Pod Insights The Moth Mothers and Memories with Padma Lakshmi: The Moth Podcast About this episode In honor of Mother's Day, we've got a special episode hosted by Padma Lakshmi - a Moth storyteller, author, and the host and judge of America’s Culinary Cup.
From buying cemetery plots, to learning to swim, to a treasured recipe - the three stories you’ll hear are all about motherhood, but they’re about more than that. They’re about the memories mothers and their children share and the legacy we leave behind once the kids grow up.
Storytellers:
Mary Mack has the daunting task of selling her mother’s cemetery plots.
Parvathy Anantnarayan keeps a promise to her son to learn how to swim.
Nikesh Shukla finds a frozen moment in time after the death of his mother.
Transcript 0:04 Speaker 00 Hi there and welcome to The Moth. I'm Padma Lakshmi, a moth storyteller, writer, and the creator and host of America's Culinary Cup. I was also honored to be the Moth Storyteller of the Year in 2020. I'm also a mother, and I'm excited to host this special Mother's Day-themed episode. The three stories you'll hear are all about motherhood, but they're about more than that. They're about the memories mothers and their children share, and the legacy we leave behind once our kids grow up. Our first storyteller is Mary Mack, who told this onstage at a sold-out mainstage show in Cincinnati. Here's Mary, live at The Moth.
0:50 Speaker 01 My 83-year-old mother still lives in the woods where I grew up. She does not have the internet, but she's heard of it. And she will ask me to do very uncomfortable things for her online sometimes, just tasks she gives me. She'll call me up, and often there's not a hello. It'll just go like, "Hey, get on your hand computer and look me up. Why is my cat licking all its fur off?"
1:20 Speaker 01 Or, "Why don't you get online there and see how much booze can I have with this new medication?"
1:30 Speaker 01 And I want to do these things for my mom. It's important for me to help her, because she has not had an easy life. Her health is bad, money has always been tight, and just seeing my mom go from depressed to happy for an hour is a gift. Plus, my dad had enough nerve to pass away before I had any means to help him out. So consequently, I am a little overzealous at wanting to help my mother. For example, I will pay somebody to mow my yard, and then I will drive a four-hour round trip to mow my mother's yard.
2:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, in therapy, I learned that this is called codependency.
2:21 Speaker 01 And it's not a good thing, but I am really good at it.
2:28 Speaker 01 The therapist has tried her best. She has given me assignments. Read the book Codependency No More by Melody Beatty. Hey, how about we make a hand-drawn poster of the tips of how not to be codependent? And I remember going home and digging in my junk drawer for colored pencils, and I squiggled out guidelines like detach with love, put your own air mask on first, boundaries are good. And I hung it on my wall, and I mostly forgot about it. A few years ago, at Thanksgiving, I went to visit my mom, just me and her.
3:09 Speaker 01 And my mom pulls out of her worn-out woolly bathrobe an official-looking trifold document, pearlescent. It had mildew stains on it. It smelled like the basement. She says, "Here, I want you to sell these for me." I'm like, "Well, what are they?" "It's a couple burial plots I'm not gonna use anymore." Oh, boy. Yep, that is not enough information, and also too much information.
3:44 Speaker 01 My mom didn't even realize she owned these plots. She didn't remember? She was in the basement looking for yarn, and she came across the deed. And she doesn't need them because she doesn't live in this town where the cemetery is located anymore. In fact, she's never lived in this town. And now she lives even farther away, two hours away. So she also realized that they'd be worth way more than when she bought them in the 1960s, you know, almost 60 years ago. And then I envisioned myself selling these plots and returning home a hero.
4:28 Speaker 01 Like, "Come on, Jan. We're gonna pay off all your bills, and then we're going to the seafood buffet at the casino."
4:38 Speaker 01 So she says, "All right, get on Greg's List and sell them for me then."
4:44 Speaker 01 Maybe there is a Greg's List.
4:50 Speaker 01 And then she adds, "Unless you wanna use 'em." "I don't, I don't want, I don't live in this town either." And a bit of fear crept into my head. "What if I don't sell these? Will I have to get buried in Coon Rapids? Because I know me and I know my codependency, and that is something I would do."
