There are these moments, immediately familiar, when it seems the world ought stop because something you want to happen just will not. The pregnancy will not materialize. The phone will not ring. The man at the window will not budge. The message will not arrive. The right girl (or boy) will not be found. The treatment will not be possible. The separation will not end. The offers that arrive dissipate with random passing breezes.
You had waited; you had been patient, so patient. You had counseled yourself and consulted the experts and rallied and tried everything. You had, as the Nigerians would say, tried. You had made some mistakes, but you had resolved to fix them. You had put yourself out there, really, walked out on a limb. You had come tantalizingly close. And so, you had allowed yourself to hope. You had wished and desired and invested yourself, and you had nurtured that hope with conviction, and allowed it to grow.
Hope is not a bad thing, right? So you’d always been told. But oh, when it’s dashed just the morning after it has risen like a bread dough that couldn’t be baked, you’d wish it had never been there at all, such a mess does it leave behind. In fact, you’d wish for freedom from wishes—because wishes aren’t horses, and beggars don’t ride.
You’d find yourself raw, unable to be touched. You feel yourself in a bubble, cut off. Stories will come to you, of those who have suffered so much more and longer. Mothers who have lost children, or found their healthy, strapping 13 year-olds slumped in chairs because tumors are pressing at their brains and nobody, but nobody, could have known. Children who have lost mothers. People with no safe place to spend the night, or no way to know if father will be there tomorrow. An illness that came slowly, and never left. News that came suddenly, and never left. But you will not listen, really because you are in a bubble and counsel from elsewhere is still warped. Because you’re fighting, still fighting so hard to reach out and grab that which you want, that which you know, with the astounding certainty of ages, is right for you. It’s impossible to think otherwise at this moment. You’ll keep checking email, waiting for the numbers to change. You’ll hear the phone ringing even when it isn’t. And so it is that your hands will miss the ropes thrown to you and grasp instead at air. Warm, empty air, as the lifelines pass you by.
Then: slowly, but slowly, the bubble will dissipate. It will not pop suddenly, but suddenly you’ll realize it’s no longer there. You’ll look around. You’ll hear the laughter of children, who had no idea where you’d been all this while, and who’ll ignore your every worry in their characteristic, heedless ways. The sounds of the distant ocean will once more become distinct amidst the peals. Their cadence will lift you up. The compulsions of your day—the need to get food on the table, or to answer the person who has arrived as you asked before you knew what things would be liked (when you had still hoped, and wished), or to pay a bill or send an email or wash the piling dishes—these things will propel you to normalcy. And somewhere, somehow you will allow them to, accepting that there is massive solace in mechanical mundanities.
You’ll get up, at last. You’ll search the cupboards, absently at first, but then things will start to come back into focus. You’ll look around for ways to work with what there is, instead of searching for things that need to be found. Old, completely blackened bananas, ignored amidst all yesterday’s visions of fantastic highs, become your tools of recovery. You’ll think: it’s time to learn how to bake a banana bundt cake.
You’ll beat your despair to the measured rhythms of the beater going round—round—round. You’ll let it go with each eggshell crack. You’ll pour yourself into the batter—not so that you can free yourself from something horrible, but so that you can transform yourself into something beautiful. You’ll work slowly, because it still takes effort to summon energy. But the ingredients will be kind; today they will understand. They’ll help you to bake the most beautifully fragrant banana cake ever. No quick bread, this. Not easy. But something rich and moist, holding out not hope but the surety that all will be well. A resurrection of things that once seemed only fit for the trash. A combination of whatever there was, and whatever there was left, into something that will bring joy, quite incognizant of its origins.
You’ll remember lessons from storybooks. About Sophie, who was angry, very, very angry. About the baker who held back. Simple tales will suddenly make perfect sense, even to you. You’ll carry your slice of cake up to the place from where you can see the ocean or the mountainside or the green meadow or the blue sky. You’ll hear the sounds of birds. The wide world will comfort you. Things will still seem insurmountable—but you, you’ll be more equal to them now. You’ll hear the words St. Nicholas addressed to the baker who held back anew: fall again, mount again, learn how to count again. You’ll know they were said to you, too. And you’ll look at the still uneaten slice in your lap and take a bite—and wonder, though you feel your bruises still, if your fresh counting lessons haven’t already begun.
Ingredients
Instructions
- Pre-heat oven to 350F/180C
- Sift the dry ingredients together (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt).
- Using a stand-mixer (preferably) or a good hand-held, whip the soft-but-still-cool butter until it's light and fluffy and almost a paler yellow from when you started--about 5-6 minutes.
