Part 6 of 9 · 2 minHer Kitchen

I went back on the Sunday. She was expecting me, in the sense that she had made enough.

The kitchen was at the back, the half that had not burned. Clean in the way a room is clean when somebody has nothing else to do with their hands. Two stools. A calendar from 2021 still on the nail.

She put a plate in front of me and sat down opposite with nothing in front of her at all.

I said, I know who you are.

She said, I know. She said it the way you would agree about the weather.

I asked what she had been putting in the food. She said, nothing you will not walk out of here with. Then she said a word I did not know, a plant, something you can buy in any market for eleven rupees, and she said how much and how often, and she said it the way my mother used to give a recipe — the amounts loose, by feel, because she had made it so many times.

I asked why she had stopped, some days.

She said: because you needed to feel the difference. Otherwise it is only how you feel. It has to be something I do.

Then she said the thing I have not been able to put down since.

She said: I did not want you sick. Sick is nothing. I wanted you *fed*. I wanted you to go home at night and stand in a kitchen and think about me, and cut things small because I like them small, and get better at it because I said you were getting better. I wanted a year of your evenings. I have had five weeks.

She said: you gave them to me. Nobody made you.

She said: he used to bring his own box. I filled it every morning for six years, and on the Thursday they gave it back to me washed, and somebody had wiped it with a cloth so there were no water marks, and I have not been able to eat since.

And she pushed the plate an inch towards me.

I ate it.

I want to tell you I did not, and I ate it, and it was very good, and while I was eating it I began — quietly, in the back of my head, the way you notice a sound you have been hearing for a while — to plan.