5:24 Speaker 01 But then I also remembered I had already had a little bit of success with online sales. The previous year, I had sold a camper awning on Facebook Marketplace, and after that transaction, I fashioned myself a businesswoman. I thought, "You know, not everybody owns a camper, but everybody's gonna die." Right? It's a built-in market.
6:00 Speaker 01 So then I go home, and I realize there are other challenges. It's just not a fun sale. When you're scrolling Facebook Marketplace, you're not looking for graves.
6:17 Speaker 01 You're looking for whimsical items like vintage wallpaper, or labradoodles, or a fog machine, yeah? And I also noticed, upon examination of the deed, that these are full-sizers. Oh yes, nobody's getting full-sized buried anymore. Cremation is very popular, but full-sized buried is a production. They lay it out for a display, but with cremation, it's easy. It's like, "Oh, let's forget this ever happened."
7:02 Speaker 01 Burn the evidence, you know?
7:11 Speaker 01 But, but I'm in, I promised, you know? I, I read online that you need to take a picture of the item you are trying to sell on the internet. And it turns out you cannot just Google Maps your way to the Tranquility Gardens, Row 40, Plots 3 and 5. Oh yeah, 3 and 5. It got harder.
7:45 Speaker 01 Who is the creeper in Plot 4?
7:57 Speaker 01 But I'm in, I promised.
8:01 Speaker 01 So I just locate the cemetery in general, and I find the cemetery office, which looks like every other suburban home that has sprouted up since she's bought these, you know, a beige vinyl-sided split-level ranch. And I go inside, the man brings out some paper maps. Nothing's online, just some charts and some maps. He unfolds them, and he points to where he thinks these sites might be on the grounds. And he says, "Oh, nobody's gone in there for a while." And I'm like, "Well, yeah, I know, because we've been hoarding them. It's us."
8:41 Speaker 01 And then he takes out a pricing sheet, and he silently points to what these grave sites are worth. And my jaw dropped. It is thousands of dollars. And it reignites my desire to want to sell these things for my mother. I'm like, "We're going to the seafood buffet twice." I can see it.
9:11 Speaker 01 So I go out there, I snap my photo. "Don't even bother, you can just take a picture of a sad field anywhere."
9:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then I get home and I figure, well, I'll put it on Craigslist. I put it in general sales, because I didn't know, I had no idea. And I thought, oh, this photo, it's so depressing. I'm gonna really have to jazz it up with the ad copy if I want to turn heads, right?
9:48 Speaker 01 And so I captioned it, "Looking for your forever home."
9:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:59 Speaker 01 Thank you.
10:04 Speaker 01 "Quiet neighbors, Minneapolis adjacent."
10:12 Speaker 01 And then I just sat back and waited for that sweet, sweet cemetery resale money to come rolling in.
10:22 Speaker 01 Two weeks went by, nothing. Three weeks went by, no word, nothing. I thought, you know, the cemetery guy said it could take a while. And I'm like, well, yeah, it took me a month to sell the camper running, so this sounds, seems normal. And then I changed the caption to be a little more respectful, in case I offended anybody. And I waited, six months went by, nobody. You know, and at that time, somebody suggested, well, have you checked the spam box on your email? And I thought, oh, no, probably dozens of people have died.
11:03 Speaker 01 And, yeah, and they're all trying to contact me and it's in my junk mail.
11:11 Speaker 01 So I look and I, there, nothing, there's still nothing, nobody.
11:17 Speaker 01 And then about a year in, after not hearing one word, I wake up in the morning having these little panics. I grew up poor. These are worth thousands of dollars. I cannot waste these sites. But this fear prompted me to up my game in marketing, and I printed out hard copy flyers. I printed them and I drove to Coon Rapids again, looking for bulletin boards. There are no bulletin boards in Coon Rapids, Minnesota. I had a long talk with a 19-year-old grocery store manager about the benefits of bulletin boards for older people.
12:00 Speaker 01 Nobody cares.
12:03 Speaker 01 I took out a classified ad in the Penny Saver. That's a hard copy publication. And still, nothing. Nothing. I failed. I did all that. And I know my mom will still love me, even though I'm not a cemetery resale mogul. She doesn't probably even remember I'm trying to sell them. She's just crocheting her hats, living her life.
