They say that a certain smell can take you back in time, like a time machine working its wonders.
Mentally, I’m back in 2007. My father is cooking rice and yellow dal, the traditional lunch of every Indian family. While my mother is frying fish with eggplant cut into circular shape.
While my little brother and me are sitting around the dining table watching television. What a beautiful family. Let me tell you, this is a real thing, a real memory from my past. I couldn’t have ever thought in my scariest, darkest dream that one day- this will be just a memory.
A memory that I would want as a reality once again or at least to be able to relive it a thousand time, over and over again. I would want to see my parents cook for us, smile to each other. There is a part of me that remembers them being in love. A love like no else. My father would often get my mother chocolates and roses. He would tell her about this day at work. My mother would do everything to make my father happy. Even when he was wrong and she was misunderstood. You can call her a ‘people-pleaser’, I did too but I was so wrong, she was just in love. A woman in love who would try her best to make her spouse comfortable in his skin even when he was flawed. I objected some of my mother’s traits, especially the ones she had for the people she loved, including me. She would always forgive people who damaged her. Why? Only because she believed in karma or because she was putting all her energy and focus on her children?
Now that she is gone, I can only apologise to her soul for being ignorant towards her- my mother.
Well, coming back to where we were. Honestly, I think my younger brother would want this more than me, to see his mother cook for him, to have homely food and warmth in that house once again. It’s always so cold after they departed.
While winter is fading away and this afternoon is making me realise – memories don’t just fade away like seasons as much as I want a time machine and as much as I know, there isn’t one. We can do well with nostalgia and a certain smell that can take you back to the past.