- Add the sugar and continue whipping another 5 minutes. Take deep breaths and watch the mixture become fluffy: it's therapeutic.
- Add the eggs, one at a time, whipping well after each addition. Don't rush; allow the process to take its own time.
- Incorporate the vanilla and the heavy cream.
- Hand fold in your banana puree and then the flour until barely moistened--taking care not to overmix.
- Mix in the chocolate chips.
- Bake in a greased bundt pan for about 40-45 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean. Allow to cool for about 10 minutes before inverting onto a rack to cool completely.
- While the bundt is baking, you can make a ganache by adding semi-sweet chocolate bricks (or chocolate chips) to a half cup of scalded milk or cream. Mix until smooth, and adjust with teaspoons of additional hot milk (if necessary) to obtain a drizzling consistency. Drizzle over the cooled bundt.
- Or simply dust with confectioner's sugar before serving.
This is a lovely post. I hope the thing(s) that you’re waiting for happen(s) soon. And in the meantime, congratulations on how your cake turned out. It looks absolutely scrumptious.
I’m a grad student in anthro, currently doing a summer stint of pre-field research in Kathmandu. I read your book on Hindutva this spring, and just found this blog through your guest post on Savage Minds. Looking forward to reading more entries!
Dannah, So glad you found both the book and the blog. My more recent work on Hindutva (a progression from the book, I think) is in Religion Compass and in a volume on Public Hinduisms (co-edited with Zavos et. al., soon to be out with Sage). Would love to know your feedback, especially since you’re in the thick of fieldwork yourself. Kathmandu–feels so close and yet so far. Would that I could zap a slice of cake over–and thanks for the good wishes. Always welcome : ) Stay in touch!
Thanks for your reply! I will look up your further work, and am especially interested to read that volume on Public Hinduisms. At this point, I think my dissertation research is going to be about something along the lines of “What it means to be Brahman in an officially post-Hindu, post-monarchy state.” So I’m always on the lookout for readings that will help me to get a grasp on lived experiences of Hinduism, particularly when these lived experiences lie at the intersection of the personal/political. Your book was very helpful in that regard.
I also wish that you could zap me a piece of that cake! Baking is one of my favorite pastimes in the US (which is home for me), but here in Nepal, I do hardly any cooking at all. I live with a Brahman family, and they’re not comfortable with me preparing food in their kitchen (non-caste person that I am). And there isn’t an oven, in any case. But perhaps I’ll give your recipe a try when I head back to the US next month.
Reading through your old entries, I was impressed by your dedication and ingenuity in making staples, such as crackers and marshmallows! I love the way that you use food as a medium for thinking about connecting the various strands of your multi-local life.
Dannah, Your work sounds fascinating — I wish we’d known of it when the Public Hinduisms project was in full swing. And your comment about my book being useful made my day, nay my year. Sounds like you’re exploring sensibilities I was struggling to put my finger on in the course of that research/writing. So all the more I look forward to reading what you end up writing.
Cooking in a Brahman household: I guess they must be orthodox, then? But can you at least offer to help with vegetables or preparation–rather than cooking your own meals? If you can/do, I’d love to know what insights you then gain into the experience of caste or social hierarchy via food.
If you do try the bundt cake recipe, let me know how it turns out! And thanks for the so-kind words about my staple posts. It’s an interesting exercise, this business of weaving together so many different aspects of work and life and ethnography and theory. And some sketching besides. It’s something I doubt my regular tenured job would have given me much room to explore, to hearken back to the Savage Minds discussion about to unfold, but it’s fun–and at times challenging to hold it all together in the breadth of a recipe. If ideas for topics come to mind, now or in the future, do share. Or better, guest post!
Sigh. This makes me so wistful :-S
Shreya! You’re back! Yes I suppose the post draws sighs–but hopefully turns in the end into a contented pensiveness… of the sort with which Ammai would perhaps also identify.
🙂
Deepa,
Your 2-4 paragraphs stirred a lot of emotions and memories. They drew me back 4 1/2 years ago to the beginning of my journey with a brain tumor. It has inspired me to write, to try to put down and make sense of the jumble I am feeling and have felt these long years. Thank you for this thought provoking post. I think I will make some homemade popcorn (a comfort food for me) and sit down to write.
Well, if my 2-4 can inspire another 2-4 or 6-8, or even just the impulse to sit and reflect and make sense of it all–then I’m deeply touched. Feel free to share what you will, when you’re ready.
