thoughts. There’s a familiar thud, shuffle and murmur as Neela drops her heavy bag to the floor, kicks off her sneakers and pads across the carpet to her father’s armchair to give him a kiss on the cheek.
She appears in the kitchen archway, bare feet straddling the line between carpet and linoleum, seeking the breeze of the fan. She is clad in lavender-coloured scrubs, dyed blonde hair pulled back into a dead-straight ponytail. Her face is drawn after the week of work, a sheen of sweat on her forehead.
‘I got you this, Mum,’ Neela says. It’s a cactus, a strange contorted thing in a blue ceramic pot. ‘They were doing a sale across the road from the practice.’
Rani takes it from her, but she’s not sure where to put it. She places it on the end of the kitchen counter for now. Neela’s eyes linger on the plant.
‘Have you eaten?’ Rani says, back at her grater.
‘Yeah, nah I’m fine. Only two people in tears today during standard check-ups, so that was a new record.’
Rani speaks in Tamil, Neela in English. It’s the way it has always been between them, an effortless show of bilingualism that would have made Rani’s own, Union Flag-fearing mother proud.
Neela leans into the archway, picking at a chipped edge in the wall with her fingernail.
‘We—I went to Sydney Road at lunch. Got a new dress.’ She pauses, as if concentrating on a particularly stubborn crumb of paint in the wall. ‘Actually, I… I’ve got a thing on next Sunday. Would you and Dad be right to look after Benji?’
‘Thing? What ‘thing’?’ Rani repeats the word in English.
‘Oh, it’s nothing, it’s just a bar mitzvah… for Tony’s godson.’
‘Of course we can.’ Rani, trying to avoid the argument that so often ensues between them whenever Neela’s boyfriend is mentioned, says, ‘He is slim, your china karan. He will look good in a suit.’
‘He’s Korean, mum, not Chinese, remember?’ Neela says, but her shoulders have slackened and she is no longer peering so intently at the wall. ‘Yeah, so there was actually a nice blue suit at the…’
She stops mid-sentence, her gaze landing on the tray of layered chips and cooked tomatoes ready for the oven.
Rani looks up from the cheese grater and finds the thick heat of the kitchen punctuated with a new tension, the air of easy amiability that they had both tried so hard to cultivate sucked away in an instant.
Neela’s eyes fix on Rani’s face, a magpie ready to swoop. ‘Are you serious, Mum?’
‘Mmm?’
‘I told you not to give him that stuff anymore.’
‘The nachos? Oh it’s okay, Neela, he loves it. You worry too much.’ She starts her grating again.
Neela pulls her fingers through her ponytail, eyes rolling to the top of her head. ‘Mum, they’re not nachos.’ She enunciates each word in a way that makes her sound even more Australian than usual, and Rani wonders, not for the first time, how this daughter that looks so much like her can sound so different.
Bharath’s voice bellows from the living room. ‘Rani, get us a tea, will you?’
For the last decade Bharath’s voice has overcompensated for his ailing ears with volume, as if his hearing might somehow be recovered if only his voice could travel far enough to find it. Over the years, the actors and actresses on Bharath’s Kaadhal-TV soap operas gradually joined him in becoming louder and louder, until one day Neela picked up the remote and muted the blaring television in a fury. Bharath did not notice.
The television had remained muted ever since, now branded with the flickering of wildly inaccurate white-yellow-and-teal subtitles.
‘Have you even looked at the salt content of that packet of chips?’ Neela says, ignoring her father but raising her volume to match his. ‘He’s three years old! He can’t be eating this shit every single night.’
‘Rani. RANI!’ calls Bharath with increasing urgency.
Beneath Rani’s fingers, the holes in the grater are open mouths eager for a feeding. They gape at her, pressing – more, more! She obliges, pressing the cheese into the grater with more vigour – down and up, down and up. The joints in her fingers are stiff – “osteoarthritis, not unusual for your age” Doctor Kanaganathan had said with his usual insouciance, pen in hand, in his office two weeks ago – but she ignores the twinge of pain, and keeps grating, watching the mound of cheese grow.
Neela is yelling now, and Benji, awake, is contributing to the din with his cries from the bedroom, the soprano in the family chorus.
‘For fuck’s sake, Mum, are you even listening?’ Neela says, hands outstretched to the heavens like she hadn’t loudly denounced the gods years prior in the middle of a visit to their suburban temple. ‘I’m taking him home.’
When they leave, the block of cheese is nothing but a crumble in Rani’s fingers.
*
Later, after Bharath has gone to bed and the television has been turned off, the bowl is still waiting, patient and full. Rani turns away, but it’s still there, no matter which direction she faces, and soon it is just her and the bowl and the counter, and nothing around them but a white expanse in every direction. As she stares, the contents turn from yellow to orange until she is looking down at a bowl of not cheese but grated carrots. One by one, she mixes in eggs and sugar and flour, bicarbonate soda, cinnamon, vanilla and cloves, and when her work is thick and creamy, she pours it into a rectangular tray and places it in the oven.
