Paan – by Josefina Huq
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Our mother is bursting through doors, breathlessly dropping pieces of jewellery across the floor whenever they are not working with her shalwar kameez. She has changed three times, has settled on a blue one that doesn’t suit her at all. To tell her would be fatal. Years later she will wear one again, for a solemn occasion[1], and it will remind her of nights like this. She will trick herself into missing these nights.
It is Eid and we have spent the entire day in a cycle of driving from household to household, loading up on food, taking off shoes and putting them back on, getting into fights about which cars to share and making it clear who our favourite cousins are.
The houses are all the same: new builds of white paint and manicured lawns. No plants. Bare furnishings with displays of glass and crystal, all the things not allowed to be touched. Every auntie has a chrome fridge and so my mother begrudgingly replaced her functional, white fridge.
She is now moving like a cyclone, ripping up the house, the fans on high so her makeup doesn’t run, hair doesn’t frizz. The rhythm of her bangles jangling against each other[2] indicates the level of her stresses.
My and Jamil’s Gameboy batteries have run empty. We are exhausted by meat and rice and people, but we were particularly good strategists this time, mapping out our targets. Bonnie Auntie’s house is boring, but she has the best kebab, so we hitched a ride there first and played on our handhelds. We saved Danny Auntie’s for last, where the best chicken korma is and where they might let us play on the Nintendo 64.
Our mother has to harness a different kind of energy for today. She calls out for us to get in the car but we are already leaning against the doors, praying for someone there to have something we can at least watch. We are handed hot trays covered in alfoil with the food people will mostly avoid[3]. We make our way to Dada and Dadi’s[4] to finish the celebrations. The tray is burning my thighs, making me sweat through the scratchy fabric of my shalwar.
The driveway has been emptied to make room for the plastic outside furniture. This furniture usually lives in the verandah cupboard we are not allowed in, even though it is always clean, never strung with spiderwebs or dust, as if time does not happen in there. Dada has marked this furniture on the back in bold black Sharpie with our last name HUQ. Most objects in this house are labelled with HUQ HUQ[5] HUQ, to deter people from stealing his chairs and Tupperware containers.
The house is dimly lit and full of chatter. Never music. We give air kisses to aunts and uncles and place the food on the kitchen table. We find Dadi in her seat, chewing her paan[6] already, and she embraces us, her cloudy eyes trying to gauge who we are. Dada pats us on the backs hurriedly, asks us where our papa is. He will come late, after his shop is closed, but at this moment he does not follow Eid day practices[7].
Our cousins have not arrived yet, so we go to the cupboard to retrieve a plastic tub of multicoloured building blocks, the only indication that children come to this house, ancient blocks from many years and moth eggs ago. We are now too old for them, but desperate times.
It is the large cupboard next to the steps between the lounge and bedrooms, the steps Dadi will often fall from. This is the one cupboard we have access to, and even then we ask permission to do so. Objects, drawers, rooms feel off-limits, but I never feel I deserve to know the secrets here.
The cupboard smells[8] the same way every time. It’s full of a stockpile of saris, earrings and knockoff perfumes from Bangladesh to hand out for birthdays.
The outside of the house is more ours, us and the cousins, with a steep hill at the back we will roll down or stand upon defiantly when we are playing Pokémon trainers about to battle. The Hills Hoist we constantly get in trouble for swinging on, making someone grab hold and whipping him into a vortex of laughter and screams, panjabis and modest underwear flying around him. There are too many people around for that tonight. When cousins arrive we kick our feet around below the mango tree at the front, always full of things that squeal in the night. Rotten fruits returning to the damp soil underneath. The sweet musk that smells primal, forbidden.
The kids line up for food first, trying to snatch the turmeric-soaked eggs before they disappear. We eat off paper plates, sitting on plastic chairs. The weight of rice and oil makes the plates bend in the middle. Dadi[9] waddles around briefly to make sure we have enough; if our plates aren’t caving in, she assumes not. She returns to her chair to chew more paan[10]. We are surrounded by new families who have not worked things out here, but we aren’t the kids you’d ask where the toilets are or whose child belongs to which auntie. We have never felt an ownership over the house.
