Authors: Ramin Ganeshram
Outside, my father has the red, black, and white flag of Trinidad on one side of the door, the American flag on the other. Dad has hung the American flag
just slightly higher up — about two inches. This is part of what he calls, “Doin’ right, walkin’ good, speakin’ true,” which means doing the right thing. As far as flags go, a country’s flag is always highest in its own land. My father is very particular about things like that.
I grab a plate for Mr. Farrell and pile it high with chicken, dumplings, and cassava cooked in a light curry. I spoon some of Deema’s special homemade pepper sauce — reserved for the best customers, everyone else gets bottled — and sprinkle it over the food. It’s yellow and thick, and the sharp bite of the Scotch bonnet peppers is so strong I feel a catch and tickle in my throat just from the vapors alone.
I reach into one of the foil-covered trays that holds another one of my creations — a salad I’ve made from shredded jicama, arugula, sliced avocado, and mango that I’ve dressed with seasoned rice vinegar, toasted sesame oil, and sesame seeds. The salad isn’t truly Trinidadian, but Dad lets me give out my “specials” to our best customers, or those who know us well and are willing to be tasters. Mr. Farrell definitely qualifies as a taster. Besides, I feel sorry for
Mr. Farrell. He seems so lonely. When I make up his plate, I add something extra — usually one of my experiments. I put together a small plate of the salad for Mr. Farrell. The toasted sesame is savory and smoky, and makes the mango taste brighter and sweeter.
I bring out the tray to Mr. Farrell, who is already sitting. He smiles.
“Thank you, darlin’,” he says, squinting at the salad. “What’s this?”
“A salad I’m experimenting with. I thought you might give me your opinion.”
“Happy to!” Mr. Farrell says, scooting his chair close to his plate. “Anjali, child, those stuffed callaloo leaves you gave me the other day were just delicious!”
I smile. “Thanks,” I say, knowing he’s telling the truth. Most of my experiments are delicious. I quickly return to the back of the counter, to help Dad steadily fill orders. Our place is still packed with hungry people.
An hour passes with customers coming in nonstop. When it finally quiets down, Dad tells me,
“Anjie, I goin’ fuh me supper.” In the back, Deema has our own dinner already set up. She’s been waiting for my father to join her.
Mr. Farrell’s plate is empty. He’s eaten every morsel. I go over to clear his table.
“Enjoy your meal?” I ask politely.
“As always,” Mr. Farrell says happily. “Delicious salad, Anjali. I must steal your recipe.” He chuckles, then he leans over and points his finger at me. “You, my girl, is a born cook!”
The next day I stare into the case at Fat Moon, the Chinese bakery down the street from my school. I’ve been meaning to check out this place since school started last month. I figure I deserve a little treat after all the activity last night at our roti shop.
“What’s in those?” I ask the lady behind the counter.
“They’re bean cakes filled with a paste made of beans,” she answers in a heavy New York accent.
“Hmmm.” I walk the length of the counter, staring at these cakes, each about the size of a hockey puck. There are also little tarts filled with what looks like vanilla pudding, and round buns, golden brown, about the size of a softball.
“What about these?” I say, pointing at the buns.
“They got roast pork in them,” she answers.
Over by the door my best friend, Lincoln Courtnay, sighs. “Come
on,
Anjali,” he calls impatiently. “We’re going to be late.” He hikes his
knapsack farther up his shoulder, rumpling his school blazer.
“Okay, okay,” I say, and quickly give my order. “I’ll take one of the pork buns and one of those bean cakes.”
The woman behind the counter puts them in a brown paper bag and rings me up.
“Three dollars,” she says, holding her hand out while I dig into the front pocket of my knapsack to find a five-dollar bill. I grab my change and run out to the sidewalk where Lincoln is waiting.
“Check these out, Linc!” I say, reaching into the bag. “It’s
pow
and Chinese cake!” That’s what we call cakes like this in Richmond Hill.
“Yeah, so?” he says, walking quickly down Queens Boulevard, away from Fat Moon Bakery and toward Forest Hills School on Union Turnpike, three blocks away.
I run next to Linc, trying to match his stride. He can’t seem to remember that we aren’t the same size anymore, and it’s hard for me to keep up. Linc is already nearly five feet nine, when just last year, in seventh grade, we were still close to the same height.