How interesting… and emotional… In my Mom’s final stages of life I was making banana breads for her quite often… Not because it was her most favorite food to eat (though she liked it), but because the sight of the blackened bananas was bringing me back to my senses – life was still going on despite of anything, things had to be done, the people I loved had to be taken care of, the burning desire to give yet a bit more of love and comfort to my Mom had to be satisfied, and yes, the bananas were blackening, very conveniently just in the right time…
I don’t think I made any banana bread since then… Probably should try the bundt cake for a different shape. While the dark spotted bananas are still staring at me from the counter.
See, I knew there was more to blackening bananas than meets the eye, all the more if you shared that sort of experience of taking what is there, using it as a sign, a tool, a method, and making something comforting out of it. Bananas are perfect because bananas are usually around on every kitchen counter. They spoil fast. They can be brought back to life; they can bring back some happiness, some moments of special loving something amidst the life that must still go on. They’re a perfectly beautiful metaphor like that, too. And so did you take the hint of the bananas blackening on your counter? Make a beautiful bundt to celebrate your mother and remember your shared enjoyments?
No, my dear, haven’t make the bundt yet… The bananas’ destiny was our traditional Sunday buckwheat pancakes. I’ve been thinking of the bundt, and realized the idea of making a banana bread in any form seems to be so laborious now. Avoiding figuring out the substitutes to make the recipe suitable for our dietary restrictions or resisting a new flush of difficult memories? I don’t know. I don’t know if the wounds are healed and not sure I want to test it out… But from now on, the sight of unclaimed dark bananas on the counter will make me think of your bundt and ask myself if I am ready to try it… 🙂
“You’ll hear the words St. Nicholas addressed to the baker who held back anew: fall again, mount again, learn how to count again. You’ll know they were said to you, too.” Hmmm…
Some more lines I keep going back to, on the subject of waiting and hope..
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
~ T.S. Eliot ~
(from The Four Quartets)
http://www.panhala.net/Archive/I_said_to_my_soul.html
P.S. Catching up on the posts I missed while travelling. Feels nice to return to your blog – I can almost smell the bundt cake.
Thank you so much for these beautiful, beautiful lines, and for the reminder never to let as much time as I’ve let go by without re-reading the Quartets. Another friend reminded me of some lines from Shelley’s Prometheus, which I’m taking the liberty of quoting backwards here:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates […]
These are the spells by which to re-assume
An empire o’er the disentangled doom.
& last but not least: so happy to have you back!
Amazing – it works both backwards and forwards!
A veritable palindrome : )
In the words of Nigerians, you can say you’ve ‘tried’. How do you capture all that emotion in one word Deepa…..but you have. You understand. I feel you somehow, as though you were writing this to me, for me, because right now I’m ‘trying’ hard at life and at work and ….I’m left in doubt, with hope, looking up. Thank you for baring a bit of your soul.
Have missed and wondered about you, but here you are again. So happy. Especially that there’s resonance with the banana bundt. In that sense, of course the post was written for you; would only that I’d known it at the time. As for the “you tried, O” Nigerian expression–I’ve carried it with me all these years, even remember the intonations with which it would be delivered. When I left Kano for school in India, I used it in a conversation with a teacher, who didn’t at all understand. “Don’t say you will try,” he admonished, “say you will.” I didn’t know to respond then, but now I do. It’s a statement about effort and what that takes, about pushing against the odds, about making a space for failure and surviving its beatings, about preserving a sense of hope. Do I have that right? All anyone can really do, ever, is to try in that precise sense. A poignant lesson indeed.
[…] “Faerie child” lines are borrowed and liberally modified from W.B. Yeats’ original “The Stolen Child”; the lines on hope are from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” [with thanks to Sharanya Manivannan for reminding me of them in a comment on my "banana bundt" post]. […]
This post captures many of the emotions I’ve dealt with in the past and what I continue to deal with in the presence. Sometimes we are so preoccupied with our personal woes to care that other people have it worse than we do. Sometimes it’s difficult to look beyond our personal struggles and appreciate what we do have. I certainly feel like I need to bake a Banana Bundt Cake or find something that will help me unleash these pent up emotions that threaten to consume me from time to time. Thanks for sharing this post with me. I don’t know how I missed it to begging with :-).
[…] have to start over. You’d hear once again the words St. Nicholas addressed to the baker: fall again, mount again, learn how to count again. […]
[…] then you snap out of it, find yourself in wasting bananas, and you say no. The pundits may be right about a great many things. But they are not right for […]