When it gets too warm from the foods and lights and night-time humidity, we follow our cousins into the spare bedroom upstairs, with the ceiling fan and a bed to lie on. We watch them go through the drawers out of boredom (nobody has games) and pull out cans of bampara, the stuff that Dadi puts into her leaves. Someone puts on a heavy Bengali accent[11] and pretends they are in a television commercial; BAM-PA-RA! Good in every way! We recite this to our parents later, mimicking the smile of the lady on the tin, and they laugh earnestly, heartedly.
We all get sleepy on the spare bed and say dumb, tired things, laughing out of delirium. We spend time staring above us at the white popcorn ceiling, the hardened bits full of dust[12]. Eventually, an auntie comes to warn of us dessert. We go straight for Dadi’s gulab jamun, deep fried balls[13] of milk solids that sit in a rose water sugar syrup. Jamil drinks all the syrup from the bowl like an insane idiot. And we suddenly have the renewed energy to play outside, to engage in hide and seek and tip.
My father has arrived. He hugs his parents[14] politely, hands Dadi a freezer bag of paan, from our tree that exists just for her, and heads to the kitchen where a plate covered in glad wrap waits for him. He sits at the kitchen table to eat alone.
Our mother comes to get us. We have not engaged with her all night, forgotten her even, and now she is wonderful in her blue shalwar kameez, the most beautiful[15], the one who will take us home.
We exit quickly due to my father’s presence. If it were just my mother she would pause in every room, hanging onto door frames, car doors, saying goodbye in the spare room, the stair cupboards, the verandah, mango tree, kitchen table.
We walk directly to the car[16], waving and bypassing most kisses except Dadi’s[17]. Jamil falls asleep against me in the back. My mother’s bangles glimmer in the moonlight through the windscreen. They rattle lightly when she turns the corners.
[1] (2023) Dadi’s funeral.
[2] (2023) A character in the video game Venba will produce this noise and I will feel it in my chest.
[3] (2018) Years later, my cousins will crave these dishes, messaging to ask for my mother’s recipes, asking to visit her and her cooking when they’re in town. My cousin will ask my mother for her plum chicken recipe and it will become part of his cooking rotation.
[4] (2010) As a teenager I will find out Dadi’s name is Nargis.
[5] (2023) I will look for HUQ in the new electric Cyclone Tracy database at the museum and find my father’s name, his first name recorded incorrectly. I won’t know until then that he had been sent to Brisbane.
[6] (2022) They will take Dadi’s paan away while others smuggle it into the nursing home.
[7] (2013) Our father will get sober, find Allah again, pray, but never fast for Ramadan.
[8] (2017) At our local bar, my friend will arrive with a faded purple backpack full of things from her father’s farm. I will, serendipitously, be there with my cousins, and we will all take turns smelling the bag and instantly recalling this cupboard in Dadi’s house. My friend will ruin it by saying it’s nothing but the smell of mothballs.
[9] (2020) I will learn that people close to Dadi don’t call her Nargis.
[10] (2024) Betel nut leaves have a very distinct smell, one I could instantly recognise. But eventually, I will no longer be able to recall it.
[11] (2014) I will be told off for doing Bengali accents and referring to my family as brown.
[12] (2023) My cousin will buy Dadi’s house after she passes and talk about getting rid of the popcorn ceiling.
[13] (2022) Me and Jamil will get gulab jamun at every chance, and they are never as good as Dadi’s. We will order them in Scotland and they will be shaped like turds instead of balls. We’ll forget them in the freezer.
[14] (2023) I will find out that my family were refugees in India in the seventies. Find out my father couldn’t wait to be an Australian. I will fill in some gaps and recognise new ones.
[15] (2008) An auntie will call my mother haram.
[16] (2013) Dada will pass away in a car crash in Bangladesh. Dadi will survive, and when she recovers and returns my father will look after her in her home. He will make a garden and cook for her with its produce. He will get chickens, buy a wood fire oven for the verandah. They will talk and talk like never before. He will grow her a betel leaf plant.
[17] (2020) The people she knows from Bangladesh call her Lily.
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Image: Rohan Solankurkar - Unsplash
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