12:38 Speaker 01 But I feel horrible. I gave up, basically. And then, for me, when I give up, it's sometimes a good thing because my brain slows down. I think more calmly. I remember that "How Not to Be Codependent" hand-drawn poster on my wall. And I think, yeah, maybe I don't want to waste these burial plots, but I also don't want to waste all the work I've done on myself. Right? I have tools. I have mental and emotional tools. I have read books. I have paid for therapy on a sliding scale. Okay? I don't have to get buried in the plots
13:22 Speaker 01 my mom accidentally purchased in the 1960s, and neither do you, if it should ever come up.
13:33 Speaker 01 And this may seem like an obvious choice to most of you in here, but for me, it's a big step. That being said, if you are looking for your forever home, and plots three and five are next to each other, by the way, it's just a weird numbering system, we figured it out. If you're looking, please find me, I'll make you a great deal. Thank you.
14:11 Speaker 00 That was Mary Mack. Mary's a voiceover actress and stand-up comedian from the upper, upper Midwest, which makes sense, because not only was that story engaging, her delivery was impeccable. She plans to spend a good deal of the next year getting a book of her essays ready for the general public to hopefully enjoy. The cemetery plots are still for sale. Mary's wonderful story got me thinking about my own mom and the memories I have of her. When I got married at the ripe old age of 34, my mom insisted I wear this very ornate gold necklace. I'd never, ever wanted to wear it before, and I knew I'd never, ever want to wear it afterwards. In fact, I didn't even want to wear that thing at my wedding.
14:56 Speaker 00 But I did, because, you know, she's my mom, and I guess it was her day too. I still have that necklace, and it's burning a hole in my safe. And with gold prices so high right now, I'm really itching to sell it, make myself something I'd really wear. But I can't, for now. Anyway, our next story is from Parvati Anant Narayan, who told this at a Los Angeles main stage. Here's Parvati, live at the mall.
15:31 Speaker 02 Are you okay, miss? The flight attendant asks. And I can see why he's concerned. We're six hours into a 14-hour plane ride, and in all that time, I haven't stopped crying. Great big gulping sobs like I can't catch a breath. In fact, I haven't stopped crying since my sister's phone call the night before, asking me to get on that plane. A few months, a couple of months prior, my 15-year-old son had traveled to India from the United States, where we live, to visit my sister, his aunt, and his grandparents. A couple of weeks before, he had started to feel really unwell.
16:16 Speaker 02 So some doctor's visits and tests revealed that my 15-year-old son had lymphoma. He had cancer. And so I bid goodbye to my husband and my daughter back home, not knowing when I would see them again. And I boarded that plane. When the plane landed, my sister came out to meet me at the airport. And right away, we went to the hospital. And there were further tests and further visits with the doctors. And the doctors, they sat me down and they said, "It would not be possible or safe for my son at that moment to travel back to the United States safely for treatment."
16:59 Speaker 02 He had two liters of fluid that surrounded his heart, and so the plane journey would not be advisable. They said that he would need surgery and chemotherapy right away, and they would make the call after that. The doctors, they also asked if it would be possible for my son and I to move closer to the hospital, because the commute would be quite hard on him during treatments. I was utterly overwhelmed. "How is I going to get through this?" I thought to myself. "How were we going to get through this?"
17:35 Speaker 02 The next week, my son and I went to look at an apartment. The apartment was on the seventh floor of a fourteen-story building that was next to the hospital. And as we walked in, I took in the white tiled floors and the kitchen that felt a little bit too small. And my son, he threw open all the doors to the closets and the rooms, trying to decide which bedroom would be his. And as I stood there, I thought to myself, please, God, please let this be a place of healing for us. I watched as my son slid the balcony door open in the apartment. And he turned around and he looked at me and he goes, "Ma, come see." So I go over to see what he's pointing at.
18:20 Speaker 02 And I look down, and down from the balcony, on the grounds of this apartment complex is a great, big, beautiful, blue pool. And he looks at me and he says, "Ma, it's a swimming pool. You can finally learn how to swim." A little background here. As a child, I never really learned how to swim. As a teenager, I tried to take lessons and I managed to make it through two. The first time, the first day, we went in and the instructor said to all of us who were there for the lessons, "Well, today, I'm going to teach you how to float. Now, floating, that isn't swimming. You don't go anywhere." So, it's, but it's useful, so let's start there.
