Small Thing Called Comfort

5 November, 2025

You have not been doing well recently, and I can't find it in me to reach out. I believe even if I were to show up one sunny morning, with baskets of fruits and boxes of sandesh (a Bengali sweet), with a splitting grin and hair all oiled up, you would turn me away. It is not to say that I despise you now, or if ever. I don’t think feelings are that linear. But I do admire you. I even hope to be you someday. Probably not in the same ways you’d like. You’ve done your best with what you had, and that’s a kind of love, too, I suppose. But you’ve disappointed me in ways you may never understand. And I, in turn, have disappointed you in ways I cannot undo. 

When I think of you, I actually think of your hands. Always smelling of onions, the black half-moons of dirt under your fingernails. I used to hate it. Absolutely abhorred it. The smell, the roughness, the small cuts from knives and chillies. It embarrassed me. It made me feel as though we were poorer than we were. I thought other mothers smelled of perfume and cream, not like the inside of a kitchen. Later, I realised the smell of onions was because I liked to eat aloo posto three times a week, and the black fingernails were because every morning I’d wake to find tiny pomegranates already deseeded in a bowl beside my bed.  It took me a while to realise, you'd wake before dawn, break them open, stain your fingers red for me. And it has taken me years to realise that this was love. However, I think I can understand it better now, albeit scarcely.  

For most of my teenage years, I thought your love was something I had to be worthy of. That if I studied enough, spoke English well enough, earned enough, I’d finally deserve it. You taught me that, don’t you remember? That love had to be earned. You would often say that girls like me had to build our own roofs before we could ever dream of windows. I think of that often. I think of all the roofs you built with your own two hands, the one over my head, and the invisible one over my mind. Sometimes I feel like I’ve climbed so far, and so high, trying to fix your dreams that I’ve forgotten what mine looked like. And eventually, I left everything behind. Our tiny, slow town; the men who stood in banians outside tea stalls, scratching their bellies; rooms that smelled of paraffin; cobwebs above the bathroom mirror. I even left the sound of Shreya’s mother calling her “shuorer bachcha” (a common colloquial insult in Bengali, meaning: “you little brat,” “you rascal,” or, in stronger terms, “you bastard.” More literally, it means, “You are a pig’s child”) across the drain, and Dhruv yelling at his grandma for feeding him too much ghee over lunch. I left the language of our lives and stepped into one that had no smell, no heat, no history. But you can’t really leave poverty. I don’t think. It only changes its accent. In the city, it speaks English.

You must think I was running away from you, from our street, from the lifestyle I grew into. And maybe I was. Maybe ambition is just another word for running away. But I want something bigger than the claustrophobia of good intentions and arranged dreams.

I realise why you have not spoken to me all this time. I had been cruel, unthinking, young. I’ve hurt you with words that still scrape at my throat, bitter and bright like orange peel. I understand, too, how your love for Baba, your need to protect what was left of him, might make it harder for you to see me clearly. How my way of living, of loving, threatened the rudimentary beliefs of your principles. Perhaps that’s what belief is, something that doesn’t survive translation. You love through silence, and I love through my anger. We have always spoken different languages. 

I am in this small place called Menton now. It’s in the south of France. There is blue water and white-skinned people with red lines burned across their shoulders. They wear straw hats and dig at watermelons by the sea. They look at peace, I believe. Peaceful and content in the way that comes only with money. I once dreamt of bringing you here. You would have liked the markets. They are all rows of lemons and the smell of butter. There’s a woman who sells flowers in paper cones, just the way you like, and another who draws portraits for tourists. It has this distinct scent of limitless opportunity. There is art scattered everywhere, and it feels like a life we could have had if things had gone differently. But perhaps this, too, is a life; where I speak in a language full of words you will never pronounce, and you in a language that is full of feelings I can never name. Sometimes I dream of us meeting halfway, and maybe then, finally, we’d understand each other without speaking.

I hope you feel better soon. I hope the plants are growing. I hope you can still hum while you cook. I hope I can see you again, even if we don’t speak. Especially if we don’t.