By Shreya Paul
Silence accompanies us at the dining table tonight. It is gaping, loud, provocative. You can hear it in the clinking of the cutlery, the muffled chewing, in the movement of plates and bowls. You can taste it in every bite of bhindi, in the cumin seeds floating in the daal, in every grain of rice. It’s missing something…
Three people, two generations, one family sits in a 600 square foot room. Even that is too big. Tonight no jokes are cracked, no RD Burman songs are played, no laughter is heard. Where did it all go? I wonder if it will ever come back. Was it ever there?
Love is a beautiful thing but its absence is more terrifying. What is the distance between two people that once adored but can no longer stand each other? What is the growth rate of the misunderstanding between anachronistic immigrant parents and their native-born children? How much cheeni is needed to neutralize relationships that have long soured?
We all sit and eat dinner together because we like to pretend–pretend that everything is okay, pretend like we have things to talk about, pretend that we understand each other. But our method-acting is not very good. So we let the cutlery do the talking as the silence engulfs us. You remember everything tasting better in your childhood.