19:05 Speaker 02 And so the instructor taught us to climb into the water and, you know, I learned how to kick my feet off the floor of the pool and keep my back perfectly straight. You know, my face was outside the water and I could look around, I could take a breath, and I thought to myself, "Well, this isn't so bad." So I went back the next day. On the second day, the instructor said, "Well, today, we're going to actually start learning how to swim. And to do that, you have to put your face inside the water."
19:35 Speaker 02 I climbed into the pool and walked over to the edge and, you know, started to put my face under the water as the instructor told us to. And I was utterly overwhelmed. Water started rushing up my nose and into my ears. I had my eyes open, but I couldn't see two feet in front of me and, you know, started to panic. My feet start lifting off the floor of the pool as my head goes in and I'm losing control. And I think, "Hell, no." And I splashed out of that pool and I never went back. So I'd never really learned how to swim. And here we were on the balcony and my son looks up at me and he says, "Ma, promise me that if we rent this apartment, that you'll go down there and swim every single day."
20:20 Speaker 02 Here he was going through what was probably the most difficult thing in his life. And he was there taking care of me. So I looked up at him and I said, "Okay, I promise you, I will, I'll go to that pool every single day. But you promise me that when I look up from the pool, you'll be sitting up here at this balcony so I can keep my eyes on you." And he said, "It's a deal."
20:46 Speaker 02 So we rented this apartment. And over the next few days, our routine went something like this. Every afternoon, my son would say, "Ma, it's time for you to go swim." And I'd say, "Okay." And I'd pick up my towel and I'd take the elevator down to the ground floor, walk out to the pool, put my towel aside, climb into the water. I'd kick my feet back the way I remembered how to and I'd keep my back perfectly straight. And I'd train my eyes right over to that balcony. And my son would be sitting up there and he'd wave down at me and I'd wave up at him. And in this way, our days followed one after another, until it was time for surgery.
21:27 Speaker 02 On the day of the surgery, the day before the surgery, I went to the hospital and had to go down into a basement area where there was a counter and there was a medical assistant sitting there. And the medical assistant, he handed me a clipboard of forms and he said, "You'll need these when you go in to see the surgeon." So I took the forms with me and I walked into the surgeon's office and as I sat there, the surgeon started to explain to me what they would have to do during the surgery. The surgeon said he would need to insert a needle into the skin around my son's heart or the tissue around my son's heart to get the fluid out. And he said that anytime you do something like that, something invasive, like putting
22:12 Speaker 02 a needle into the heart, that there's a very real chance that the heart might just stop. There was a chance that my son might die. He wanted me to sign those forms to show him that I understood that these were the risks. I didn't understand. My mind went completely blank and a great fear seized me and, you know, I picked up that, those forms and shook my signature across the pages. And I handed the clipboard back to him. The next day, my son was wheeled in for surgery and surgery went fine, he came out fine,
22:54 Speaker 02 and right away, they had him go into chemotherapy. The chemotherapy ward had a series of beds and there was a chair next to each bed. And while my son was there, in his bed, I would sit next to him and hold his hand and as the chemotherapy kind of flowed into his veins through the tubes in his arms, I'd sit there for hours, holding his hand, never leaving his side. The nurses, they'd fuss at me and they'd say, "You have to go eat or drink something. Go to the cafeteria." And I resented them for this because the only real control I had was to be there by my son's side. I did go to the cafeteria, I probably ate things and drank something, I don't really quite remember.
23:39 Speaker 02 I do remember getting these small cups of milky tea that was scaldingly hot and they probably burned the roof of my mouth, but I gulped them down and I'd rush right back to my son's side again.
23:52 Speaker 02 A few weeks of chemotherapy treatments, you know, later, the doctors said to us that now was a period of waiting and watching to see if my son had responded well enough for us to be able to go back home and resume treatments here.
