- Bitter Melons
- Flea Market Furnished Memories
- Summer Vacations
Bitter Melons
Several nights each week I play the role of my mother’s caregiver. Mostly I keep her company and serve her dinner, roti and whatever sabji was cooked up by her day caregiver.
We usually watch Punjabi movies together and I try to ask my mother questions about her own life. Usually mom ignores me because she doesn’t hear me or as I suspect, pretends not to hear me. By now, she probably feels questioned out. Or maybe she just prefers the quiet because my mother has endured years of noise.
Once upon a time ago, my mother’s home was boisterously overpopulated. Kids were doubled up in bed and hand-me-downs were the fashion. My dad and his brother shared a peach-growing business and like other immigrants, our two families also shared a home. Each family had five kids and shared the one bathroom in the houses. Whenever the family reminisces aboutgrowing up in the white-tiled house on Ruth Avenue, the mention of the singular toiled elicits wide-eyed shock and chuckles. Unusual. Perhaps. Our parents were immigrants and that’s just the way things were done. You waited your turn to poop.
By the time I arrived on the scene, the last of the ten Purewal cousins born into the compound, my uncle, aunt and their brood had moved to their own home. When I was two, my eldest brothers (by 19 years) got married and his wifed moved in after she came from India. Over the years, their bedroom shrank with the addition three children. Eventually they moved into their own house.
Decades passed and the remaining siblings and I also moved on. Then it was just mom and dad left in the home which had gotten a much needed exterior facelift and was now the light blue tiled house on Ruth Avenue.
Dad passed away ten years ago and since then, my mom has lived alone. When she slowed down, in came the carousel of caregivers rotating in and out.
My mom is in her 90s. No one is certain of her actual age. When mom was born, in a village in southern Pakistan, pre-partition, birth dates weren’t recorded. Her agrarian parents had bigger concerns in the early 1910s than to record the birth of another mouth to feed, especially that of a girl’s.
Oh. Another thing about my mother, even though she’s been in the United States 60 years, she has never learned to speak English. When she does interface with the outside world, there is always one of us with her to translate.
She did pick up on the phrases “one minute waitt” and “wrrong numberr” the latter she would holler into the caller’s ear when someone accidentally dialed our number. By speaking at a high decibel, mom assumed the caller was more likely to understand her.
If a friend called for me, it was instant mortification. My mom would scream my name is its actually pronounced in Punjabi, “Sukh-jheet.” Ugh. Too much to explain for a teenager who was already insecure.
Before mom fell victim to old age, she used to grow a much talked about garden that bloomed from early summer to fall. Bitter melon. Garlic bulbs. Okra. Red onions. Tomatoes. On the stovetop, mom would transform her produce into works of curry perfection. She’d slice open the bitter melons, and fill them with a billowy mixture of spice and onions. Each melon was wrapped with twine before mom dropped them into a deep fry bath. We’d eat them with warm roti off mom’s griddle.
Me & my mom.
When winter months came along, mom would pull out a pair of old sneakers and make dad driver her out to family peach orchard so that she could hand pick spinach and kale leaves, which often grew there.
That was only the first step in an all day process. She’d wash and chop the leaves. Then they’d cook for hours.
Coming home from school, I’d see the windows on our house fogged over, a give away that a pot of saag was on the stove. Opening the front door, the masala scent wafted through the air. The unmistakable scent of home.
Dinnertime at our house didn’t hold any kind of mystery.. Our mom never asked us, “What would you like for dinner?” or “I’m making your favorite dish tonight.” We knew it was roti every night. The only question was what sabji or daal we’d be eating along with it. For us, getting McDonald’s was like a feast.
Nowadays mom spend most of her time in bed or in her recliner which creaks and leans to one side, as does mom.
When I come over in the late afternoon, I surf through a sea of Indian movies until I find one that seems entertaining.
It’s when I’m alone with my mother that I learn the most about her. On one occasion, I learned the story of my parents’ engagement.