The scents permeate the air, filling her nostrils, her chest, her belly, decorating her insides in a delicate spicy-soft sweetness. She takes the tray out of the oven with care, hands clad in two red baking gloves, and places it on the counter beside the cactus. She pulls out a knife – the best one she owns – cuts a neat square from the bottom left corner of the loaf, and drops down to the laminate floor, feet planted and knees pointing upwards. She places the slice of cake in her mouth and leans back into the cabinetry beneath the counter.
It is delicious. Warm and moist and springy. Neela will come by after the weekend to drop off Benji, and Rani will give her some. Perhaps Neela will take it into work, and perhaps the dentist might like some too, and they will enjoy it together in the kitchen at the practice, and then arrive back at Rani’s just in time for dinner…
When she wakes, it is Saturday morning and there is a faint whisper of cinnamon on her tongue.
She climbs out of bed and pads barefoot down the hallway of the flat. Daylight envelops the kitchen. Neela’s cactus still sits on the counter, its position unchanged from the day before. She sets it on the windowsill, and then sends Neela a photo. The caption is in English, followed by a thumbs up emoji and a smiley face:
Sunny position! Best spot.
*
The doorbell rings. Rani pulls on trackpants under her nightie – one of a set bought at 3-for-$20 fifteen years ago from the bargain store down the road, each identical but for the word emblazoned on its rear. Yesterday’s was “juicy”; today’s “fine”.
It’s Neela. Benji squirms from her grip and runs past Rani’s legs to his cardboard box of toys in the living room. There is a clamour as the contents of the box topple onto the carpet. A cool morning wind blows in from outside.
‘We’re not staying, bub,’ calls Neela, feet planted outside the threshold of the flat and stretching her neck to direct her words around her mother’s waist.
‘What’s wrong?’ asks Rani. ‘Do you need me to take him? What’s happened to your key?’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Neela says, one hand holding the other at her midriff, wrists bent. ‘Get dressed. We’re going out.’
But it’s a Saturday, Rani says to the closet as Neela waits in the living room. It’s a Saturday and Neela is here.
Neela drives them to an open air market two suburbs away in her red Corolla. She buys them each a flaky pastry filled with spinach and cheese. She speaks with confidence at the counter, calling the food by its name in an unfamiliar language and hovering her phone over a white square to pay. Rani wonders why Neela has brought them here, and if this market is a place Neela often frequents. Benji’s animated exchange with the stallholder suggests it might be.
Rani protests the purchase of the pastry. ‘Chi. How much money did you pay for this?’ she says.
‘It’s just a burek,’ Neela says, handing one to her father and breaking off a piece of her own for Benji. ‘Look, if you eat one, I’ll give your nachos a try.’ Rani acquiesces. The pastry is both light and heavy in her mouth. She makes a mental note of the ingredients to replicate it at home.
They sit on a bench together eating their bureks, Rani, Neela, Bharath and Benji. They watch the people go by, each thinking their own thoughts about those other people: a couple walking hand in hand and stopping for jam donuts; a family of six juggling bags of shopping, a baby and a toddler; a woman carting a large trolley full of oranges.
Benji, eyes set on the oranges, slips off his mother’s lap. Rani follows him, and when Neela wanders over to fetch them both from the grocery store across the walkway, she finds Rani wide-eyed with delight. ‘Neela, is this real manjal?’ she says, fingering an orange knob of turmeric, and, ‘Neela, look at the price of this pavakkai!’
‘I thought you might like this place,’ Neela says, picking up Benji and kissing him on the cheek.
When they walk out of the store twenty minutes later, their hands are laden with bags of groceries, and Bharath rises slowly to his feet. Two mothers, a father and a toddler, a family that others might sit on a bench and form opinions about.
‘You know you don’t have to buy everything in the store today, Mum,’ Neela says. ‘We can come back next week, if you like.’
She drives them home. Bharath is asleep in the front, head sagging on his chest. Benji's lolling head mirrors his grandfather’s from his child seat in the back.
‘Why don’t you like us to see him, your dentist?’ Rani asks, one hand on Benji’s knee.
‘What, I— Because you—’ Neela takes a deep breath, her eyes locked on the red traffic light ahead. ‘How about I bring Tony next Sunday? I’ll be coming over anyway to drop off Benji before the bar mitzvah.’
‘What does he like to eat?’
‘We’re going out afterwards, Mum. You don’t have to cook anything.’
‘It’s okay, I’ll just make something small. What does he like?’
Rani sees Neela roll her eyes in the side mirror, though she thinks she can see the hint of a smile.
‘He likes Japanese food,’ Neela says, ‘And Korean, of course. And, well, I guess… Mexican. He likes Mexican.’
‘Nachos then,’ says Rani, and this time, Neela’s smile is wide-mouthed and toothy in the mirror.
‘Fine! But make some of your vadai, too, on the side? I think he’d really like those.’
They fall into an agreeable silence. The grocery bags, perched beside Rani’s feet, crinkle softly as the small red car speeds along.
Find more from Geetha over on Instagram!