24:10 Speaker 02 The doctors said we could be discharged from the hospital, so we went back to the apartment. As we walked into the apartment, I supported my son, who was feeling rather weak. We walked into his bedroom and I helped him into his bed and pulled the covers over him and turned over and started to close the blinds so he could catch some sleep. And as I turned to leave the bedroom, I heard him say, in a kind of quieter voice, "Ma." I turned around and he said, "We're back at the apartment. It's time for you to go swim."
24:45 Speaker 02 "Yes, yes," I said, "I will." I picked up my towel and turned around and took that elevator like I had so many times before. Went to the bottom floor and walked over to the pool. Placed my towel by the side of the pool and climbed into the water. I kicked my feet back and kept my back straight. My head came out of the water and my eyes trained immediately over to that balcony. But my son wasn't sitting up there. Of course, he's not up there, I thought. He's in bed. But a great wave of panic and fear seemed to rush over me. And the tears, they started flowing out the sides of my eyes and back into the water. And I thought to myself,
25:30 Speaker 02 "What if, what if one day I look up at that balcony and never see my son again?"
25:38 Speaker 02 I climbed out of that pool that day and went back upstairs to my son. And we waited a couple more weeks to see how he would do. And the doctors, they met us and they said, "He's well enough to take the flight back home. He can go back home to the United States and, you know, continue his treatments there." So we got on the plane to come back home and it was very nearly summer again. And summer rolled around and we were invited to go to a poolside. And my son and I went over and I changed into my bathing suit. And as I walked out, I saw him sitting on a lounge chair by the side of the pool, scrolling through his phone. And I looked at him. I started to climb into the water.
26:21 Speaker 02 It felt really cool, climbed up over my waist and to my chest. And turning, this time, I put my face under the water. Water started to rush up my nose and into my ears. I started to feel that familiar panic. I couldn't see two feet in front of me. My feet started to climb off the ground and I felt the loss of control. But this time, this time I kicked. I kicked and I plunged my arms out of that pool and into the water and I propelled myself forward. A few strokes later, I came up sputtering and gasping and I heard loud laughter and I looked over and it was my son sitting by the side of the pool, just laughing his
27:06 Speaker 02 head off. He looked at me and he said, "Ma, look, you're doing it. You're swimming." Thank you.
27:20 Speaker 00 That was Parvati Anant Narayan. Parvati currently teaches at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Her affiliation with The Moth began through the Moth's education program. And the story you just heard was published in The Moth's A Point of Beauty. When we reached out to her, she told us that the events of the story took place over five years ago. "My son," she says, "who was a part of the story is now wonderfully healthy and happy. I'm still a pretty bad swimmer, though being in the water has slowly evolved into a nerve-wracking joy." I feel like the stuff our children actually remember isn't the stuff we planned. It's small moments that you never expected would be important.
28:03 Speaker 00 For instance, when my daughter was younger, I got a call from her third grade teacher, who was moved enough to want to read me a paragraph my daughter had written in class about me going in the water. You see, like poverty, I can't swim either. I'm terrible at it. I'm nervous. But my daughter loves the water. And the truth is, I'm never going to be comfortable in the water. And my daughter knows that because she started the paragraph off with, "My mom is not the outdoorsy type. In fact, she's the kind of mom that will take you to Paris or to a Broadway show, but not to the ocean." She's right. After the break, a story about motherhood, food, and memory. Back in a moment.
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30:48 Speaker 00 Welcome back. Our final story is a favorite from our archive. It's from Nikesh Shukla, who told this at our annual London Main Stage. Here's Nikesh, live at the mall.
31:06 Speaker 04 In 2010, I get a phone call from my cousin to tell me that my mum has died. And it comes as a bit of a shock, because two weeks ago, she had been perfectly healthy. And then she got diagnosed with cancer, and she passed away quite quickly. And grief is a funny thing, because me and my mum, we had a very difficult relationship. We both loved each other intensely, and the only way that we could really show our love for each other was by bickering all of the time about really small things.
31:40 Speaker 04 I do what a lot of people do when they're faced with problems, and I moved to another city. I leave London where I've grown up, and I move to Bristol to make a new home. London feels dead to me at this point, because my mum is no longer there. Something has changed, something either within me or within my family, and I just can't be here anymore.
32:09 Speaker 04 The first time I walk into my new house in Bristol, the first thing I notice is that it stinks.