Although my dad was an attractive bachelor, standing over six feet tall and peering out from a set of beautiful green eyes, he was older than my mom. If my raw calculations are correct, which is all I have to go on since my late father’s age was also unknown, he could’ve been 20 years older than her.
In the end, dad got his girl even though he was old enough to be her father. My grandfather agreed to let him have mom. He decided it was better to maintain relations with existing relatives, mom’s older sister was already married to my dad’s cousin.
Another thing I learned about was a tradition called a muklawa, Although a girl may have been wed, she didn’t necessarily leave her family’s home until her parents decided she was ready
We were watching a movie called Daana Paani, loosely translated as Food Water) about a wedding between two children. According to my mother such weddings weren’t unusual as it just cemented a bond that wouldn’t be consummated much later down the road.
Curious, I asked my mom if she’d had a muklava. Yes, she told me, she did.
It was two years after my parents’ wedding that she moved to my father’s home.
I press on. Why two years? But her responses are always the same.
I don’t know.
That’s just the way things were done.
Stop asking me questions.
I wrote this in February 2023 and my mother passed away at home in December.
Flea Market Furnished Memories
In my second senior year, (I needed another semester to finish) my roommate and I lived in an apartment that suited our basic needs, two rooms and. kitchen on Ward and Telegraph. The fact that it felt like a 5k walk to campus was an unfortunate side note.
My Mr. Anonymous
We did have a supermarket around the corner. Of course Adrononico’s was so expensive, I mentally whittle my shopping list down to white bread and slices of cheese as I soon as I hit the produce section. Mustard? Much too extravagant for my budget.
Safe? Hmm. Mostly. Although there was the time the mailman caught the hapless thief crawling through our bathroom window. Imagine the “oh expletive” when he came face-to-face with our treasured second hand furnishings. Exhibit A: our yellow formica table with matching chairs from the Ashby Flea Market. Note to thief: try an apartment with something worth ripping off.
Overall convenience? A one. Slouching under the weight of various anthologies, I’d huff along Telegraph wondering why we didn’t live closer to campus. Especially annoying were Tuesdays and Thursday mornings when I started my day with class at the International House for my American literature class.
My wretchedness would be short-lived. I loved those mornings because it meant seeing Professor Breitwieser and the unidentified male who sat at the desk to my left.
It’s been years but I can still picture him, the boy who’s name I never learned and Professor Breitwieser (Of course it helps the professor is easily found with a Google search.)
Tan. Wiry build. Closely shorn hair.
More often than not , we sat in those same two seats next to each and never exchanged more than “hi’s”. I physically couldn’t. His smile would make my tongue freeze, rendering me incapable of speech.
I fantasized that one day that my Mr. Anonymous would ask me to join him for a cup of coffee after class. Cafe blah blah. Thus, our torrid romance would’ve began.
Never having a conversation was kind of a stumbling block however.
The spring semester carried on as Professor Breitwieser continued to enthrall us with his insights. Unlike some professors to be on play mode just regurgitating canned lectures, Breitwieser channeled the works into living questions for us to ponder.
A highlight was when he read from Walt Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain” Or or was it from Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl”?
As if it mattered. I loved the man.
Our final exam was in one of the cavernous Wheeler lecture halls. Short of wandering through each row of desks, I could only wonder if my Mr. Anonymous had made it in on time.
After I finished and walked out into the cool early December evening, I wondered if Mr. A had finished early and left while I was still madly scribbling my essay responses. Taking a chance that I hadn’t missed him, I I casually hung around. (Imagine feigning casualness with chattering teeth.)
I was rewarded. Sort of.
At some point a door swung open and out he walked shouldering his backpack.
I’d love to end this essay by telling you we finally talked or that he finally asked me to that cup of coffee.
Nah.
Never happened.
In fact, I’m not sure what we said to each other. Maybe it was just our usual “hi’s” or maybe I managed a “that wasn’t too bad” kind of witty banter.
Whatever it was, I don’t remember.
While I still had another semester to enjoy with Professor Breathier and to consider the lives and works of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, I never saw Mr. A again.
