Toxins

 “Na! Na! NA!” Dadi pulls the plate with watermelon rinds from my hand and raises her eyebrows to the skies. “Don’t throw these, it’s food,” she says.

“What? Seriously Dadi, you are going to feed us garbage?” Horror swarms inside me like a hundred hungry gnats as I stare down at my grandma’s wiry four feet tall frame and then at the dustbin where I was aiming to throw those peels. My fingers scratch the dry skin on my left inner elbow, but it fails to calm me this time. Dadi’s saree is wrapped tight around her, like armor. It’s as if being here with us in New Jersey is like being on a battlefield for her. Most days it is for me in school…and now at home too.

Dadi piles the peels into a bowl, covers it, and frowns at me. “Shaak maate.”

“Minal…” Ma signals to me after she places a bowl of chopped watermelon cubes in front of my younger brother, Manek, who is busy clicking away on his game controller in front of the TV.

I walk across and hiss to Ma. “Peels are fed to cows in India; Dadi treats me like a cow just because I weigh more than you!”

“You’ll never understand Minal, you were born here.” Ma sighs. “… it’s hard for your Dadi to be in a foreign land…as it’s hard for you…” she murmurs as her eyes trail down my face and fixate on my bloated belly. I am sure Ma is thinking about my stupid thyroid medication and how my body seesaws like a dysfunctional balloon.

“You eat poisonous rinds then.” My nails give my elbow a final scratch. “I’m having pizza with Adriana.”

“Vegetarian? Huh?” my mother asks. It’s more of a plea than a question.

“Why was I born into this crazy vegetarian family?” I yell and walk away without giving her the satisfaction of knowing my choices in this life.

Covid has really cracked my Dadi. My grandpa passed away in India right before the pandemic began. Pappa insisted on bringing Dadi to live with us here. And boy has she been acting up! Hoarding lentils, rice and atta in the first few months of the pandemic. Then she pickled every green chili and yellow lemon in sight. No one could convince her that there wasn’t going to be a food shortage in America, that it is the land of plenty. Now she is cooking vegetable scraps!!!

Dadi infects my life like a persistent virus. Dadi and Manek share my old bedroom. Adriana’s dad lent Pappa tools and helped him put up dry walls and a window to turn our one car garage into a room for me when Dadi moved here. I hear every conversation that happens on our kitchen table late at night or early morning because it is right next to the wall of my garage-turned-into-bedroom. Dadi filling Ma’s ears with poison like: ‘This Navratri when Minal turns sixteen introduce her to Urvi-ben; her son is also little plump, good match,’ or something like, ‘English speaking, US passport, no boy from our village will say no to that just because she is little fat.’

I hated when people made fun of me at school, whispering and gossiping about my condition. But thank God we have returned to in-person school! I was choking to death trapped at home with Dadi raising her eyebrows at everything I eat, drink or wear.

Everyone else is happy with her. Ma gets to be with Pappa at Dunkin’ while Dadi cooks and takes care of Manek, who adores her. Dadi calls him Manek Maharaj as if, at eight-years-old, he is king of our house. She constantly says that my brother’s eyes and nose are just like our grandfather’s and proclaims that one day Manek will own not one but six Dunkins’ according to divine revelations from her very own Lord Krishna. Besides, Dadi feeds Manek everything with a dollop of butter on top. And butter is Lord Krishna’s favorite food. To me, Dadi will give no pat of butter, always a dry rotli with shaak.

“Didi…are you going to Adriana’s?” Manek looks up from his video game.

“None of your business.” I grab my backpack and stomp out towards my friend’s house. 

“Good you’re early. With Mr. Kim’s six worksheets, forget any TV today.” Adriana puts the pizza box on the table between us. Since my best friend works at the Pizza Hut on the weekends, she gets preferred pricing that is so discounted it costs her next to nothing to buy a large pie with all the toppings. By turns we eat snacks at my place or pizza at hers while we finish our homework. I am in my favorite spot, a perfect pizza slice in hand, watching the world go by from Adriana’s front porch. I pick and chew the pepperoni rounds one by one. Their greasy salty ooze tickles my tongue, and fills my mouth. I know Dadi peeks out from the side window of our house to check on us…from four houses down…no way can she see the topping on our pizza. Adriana and I have sworn a pinky promise on this one.

“Dadi’s regressing: we ate cauliflower stems yesterday, and she’s cooking watermelon rinds today. Aren’t vegetable peels toxic?” I ask Adriana, who is so smart that she beat hundred other freshman applicants to get selected for a day camp on toxicology at our state university. After Adriana’s summer at the Rutgers campus we have been planning to make our college applications stellar and use our gray cells to escape this teeny town with its twenty-four people. Out of which twelve people are my very own blood relatives.

Adriana taps her pencil on my worksheet. “Most peels are safe, good sources of vitamins.”

“You’re saying we should eat peels? Eeew! GROSS!” I pinch my slim nose, the only part of my body that my family proudly agrees is perfect, the part I focus on when taking selfies.

