Spaghetti

“Insipid white food”, Aai spat out.

She sighed and continued eating.

“I taught you everything, khichdi, parathas, sabzi, daal, biryani and yet you feed me this pasta shasta. It’s just maggi in tomato ketchup.” Aai continued.

Her mother always had a steady stream of complaints against her. She was too fat some days, after her diet, she was too thin.

“Matchstick legs”, Aai grumbled.

Aai muttered about everything. Her eyes were too small, her lips too thin and her nose too pointy. Her hair was too frizzy. When she started straightening her hair, Aai started muttering about hair damage. Meera apparently walked like a man, talked like a man and danced like a man. It wasn’t like Aai had something just against her own flesh and blood. She was just critical of everything. She would flip through magazines and scoff at every model on the pages.

“Fat….chubby….heavy…this one’s just a whale.” She would snigger. Later her daughter would flip through every page of the same magazine and her heart would sink as she would see one skinny model after the other. Her own waist had never seemed bigger.

After 22 years of feeling terrible about herself every single day, Meera started looking for a job. Her only criteria, to be as far away from her mother as she could. Once away, she let her waist grow a couple of more comfortable inches, let her hair become frizzier and developed enough confidence to leave the house without make-up. But Aai was now here. It had been three years since she had lived with Aai and while distance does make the heart grow fonder, it had seemed to make her mother louder too.

She sighed and counted days till she could drop Aai back to the bustling railway station and have the flat back to herself. Aai had a tendency to make herself home everywhere too. Suddenly Meera’s dark gloomy curtains had been tied back with bright red ribbons letting the sunlight pour through. Her flat which she felt always smelt a little musty because of the seepage, smelt like fresh rose. After all Aai never travelled without her trademark rose incense sticks. Meera’s almost empty fridge was now stocked with little butter, sauce and pickle sachets from Aai’s train journey. The pillows were fluffier, the flat prettier but Meera’s self-confidence had hit an all-time low. A nicer flat wasn’t much of a consolation for a ruined self-image.

As she scrubbed off the last dregs of the pasta sauce from the pan, she wondered if her life would have been different if her Aai was just a little easier to please. She had held a reputable job for a few years now and made a decent living. She was fairly self-sufficient and had always been a dutiful daughter. The dinner choice might not have been a wise one, she thought in retrospect.

Her Aai’s voice came floating in the kitchen. Meera instinctively readied herself for another attack. In the past Aai had reprimanded her for having terrible posture while doing the dishes, as if there was any other way of doing them.

But this time, her Aai was speaking on the phone. This was her daily call to her sister who lived in another town.

“Meera’s become very self-sufficient. Earns so well and cooks so well too. She made spaghetti tonight. Like in a restaurant you know…” her voice glowed with pride.

“So how’s your daughter doing? I heard she got laid off? Tsk…tsk” Aai continued.

Meera smiled to herself. Maybe she didn’t have to always take her Aai’s brickbats so personally.