I’m only five feet tall, and now I feel like a little kid when I stand next to Linc.
I pull the pork bun out of the bag. “Don’t you think it’s funny that China is on the other side of the world from Trinidad and they have the same kinds of food we do?” I shove the pork bun at him. “Here, eat this one.”
Linc says, “I’m not hungry now. I just ate lunch.”
“I know, but I need to know what a pork roll tastes like, and you know I can’t eat pork,” I say. “They didn’t have the chicken or vegetable ones like we do.”
Linc sighs and stops walking. He’s used to being my personal taster, but just to bug me he likes to pretend tasting bothers him. Deep down, Linc likes to try out new foods.
Linc’s my taster a lot, especially when I want to find out about some new food that I’m not allowed to eat. My family is Hindu, so stuff with beef and pork is totally off-limits for me. When I’m a famous TV chef I’ll have a staff of tasters, but for now Linc’s the one with the taste buds.
He takes the bun from me and carefully peels back the square of white parchment paper at its
bottom. He gently breaks the bun in half. Slices of roasted pork covered in dark red sauce drip out. Linc quickly nibbles a piece.
“Yeah, it’s
pow
,” he says.
I slap him a high five. “Cool! Let me try this bean cake — you want some?” Linc shakes his head. He looks annoyed, like he’s eager to get going already. But I’m all about the cakes right now.
When I bite into the bean cake, it tastes just the same as the Chinese bean cakes we have in the bakeries in my neighborhood. “I have to ask my grandmother about this when I get home,” I say.
Linc’s only half listening.
“We better get going,” he says. When we hear the buzzer sound in the yard of our school, Linc stuffs the rest of the pork bun into his mouth as we run to our school’s front door.
“Hey, I thought you weren’t hungry,” I say, laughing.
“Well, yuh can’t let good food, especially a pork bun, go tuh waste!” he says, imitating our parents’ West Indian accent. Linc’s father is one of the most prominent physicians in the city, and even he
sometimes speaks in the Trini patois that is just regular speech for my parents and grandmother.
“Meet on the steps after school!” Linc calls out, heading toward his music class.
“Yep!” I race to Social Studies at the opposite end of the building.
By the time I get to class, Mr. Yan has already started his lesson on the California gold rush. He pauses when I come in. I mouth, “I’m sorry” and head to my desk. To get to my seat I have to walk by Nirmala Singh and Sunita Kumar, who roll their eyes at each other and giggle as I ease into my seat. Nirmala and Sunita are the leaders of a pack of “cool” kids, mostly Indian, some Chinese and Korean. Nirmala, who is small, dark, and not so pretty, is in charge. Sunita, who is tall and slender with light skin and big eyes, is always trailing behind Nirmala like a lapdog. When Nirmala isn’t around, Sunita can be nice, but that doesn’t happen often. Usually, they’re together and always have something nasty to say to me about not being “real Indian,” or they like to rag on me because I’m a partial-scholarship student since my parents don’t have a lot of money.
When I finally reach my desk I sit down, slip my notebook and pen out of my bag as quickly as possible, and scribble down the notes Mr. Yan has written on the board. Ahead of me, down the row, I see Nirmala pushing her notebook to the edge of her desk so Sunita can read a note written in the bottom corner of the right-hand page. I shake my head.
How can Mr. Yan not see that?
Nirmala and Sunita sit right in front of him.
“Do you disagree with my assessment, Ms. Krishnan?” Mr. Yan says, looking at me.
“Uh … no, no, sir.” My face goes hot. “I was just shaking my head at something I was thinking.”
“Okay, Anjali, but try to
think
about the lesson at hand.”
I nod miserably. I feel bad about not listening because Mr. Yan is one of my nicest teachers. But I am also angry at myself for giving Nirmala and Sunita something more to laugh at. Nirmala and Sunita giggle, looking over their shoulders at me.
I quickly look down. I pretend to be absorbed in writing notes, but I’m really writing
I hate N&S
over and over.
It’s hard to understand why they’re so mean. What
do they care where my parents were born? Nirmala and Sunita were born right here in Queens, just like I was. Doesn’t that make us all the same? The African American students and even the few kids actually
from
Africa never seem to give Linc a hard time, or tell him he isn’t “really” black, even though he’s lighter skinned than they are, and also West Indian.