Adriana’s fingers fix her fringe. “Don’t you eat apples and cucumbers with their skins?”

“Yes…” — my fingers find the raw eczema patch on my inner elbow again — “…but we don’t eat watermelon peels.”

“Undercooked food can be ‘toxic’ but cooked stuff is fine; cauliflower stems, turnip greens, carrot leaves are not ‘toxic.’ The world wastes too much food. Our ancestors ate every edible part of a plant, plenty of forgotten foods out there that are not toxic.”

“You’re telling me Dadi’s sane — she’s not trying to poison me?” I hate it when Adriana emphasizes words with finger quotes.

“Stop overreacting Minal Patel.” Adriana raises her eyebrows at me. “Your Dadi’s not got dementia or Alzheimer’s or trying to poison you with systemic toxicants. She made the most awesome samosas last week.”

Adriana loves to use fancy medical words because she dreams of being a doctor. I dream of becoming a PA — physician’s assistant, wear scrubs, and work in a sanitized doctor’s office far away from all the Patels and all the Shahs who spend all their lives either in a Dunkin’ or Subway kitchen loading unloading soiled crates of milk, buns and doughnuts.

“Old people should just disappear.” I tear off the largest slice of the cheesy pizza to keep my fingers from tearing at my elbow’s patch of eczema.

Adriana glares at me, makes the sign of the cross thrice, plugs in her buds.

“Sorry…I didn’t mean it.” I whisper and shrug my shoulders. I really don’t mean to upset Adriana because I know how hard it was for her when her Lola suffered from Covid and passed away. I don’t want Dadi to die. I just hate that she can’t think beyond cooking and marriage for girls.

Adriana is truly the sister I wish I had; she understands me. Period. We both aced freshman biology. This year I am helping her with English essays and she is helping me with math homework. A scholarship is my only ticket out of this life. Even though Pappa has agreed to pay for two years of community college, but, if I continue to live at home, it won’t be long before Dadi arranges some weird match for me with the astrological blessings of her village priest in Gujarat. And I have sworn not to work at Pappa’s Dunkin’ Donuts with our whole extended family there. Pappa employs his younger brother and two of his brother-in-laws, and their families live within five-square inches of us. In our town most kids work in the family owned shops and businesses right out of high school. Adriana can work at the Pizza Hut or McDonald’s but Ma is dead against that for me. I can’t be touching or cooking raw meat — what if stuff splashed on me!

For now, I try to focus on the homework like Adriana. Analyze the Bill of Rights and the practices of the new Republic for history. Check. Use the notion of a point and line to develop definitions for angles, circles, and parallel lines for geometry. Check. Explore the representation of a subject in two different artistic mediums: “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams and Breughel’s painting with that identical title. CHECK. Adriana hasn’t spoken to me this entire time. I gather my books. I rub my left elbow. As I watch the fireflies twinkling in the bushes, I search for the piece of gum I need to pop in before going home. 

Next morning Ms. LeBlanc sees us in the hallway and asks, “Why so glum?” 

“Fess up!” Adriana nudges me, then continues, “Minal’s mad cause her grandma cooked watermelon rinds. It’s some secret family recipe.”

I grimace and slam my book into Adriana for blurting that out, especially to Ms. LeBlanc who will write my college recommendations. I don’t want any trouble with that. What will Ms. LeBlanc think? That our family is totally uneducated? That I come from a poor family that eats vegetable peels?

But Ms. LeBlanc chuckles; her uplifting, musical, warm-eyed laugh echoes around me. “Sweet Jesus, I had no idea people in other places on this planet cooked watermelon rinds. Down south, in Louisiana, my MawMaw pickled them in vinegar and sugar, and I ate them as a child.”

“What did I tell you?” Adriana’s eyebrows shoot up through her fringe and she turns towards me.

“No… way…” I mumble.

“Supreme serendipity, Minal…” Ms. LeBlanc says, “A Pulitzer Prize winning author pickled melon rinds, too.”

“Who? Harper Lee? Hemingway?” I stare at my English teacher.

“Eudora Welty sent jars of scrumptious rind pickle to William Maxwell, who was her longtime friend and editor.”

“Welty who wrote The Worn Path… pickled… WATERMELON… rind?” I utter each word with a hiss of hot air from inside my cheeks. I can’t believe I am having a conversation about vegetable peels with my favorite teacher.

Adriana chimes in, “Didn’t German immigrants make sauerkraut with whole cabbages, stems and all, for winter use back when there were no supermarkets selling packaged foods?”

Ms. LeBlanc nods. “And down south people devised new recipes during the food shortages of the Civil War. Tell me Minal, how was your grandma’s recipe?”

“Oh… I didn’t try it…” I look down and rub my thumb on the sleeve of my tee cutting into my inner elbow.

“Maybe you should. Perfect inspiration for the memoir piece in your language arts portfolio.” Ms. LeBlanc spirits away leaving us in the middle of school-bell-ringing-chaos-ensuing-teens-rushing-mayhem.

