Words, Lentils, Dates, Pork

Walking up my snowy street I see a silver Honda Accord tentatively reversing into a parking spot across my front porch. I walk up, tap my father’s car window and smile. He smiles abstractly, the car wiggling backwards and forwards, while my mother gestures repeatedly for me to get into the car. "What? Where are we going?" I ask. "Get in! Get in!" she mouths through the window my father has rolled back up. “Stop the car, Dad,” I say, and I get in. “We need dinner,” she says. They are visiting me on their way back home from a concert at Roy Thompson Hall.

“What kind of food?” I ask, after mentally checking my fridge. I’ve just finished the last of my mattar paneer. “Not Indian,” my mother says vehemently. “How about Ethiopian?” I say. My father’s expression sours.

“No!” he says. “It is not halaal. They serve PORK.” It is as though the word itself is the taboo flesh, in his mouth, and the harder he rolls his r's and faster he brings them to a stop against a hard, hard k, the less he will be infected by it.

“Um, I’ve never seen pork at an Ethiopian place,” I say, “But, uh, I know a vegetarian Ethiopian place.” It's actually vegan, but this is too much to explain.

“No! It is not halaal. They serve PORK,” he spits out again, word for word. My mother tries to explain: “It’s VEGATARIAN,” she says.

“Well, there’s always Tibetan,” I say—“It’s not Indian but it’s similar, so you’ll like it.” Silence from Dad.

“Which do you prefer, Dad?”

Silence from Dad.

“Dad, will you eat it?"

"–DAD?!”

“Well, if I am sitting it, I will be having to do SOMETHING,” he says unhappily. “What is that Lebanese place, long ago?” he asks, straining his memory, looking for a way out.

“I can’t think of one close by....what about a place around here?”

Silence.

“Dad, I don’t know of a Middle Eastern place. Dad, do you want either?"

"Which do you prefer Dad?"

"DAD?!!!”

“If there is ‘park,’ there is ‘pork,’” he jokes unexpectedly, sidling out through the verbal loop marked ‘pun.’

In our attempt to find parking we end up at the Ethiopian place. My father and my mother not only enjoy but fall in love with the food, much to my relief, and as I wondered they might, if I could get them to try it. My father slurps his soup. He’s an old man; he trembles reaching for the injera bread, coughs violently into his soup, gripping it with his thumb in the bowl, passing it to my mother, who eats quietly while daintily holding a hand over the sequined white hijaab falling across her bosom, over the fancy black suit she’s donned for the concert. She’d flapped her arms in the street to show me how she’s lost weight. They bend their heads over the food, trying to figure out the grains. Chickpea? Barley? Whole wheat? They question the store owner, who brings out her bags of supplies, which we all examine together. My mother wants to try the injera bread with Indian food. I can see her mouth salivating. “I had bread like this in the village, as a girl,” she says. “Never since.”

They tell me about the concert. She’s wowed by the museum of pluralist Islam that’s being built in Ottawa. “It was all gujaratis and white people”, she says. “No one like us. The Ismailis are very organized.” “The Agha Khan is my age,” my father says, and my mother falls silent.

After eating my father puts his hand in his pocket and, his eyes twinkling, hands me a raw date. He always has something sweet in his coat pocket that he hands silently, randomly and surreptitiously, sideways, to his three adult daughters and slew of toddler granddaughters.

“Remember when you were little girl?” he says. “You always wanted date when I was eating the date. Here is a date.”

Dates, my parents agree, correcting each other—peanuts when I was smaller, then almonds when I got bigger.

The date is yellow and dry and sweet, just like the raw dates on the towering palm trees in our neighbor’s yard in Sindh. He offers to share the other date with my mother, which she refuses. We sip the spicy tea the owner has brought us on the house, because I keep bringing her business. There are Indians in Ethiopia, the store owner tells us. My father picks out different Amharic words for different kinds of lentils from the menu, relating them to their names in Urdu, and repeatedly pointing out which ones he can’t eat because of digestive problems. Hazrat blah-blah ate this type of daal, he says fondly, referring to an ancestor-saint who lived 900 years ago. He lived in Ethiopia for many years, he adds as an explanation, twinkling at me as though telling me about a family beloved family member. He’s confused when I look at him blankly, without any response of recognition. His saints are as close to him as family members, and I don’t know who they are.

His family members may not be my family members, but I love how my father tells history through words and lentils. How the hell does he know that Hazrat what-his-name ate missr daal? But he does, and its utterly relevant to our meal, and our relationship to the store owner, and how we connect to her, and his enjoyment of what he ate. It is very close to your house, my father says happily, driving me home, to my little two-bedroom apartment.

My mother comes into the apartment with me while my father waits in the car. I show her my new baking dishes, she comments on my gourds. We hug each other. Bit by bit I let go and hug her closer.