Whenever Nirmala and Sunita start up, I think about my mom, who is mixed African and Indian. She doesn’t feel like she doesn’t belong. She was raised in Trinidad, where Deema says “everybody mix up.” So it’s different for Mom. She accepts who she is.
The bell signaling the end of class can’t come soon enough. This is my last period today with Nirmala and Sunita, and that’s something to look forward to.
Linc and I walk across the playground before heading home. He listens patiently like he always does while I complain about Nirmala and Sunita.
“Why don’t you just ignore them?” He slows his pace to match mine.
“I try, Linc, but they are just so vicious.”
“They’ve got nothing on you, Anj. No
pow
in those two.” Linc always knows how to make me smile. “
Pow
-less.”
I giggle. “Later, Linc.”
I cut across the playground to Austin Street behind the school to get the Q10 bus down to Liberty Avenue.
I walk through the fading sunlight, crunching the piles of fallen leaves on the sidewalk. The air is thick, sweet. Afternoon has turned the redbrick apartment buildings to glowing orange. The changing leaves make even my street, which runs right next to the Van Wyck Expressway, look pretty. Here in Forest Hills the smell of fireplace smoke from the small Tudor-style houses rises up Austin Street. At this time of year people have pumpkins and chrysanthemums on their small porches.
Whenever I walk down this street I wonder what it would be like to live in this neighborhood. It’s so peaceful here. At my house the only quiet I get is late at night, when there are fewer cars on the expressway. That’s when we can open our windows without hearing the constant sound of traffic.
The bus comes quickly. I squeeze on with the commuters from Manhattan. In a few stops I’m able to get a seat, so I pull out a small notebook from the front pocket of my knapsack and begin to write.
I’m still thinking about that bean cake.
It might be fun to make a pudding from the filling, but how?
I stare out the window at the traffic. It’s already starting to get dark. I go back to my recipe and think some more about how I can make my own special pudding.
When I get home, I’ll go to Sybil’s Bakery in my neighborhood and get some more bean cakes to taste the filling again, and to really look at it, too. And I’ll ask Deema — she’ll definitely have some ideas.
I am so caught up in vanilla, coconut milk, and cassava beans that I almost miss my stop. I shove my way through the standing passengers before hurtling through the door and onto the sidewalk at the base of the elevated A train platform at Liberty Avenue. I stop a minute to catch my breath before walking down Liberty to my family’s roti shop. The train clatters overhead, adding to the sweet mix that has now taken me over.
Vanilla. Coconut milk. Beans.
As soon
as I get home, I’m in the kitchen, looking for ways to bring my pudding alive.
“What yuh doin’, child?” Deema comes up from behind. I’ve pulled ingredients from our fridge and cupboards.
I tell her about the
pow
and the Chinese cakes.
“Ah,” she says. “Sweet goodness from bitter times.” Deema explains that the Chinese indentured laborers in Trinidad and Guyana brought those cakes over with them from China.
“They came even before our people did,” Deema says. She goes to the bookcase in her room and returns with a book about the history of Trinidad. “Those original recipes didn’t change much, even though ours did.”
I look over Deema’s shoulder at a picture of Chinese men cutting stalks of sugarcane.
Deema is tall, slender, and stylish. She doesn’t look like the other Trinidadian grandmas I know. Her skin is the color of coffee with milk. Her eyes are green. Everyone else in the family calls her Rosie, a nickname her uncle gave her back home in Trinidad when she was a baby on account of her light complexion
and pink cheeks. I call her Deema, which is short for
dadeema,
the Hindu word for grandma.
“I was thinking, Deema, of trying to make a pudding that is sort of like the bean filling in those cakes, but that you could eat with a spoon.”
Deema smiles widely. “Anjali, you know what’s good, girl.” I feel a tingle in my stomach. Deema hunts down a bag of kidney beans from the freezer, where she keeps the beans after she soaks them in water to make them soft. “I’ve never liked those canned beans,” she says. She hands me the bag.
“Anjali, defrost these in some boiling water, then grind them up.”
I boil a pot of water. Steam starts rising off of it, clouding the kitchen windows. I’m like that steam, rising with the joy that comes from cooking.
“Let’s put a little piece of cassava in to make it more puddingy,” says Deema.
“Cassava?” I say doubtfully, looking at the long brown root sitting in a basket on the counter.