32:20 Speaker 04 It'd been occupied by some hippie students, because it is Bristol. And so between growing pulses by the kitchen sink, and burning incense, and lots and lots of cats, it smells like it's a house that belongs to someone else. It definitely doesn't smell like my house.
32:41 Speaker 04 And I don't feel like I'm at home. I'm kind of caught in this in-between. I'm mourning for my mum every single day. It feels like this heavy thing on top of me. And I've moved cities and I don't know anyone and I just cannot wash the cat shit out of the carpet. And I go home to visit my dad. It's been a year since my mum died. And there's one weekend where I go to visit him. And maybe it's because I've moved into a new space that I suddenly look at my childhood home with fresh eyes. But the moment I walk into my childhood home, it feels so familiar and yet it feels different. Because in the year since my mum has died,
33:27 Speaker 04 the house has kind of been locked in stasis. You know, there's still laundry in the basket left over from when she was alive. Her clothes are still in the... Dirty clothes are still in the laundry basket. Her handbag is still at the bottom of the stairs.
33:46 Speaker 04 And while it looks like my childhood home, it also looks very clean, like nothing has been used. It feels like a museum. Like, say there was a recreation of our house in the Tate Modern, or Tate Britain, which would be a weird thing to see. It feels like a museum to how things used to be. The kitchen looks unused. The only place that kind of has any life is the lounge area where my dad sits and listens to Bollywood songs really loudly. And I go upstairs and I'm lying on my childhood bed. And something feels different this time. Because when I grew up, my bedroom was on top of the kitchen.
34:29 Speaker 04 And so I grew up with the sounds of Bollywood music and I grew up with the sounds of the pressure cooker. And I grew up with the smell of onions and cumin and garlic and ginger and chilies in the air. You know, my mum was a firm believer in me and my sister removing our school uniforms every time we came home from school because she didn't want our clothes to smell like, like the food that she was cooking. She said, "Don't give the white people ammunition, just wear house clothes." And we respected that. But I was lying there and it, everything felt stale. It didn't feel like my home. And I'm already feeling unstuck because Bristol doesn't feel like my home and here I am on my childhood bed and my childhood home. And this doesn't feel like my home.
35:16 Speaker 04 I'm hungry. And so I go downstairs. And I look in the fridge and it's empty except for cans of Fosters and ketchup. Because my dad is now a singleton and that, his fridge reflects that. And I open up the freezer hoping for some inspiration and I see some Tupperware boxes of my mum's food in there. And I think, "Oh my god, here is my mum's food." So I take out what a Tupperware box, it's got Houndre on it, which is like this really delicious savoury pancake. And I put it in the microwave to defrost. And I'm standing there waiting for it to heat up.
36:02 Speaker 04 And something happens to that really stale, sterile room. It starts to smell like my mum's kitchen again. The spices are making the air come alive. And...
36:16 Speaker 04 It feels like my home. And when I eat, I eat the, I eat the hound or and it's delicious as it always was. And I think, I need to learn how to make this hound or. I'm disappointed in myself because every, you know, I had years and years of my mum trying to get me to cook. Uh, try, I had years and years of my mum trying to teach me how to cook like her. When I, when I left home, she tried to get me to learn how to make basic jana masala and paneer and stuff like that. And I just, I was just like, well, I'll just come home and get leftovers, it'll be fine. And she was like, no, I won't always be around. And I was an idiot and I never learned. And I know that she was disappointed in that. And here I am now, ruining those decisions.
37:01 Speaker 04 And I really wanna know how to make hound or. I remember that my mum told me she got the recipe from Salamasi. I haven't seen Salamasi since my mum's funeral. So, knowing that my mum's handbag is on the, at the bottom of the stairs, I go and look through the handbag to find her address book. So I can phone Salamasi and say, "Hey Salamasi, can you teach me how to make hound or?" And I find a stack of papers in my mum's handbag. And I open one of them and it's a shopping list. You know, it has things like weetabix and onions and cumin powder and chili and cheese and you know, really mundane things that you get for the big shop on it.
