here, there & elsewhere. Weed seed

Bins loves to cook. “Cut five medium onions and call me,” he says. His style of cooking involves getting me to do all the boring stuff while he watches a movie on my laptop. Fortunately, I like the boring stuff. I can enter a trance-state while dicing tomatoes, grating carrots and peeling individual pods of garlic. The hiss and crackle of food on the fire makes me nervous. So I end up either undercooking the food by taking it off the electric ring too soon or burn it by pretending I can’t hear the sound.

Onions are a problem, however. I cry so much while slicing them that I get dehydrated. I’ve tried the usual remedies, such as chewing gum and wearing swim-goggles. The thing that works best is storing the onions in the fridge. Bins is horrified by this solution. “Where is my flavour?” he howls the first time he catches me at it. “Cold onions are dead onions! Thermocol onions!” In Bins-speak, thermocol is the anti-Christ of edibility. So I revert to wearing the swim-goggles.

I’m in the kitchen, with the five onions arranged alongside the chopping board. There’s a plastic bag positioned so that I can shove the slimy pink skins into the bag for quick disposal. I have the big, shiny knife ready. Now all I need are the goggles. They’re in the drawer under the counter, where I keep cutlery and other little bits of hardware related to the table and kitchen. I open the drawer, get the goggles out and put them on when I notice a small plastic bag filled with seeds, in the drawer.

I call out to Bins. I want to know why the seeds are in the drawer instead of on the shelf with the other spices. To my surprise, he dashes into the kitchen, snatches the baggie out of my hands and dashes back out again. “Nothing, nothing,” he mumbles. Of course, I follow him out. What was that about, I want to know. “Go cut your onions,” he says. “Put the dal on the fire. Turn on the rice-cooker.” Not until you tell me what’s in the baggie, I say.

“Enna di,” he says, giving it those Tamil ones. “Let me watch my movie, no?” Tell me now, I say. He changes tactics. Turning around, he looks at me, still wearing my goggles and begins to cackle. “Look at you! Haha! You look like a storm trooper — or no! A raccoon! An angry raccoon!” I am not amused. Tell me, I say, in my most Darth Vader-y voice. What. Is. In. The. Baggie. “Hoo-hoo,” he says, now pouting. “You will just make a big noise. I wanted to save you that effort.”

There is a silence. Then I ask him if it’s what I think it is. Bins is too lazy to lie. “Yup,” he says. “Weed seeds. Really good stuff. All the way from Pondicherry!” He looks up with a naughty grin. Completely shameless. “And you want to know the best part? Fooling the little sniffer-dog at Boston airport!”

(Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist writes about her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column)

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