#3: Slowness

By Halima Abukar

Photo by Halima Abukar

The charcoal burned as she watched her aunt fan herself, interestingly: first with a plastic bag, and when that failed, she tossed it to the fire and sought an unmarked envelope. The food was heaped onto a metal spoon shaped as a spoked wheel, and her motherly figure hovered a bit, the juices and oils of the long-awaited meal dripping back into the pot before being brought quickly to plate, then hovering, floating, and brought with a light thumping finish to the floor, where she sat patiently with her legs crossed. She waited obligingly because she was only a little kid. She lacked the volition to reach into hot pans, her limits unknown to her, unable to prevent burns to her skin, and she paused to stick her hand into the high cabinets where plates and bowls resided. She knew where the spoons were, but they were next to knives, and knives could slice. She knew that because her brother shouted that at her when she held one. 

Then the glass of water came next. The water screamed loudly into an octagonal glass and the sound reminded her of water fountains that they walked past and never flipped a penny into for shopping malls.

She sat and listened, shoving mouthfuls of food and alternating it with air and water. Her brother sat across from her, swishing the water with the food to make it go down easy. It looked the same, she thought. The same as the food while it was being cooked, in the pot. The spinach, condensing with heat in a pan and fully evaporating before being brought to a hot mouth and swishing cupfuls of water into it. The same, she thought.

She knew preparing a meal was not a simple task. While she was in her bedroom playing, she felt her eyes glinting on the floor because the aroma of onions traveled through the kitchen, up the stairs, and slithered under her bedroom door. She tried as she could, thinking maybe if she cracked a window open, or washed her eyes with cold water that the burn would leave her body, but to no end. It was never a joke, because the heat of cooking rice for her large family was always next. Sometimes she would awake from her sleep feeling stuffy because the rice was being cooked and her house was brought away from America and somewhere in this wind-ridden, sand-dusty, noisy kitchen somewhere in her supposed motherland.

It was hard to fight against the impulse to venture out into the heat. To inch closer, and closer to the hot stove, and be shooed away with agitation. She saw her, usually, her aunt, stirring a pot with a large wooden spoon or watching a pot bubble and boil and shake on top of an isolated charcoal fire on the floor. An ornate and 1950s style stove, mostly decorative, stood overwhelmingly in the corner of this area they called a kitchen. The fridge, which looked more like an icebox, hummed quietly amid the chaos.

Her aunt, while making a meal, is either whispering remembrances of God or listening to them. And she looks on, studying her aunt when she adds cardamom and clove and cinnamon sticks to a rice mix, and she sits confused, when her aunt adds the same spices for cups of tea.

Sometimes, she thinks her aunt is unconscious when she cooks. She knows the women in her home enter a meditative state in the kitchen, where rules are not bound by teaspoons and measuring cups. 

They’re bound by hands and lips and they measure with the tips of their fingers and the tips of their tongues. Their bodies remain isolated from mise en place and glasses marked by lines they cannot sense.