37:43 Speaker 04 But there's something about seeing my mum's handwriting that makes me crumble and makes me feel the heaviness crash over me again. Because seeing that ink on the page, you know, that ink came from a pen that was connected to her fingers, that was connected to her arms, that was arm that was connected to her brain. And seeing her handwriting and smelling her food, the smell of her food still lingering in the air. It feels like she's a real person. You know, when, when someone dies and you romanticize them, they become the really good things and the really, really bad things that used to wind you up. And you forget about the really mundane things like when they wrote shopping lists or when they made hound or.
38:27 Speaker 04 And I take one of those shopping lists home. I phone Salamassi, I get the recipe. And when I get back to Bristol, I decide I'm gonna do this shop. I'm gonna do my mum's big shop. Which is silly, because we already have cheese and we already have Weetabix. But I feel like I need to do this. So I go to the shop and I buy all the things that are on the list. Making sure that I also add in things that I need to make hand-dried. And I go home. And I'm looking at Salamassi's instructions to make hand-dried, and I think, God, I really wish I knew how to cook.
39:08 Speaker 04 Okay, let's do this. It just says mix all this stuff up in a bowl. I can do that. So I get everything out, because that's how I cook. You cook when you don't know how to cook. You get everything out so you can stare at it. And I put everything in a bowl. And I'm following the instructions very robotically. And the last thing you have to do is temper some sesame seeds and mustard seeds and cumin seeds together. So I Google "temper". I then Google "temper cooking". And I, for some reason, I decide to get a big frying pan out
39:51 Speaker 04 to temper these sesame seeds and mustard seeds and cumin seeds. And I put the pan on and I light the hob and let it do what it's doing. I get distracted putting the mixture out into a baking tray. And I don't notice that I've been tempering a bit too long. And the pan is smoking. The smoke alarm starts to go off. And I panic. I don't know what to do. Do I turn the hob off? What do I do? So I grab a tea towel and I'm between the smoke alarm, trying to wave the smoke away from the smoke alarm, and the hob, trying to wave the smoke away from the hob.
40:36 Speaker 04 And the tea towel catches fire, because I'm an idiot. Now I've got a tea towel on fire, the smoke alarm's going off, the pan is still smoking because I still haven't taken it off the hob. So I open the back door because that seems like a sensible thing to do. I open the back door, I throw the tea towel out into the garden. I turn off the hob and I take the pan out, take the pan off the hob and I run outside and I leave it on the ground outside, making sure I don't stand on the smouldering tea towel. Then find another tea towel and I try and wave the smoke away from the smoke alarm. And I'm really just...
41:16 Speaker 04 A year and a bit's grief just suddenly crashes over me. My mum is gone. She won't be able to show me how to cook this stuff. I can't follow simple recipes. And she's gone. And her food is gone. And I'm not sure how I'm gonna honour her in this new home. And so I sit down on the middle of the kitchen floor and I cry. The smoke alarm is still going on. And I look up because there's a smell in the air.
41:59 Speaker 04 And somewhere amidst the smell of smoke and burnt sesame seeds and mustard seeds and cumin seeds, there is also the smell of onions and garlic and ginger and chili. And my house smells like my mum's kitchen. And for a second, just for a second, it starts to feel like home. Thank you.
42:31 Speaker 00 That was Nikesh Shukla. Nikesh is the author of three novels, as well as editor of a recent collection of essays about race and immigration called The Good Immigrant. Nikesh's story really brings home the point that food can bring us closer to the people we love, even when they can't actually be with us. That brings us to the end of our episode. Thanks so much for joining us. And if you can, don't forget to give your mum a call.
43:03 Speaker 05 Emmy-nominated Padma Lakshmi is internationally known as a writer, entrepreneur, and food expert. She's currently host and judge for America's Culinary Cup and is the author of Padma's All-American. Mary Mack's story was directed by Michelle Jalowski. Parvati Anandarayan's story was directed by Chloe Salmon. Nikesh Shukla's story was directed by Meg Bowles. Additional audio mixing by Davy Sumner. This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Sollinger. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Gina Duncan, Christina Norman, Marina Kluchay, Jennifer Hickson, Jordan Cardenale, Caledonia Cairns,
43:47 Speaker 05 Kate Tellers, Suzanne Rust, and Patricia Uranya. The Moth Podcast is presented by Odyssey. Special thanks to their executive producer, Leah Reese-Dennis. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.
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