The rest of the school day is uneventful. And later, at my house, Adriana cheers up when Dadi fries spicy samosas for our snack.

“This Saturday, I’ll treat you to a special vegetarian pizza with jalapenos, Dadi.” Adriana smiles as Dadi slides two extra samosas on her plate.

“Na… Na, no pissa,” Dadi waves off her hands, “I like home cooking; it’s free.”

I smirk at Dadi’s pronunciation of pizza sans the ‘t’ sound and watch her chatting with Adriana in her broken English. Adriana devours the samosas and the attention. Both of them raise eyebrows in unison, Dadi and my best friend look like long lost twins. I gape at these two people, from two ends of the world, one I used to love, the other I used to hate. Now, I am not sure how I feel about either of them.

“Move it, move it, we have tons of homework.” I grab my plate of samosas and charge towards my room. Adriana grumbles and follows me.

That night, when I walk past my old bedroom, I hear Dadi teaching Manek her prayer chants. He repeats them like a parrot.

“Why do you pray so many times?” Manek asks Dadi.

“Mornings I pray for full family; afternoons I pray for Manek Maharaj; evenings I pray for Minal,” Dadi replies.

My feet stall at the mention of my name. I shrink into the wall, cloaked by the dark in the passage that leads to the first-floor bathroom, I see Dadi’s silhouette from where I stand. She sits cross-legged on the carpet in front of her tiny altar between their beds.

“But Didi fights with you every day,” Manek snickers and jumps up onto his bed.

“Arre… Minal’s body makes her angry. Even your Kaki has same disease. I pray to Krishna to cleanse your sister’s blood of poison so I can see her happily married before I die.” Dadi sighs and touches her forehead to the floor in front of her idol of Lord Krishna.

“Didi and Kaki are both fatties!”

“Chup! Big body, bigger brains.” Dadi smacks Manek’s knee. “Minal got A+ in all her exams, your Pappa told me.” 

I look down at my hypothyroid-bloated-body, the butt of a billion jokes in school, the reason I work hard — to show all the bullies I have the smarts to leave them behind scrubbing shop floors while I will wear real proper hospital scrubs. I had no idea my aunt suffered like me. I had no idea Dadi prayed for me. I had no idea Pappa told her about my grades.

I inch back into my room. Lying in bed I wonder about those toxins in my blood. According to the dictionary, toxic can also mean “extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful,” when referring to a person. I slip into slumber with my mind snapping up every nasty comment I have made about Dadi over the last twenty months, or six hundred and nine days to be precise.

I wake up to pings. Adriana’s texts. She has the slow Saturday morning shift. Ma and Pappa would have left early and dropped Manek and Dadi at my aunt’s place. I roll over. I can lie in bed till noon. As I scroll through my cell, Dadi’s prayer songs waft in through the wall; why is she home? Dadi’s sing along voice whistles through my thoughts like wind through drafty windows. Should I knock on the wall, my signal for Ma, and hope Dadi quietens down? But my legs have their own agenda; they slip off the bed and cart me off to the kitchen. My mouth is talking before my brain is functioning: “You didn’t go to visit Kaki?”

“Full family’s coming for lunch. I sent Manek away with your Ma-Pappa. I’m cooking especial food: undhiyu-puri, shrikhand ne khandvi.” Dadi hands me a cup of chai.

I sit down across from her. I rub my elbow. I dip a cookie in the fragrant chai. One bite — the sweet drowns my doubts. I ask Dadi, “don’t you get bored here?”

“I know two things, cook and pray, and my time passes with that,” Dadi replies. “Lucky you — work a computer, soon you’ll drive a car like your mother, then earn money. My time girls were only taught housework.”

I look at Dadi’s creased face as she wipes her nose with the edge of her saree. I notice for the first time in my life that I have inherited her shapely, slim nose — my lips stretch into a smile. I don’t have to prompt Dadi after that. Slowly stories drip out of her then flood my morning with images. Dadi helping her mother grow vegetables. Dadi drying onions and cauliflowers in the winter sun for use in other seasons. Dadi making tea with camel’s milk. Dadi reminiscing about one harsh summer when all the vines of karela and dudhi, bitter gourd and bottle gourd, shriveled up, only the watermelons survived. Dadi cooking watermelon rind, drying every watermelon seed, peeling them as snacks for her younger siblings. Not just the sweet red flesh, every bit of the watermelon gave them nourishment.

Two hours later, I put perfect cubes of watermelon to chill in our fridge. The pungent spicy aroma from Pyrex dishes on the kitchen counter fill me with bittersweet. My insides deflate like a punctured boil oozing out its toxins.

“NA! Pachal Hato!” Dadi holds my elbow, nudges me back from the sputtering mustard seeds and whole dried red chilis in the heated oil. Her wrinkled fingers right on my itchy patch feel cool and soothe my skin that flares up just as often as my temper. Under Dadi’s watchful eye, I slide the chopped watermelon rind into the dance of spices in the pan.