Off he walked into the cold Berkeley night, having shaped another episode of my college years.
With time I grew more confident as a woman and allowed myself to be less inhibited. I just wish it hadn’t taken so long.
Summer Vacations
As with most kids, summer vacations were etched on my siblings and mine mental calendars and cherished as long sun-filled days when we didn’t have to bother with school.
Once released, my older sister, brother and me would perch ourselves in front of the television, watching our favorite 1970s families: The Brady. Bunch and The Partridge Family.
We were mesmerized when the Bradys explored the Grand Canyon, horrified when Bobby and Cindy got lost, envious when they went to Hawaii where the Brady girls and even the housekeeper, Alice, took hula lessons on the beach.
We’d heard rumors that like the Bradys, real life families went on real life vacations, traveling to to exciting places and staying in magical places called hotels.
I say rumors because to me and my siblings, such adventures were as mysterious as the Tooth fairy and Santa Claus, neither of whom ever dropped by our house.
Disneyland. Was that even a real place?
We had no way of knowing.
Me on the left with my older sister and brother pictured in front of one of the many Purewal peach orchards.
Our plight was predictable. After all we were born to a pair of Indian immigrants afflicted by an invisible disability known as Fun Gene Syndrome or FGS. Apparently it was endemic in the villages my mom and dad grew up in.
They did their best but as their children, we did suffer.
Sometimes my brother and I would say things like “there’s nothing fun to do” or we would beg for a pool because our neighbors had one. With our noses wedged into the fences’s boards, we’d spy shamelessly on the three Whitney daughters as they laughed and splashed in their pool.
Our boredom would be short-lived. Come July, we’d be too tired to complain. That’s when the family business, peaches, was at its busiest with harvesting.
My dad and his brother had found the American Dream below their feet, in dirt. They worked, saved and bought peach orchards. Eventually they enjoyed a measure of prosperity.
Not that they acted rich. Not with us anyway.
After all, they used us as a source of cheap labor.
We were woken up at 5 a.m. (as if it was no big deal for a fifth-grader on a summer morning) and out in a peach orchard until at least one in the afternoon.
We’d slurp down our cups of tea (we’re Indian, my mom had us hooked at a young age) and climb into my dad’s noisy GMC truck. Oh and if he was in a particular hurry to get to the orchard, our usually mild-mannered father would holler at us to put our shoes on in the truck.
Our jobs weren’t complicated, We were graders, throwing out peaches that were gunky, too small or just not right to be used for canning and sold in supermarkets.
We collected our peaches from bins, large wooden boxes that were being filled by peach pickers.
The peach pickers wore cumbersome bags around their necks in which they dropped the peaches they picked. They would empty their bags into the bins. Using ladders, the peach pickers would climb to the tree tops to make sure they’d picked the trees clean.
It was work that would leave one one achingly exhausted.
Our family’s employees were mostly uneducated, doing work that others couldn’t and wouldn’t do. Many of them traveled north from Mexico in their battered Monte Carlos and Impalas. Others were new arrivals from India, realizing that ‘Amrika’ wasn’t as glamorous as they’d pictured.
Just like those parents, our own parents were illiterate immigrants who had worked and saved, sacrificing convenience to lay aside a little extra each month.
Understanding how difficult our workers labored and how difficult their lives were, my mom and dad always showed them tremendous kindness and respect. My dad would even skip his lunch so that an employee who needed it more would have something to eat. It was the closest my dad ever came to a diet plan. Dad always packed extra water for employees, years before labor laws required employers to do so.
Eventually the harvest came to an end as did our annual captivity.
School returned. Sadly, we’d trudge back, feeling cheated without having anything interest to share about our summer breaks. Like outsiders we’d listen to our classmates brag about their summer highlights and all that thy had done and seen.
Sigh.
Only with time and reflection did I appreciate all that my summers had taught me. I saw and learned about the importance of honoring others and their experiences..
Still, I would’ve loved to have been on the beach with my own hula skirt.
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me
My Musings 