Orphaned Fruit
Photo: Claudette Bleijenberg on Unsplash
‘The young one eats only the fried fish. Her own stomach does not prefer fins swimming against the currents of life.’
Her stomach is a love letter to five children. They bulge by the time of seven grandchildren. By the slight morning, she drinks a coffee milk-less, bitter.
In the kitchen, she inspects the black balls set to dry (jackfruit pulped, boiled, balled), bananas cut to wither into themselves, prawn dried and powdered, left on yesterday's newspaper.
(You must choose the middle pages; they are the ones least touched by hand)
The yellow meat is sweet, cooked in jaggery and coconut shavings, two grandchildren walk into the kitchen to steal them before they are dry, five don't like them.
Red meats are welcoming to the palate of all—sons, daughters and in-laws. Flakes of chilly, hairs of ginger dissolve into muddy depths of meat and fat. Sadly, they aren't polite to her own stomach.
Since the husband’s death, two summers ago, she oversees coconuts sent to the mill. They will arrive later tomorrow, along with the finely powdered rice, ten litters of virgin coconut oil, five kilograms of powdered rice, five hundred grams of rice, fried and dried and powdered. (no, they are not the same)
Her eldest granddaughter is a picky eater. But she takes photographs for that thing they call Instagram (it is a kind of Facebook for photographs). The murdered cinnamon stem, stripped of scented bark; Pearl spot fish coated in blood red masala (ginger, garlic, salt, red chillies ground by stone); then wet flour, with impressions of bent fingers, held by Banana leaves.
The young one eats only the fried fish. Her own stomach does not prefer fins swimming against the currents of life.
Her children live in gardenless cities. She lives by the ghats over the seas that bring monsoons. Processing food, packaging litres and kilograms to be shipped into that cold, dry city of shoes and ties.
Her stomach, a globe of its own.
Unpeopled, warring for one more day of breath between spice and sugar.
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Anna Lynn is a research scholar at EFL University. Her areas of interest include women's writing, art and cinema. The anxieties of a feminine heart are a constant muse and as the Woolfian stream passes, she presses watered images into writing. You can find her work on Sunflower Collective, Esthesia Magazine, Gulmohur Quarterly, In Plainspeak, and her blog www.seagirlstories.wordpress.com. Anna is on Instagram: @seagirlstories and @lettersinthemargins.
