While You Dreamt of a Cup of Tea

My grandma is a force of nature. She is a former Physics teacher, a wife of an intelligence officer that survived two dreadful years in Iran post Islamic revolution on a huge empty territory surrounded by barbed wire and often left in the company of eleven dogs that they kept for protection purposes. She often talks of killing scorpions in her garden in Bombay as if she’s talking about a stomping commonplace cockroach.

She speaks of her childhood during WWII as a fun time when she and her sister would “make” shoes out of whatever material they found. Hunger, typhus, cold – all these things sound like carefully crafted decorations of one big adventure that we totally missed out on. However, instead of writing a bestselling memoir filled with these often fantastic events, she chose one passion in life – to cook and to feed. To feed and to cook.

Our apartment is a fifteen minute walk from hers and so we would casually walk up at the end of every stroll at the seaside park and we have yet to leave without being forced to eat something. Orhan loved going there because after he’s fulfilled his mission of polishing his plate, he usually goes to the living room and watches YouTube – the app that I deleted from our smart tv to stop him from watching absolute rubbish. This is his chance to indulge in unlimited amount of that sort of content. All he must do is eat.

That day during our walk back from my grandma’s, he said something that caught my attention. “Your grandma is confusing” he began “She is really nice, but she always forces you to eat”. It was such a stark observation that I had to pause and think. I’ve hated this force-feeding habit, but never thought of it as confusing. This is what grandmas did. They cooked and you had to eat. Who cared if the sight of a cooked pumpkin rice made you nauseous? Yes, they did it out of the goodness of their heart, out of their desire to give, give, give, but was anyone asking what you wanted? And then it dawned on me.

This was a society of people that were endowed with irresistible desire to give you love. It came in the shape of food you didn’t want to eat or advice that you didn’t ask or a curse if you refused to yield and do as told. All you got from those around you was love, but the kid was right. It was a confusing kind of love, the one that can choke you dead. This was a city of people bathing in so much love and care that it came close to strangling them. This was a society where loneliness was simply not an option. This was a city of people that would never leave you alone. They’d use all their energy shoving their love down your throat and never stop and asked what was it that you lacked at the moment?

Here, you’d get random calls from your dad and uncle asking you to recite all the fruits you have in your fridge, complaining that you are not taking advantage of the pomegranate season and repeating, in a unanimous choir, that pomegranate juice is equal to drinking blood, that’s how good it is for you (whoever came up with that comparison!). Surely, there had to be a price for this unbridled affection. The price was that familiar feeling of being misunderstood. You might never feel lonely here, but you were misunderstood most of the time and by people that would gladly give up their life for you.

In front of you stood an army of well-wishers ready to ride into battle for you, while you dreamt of a cup of tea and a person that will ask you a simple question and listen without projecting their past and present and future fears upon you. All you wanted was a hollow space where your voice is heard, and your company is cherished here and now.