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16 Six Recipe Cards, a Wing and a Prayer, Circa 1984 A s with my grandmother and mother before me, an astonishing network of mothers, aunts, and cousins, epic really in its proportions, reached out to me in Kansas when I was seventeen in 1979. It was because of Indian boys. Other than my brother and a son of a family friend who had lived in Pittsburg and then moved, no Indian males my age had lived nearby for most of my life. Heads were no doubt scratched, brows furrowed. Then, as if by magic, one day an Indian boy arrived at the bus stop on Fourth Street. He—a friend of a cousin of an aunt, I am sure—stumbled out of a bus to meet me, though this was never said directly, after a fourteen-hour-plus ride north from a university in Texas. He had been raised in India but had been in the United States a year or two, dressed well, and was a boy from a good family. Unfortunately, just before leaving, the young man had broken his arm in such a way that the position of the cast made him look as if he were taking the oath of office or reciting the Boy Scout pledge. Either way, I couldn’t take him seriously. Seeing him turned sideways in order to get his upraised plastered arm out of the bus was enough. After that, no other young Indian male visitors arrived and I was relieved that this form of linking my two worlds was abandoned. I was off to college, anyway. Who could have predicted that there, swiftly, I would meet and soon marry Terry, a Missouri man from a farming family? Talk about cultural leaps. 122 Six Recipe Cards, a Wing and a Prayer But not only did we marry, we left for the Peace Corps just after my graduation . We both wanted to physically help in the world. Wisps of memory, too, caught at my attention and I realized, finally, that the young boy eating a banana through its bitter peel was not a dream. It took seventeen years for me to ask the question of my mom: Were we ever on a bus ride in the blue Nilgiri Hills together? I recognized the landscape she mentioned, the bus pullout where we stopped for juices—I recognized him. This had the astonishing effect of reshaping my mind. That sensation just under my sternum that animated all my opinions on politics and charitable efforts had a basis. I saw, too, that I could do something. I imagined that boy, if he had been well fed and secure, rolling his eyes. Took you long enough. So, though Terry and I had our own two cultures to juggle, we decided to add yet one more: Tunisia. In June 1984, we left for a two-year assignment in the North African desert. I packed only essentials for Tunisia: two dresses, three long-sleeved cotton shirts, a pair of loose pants. Reluctantly, I left my cheesecloth for chhana folded at Mom’s house and adjusted my expectations for desserts: no sandesh for two years. I tucked in a tiny sample of Clinique makeup next to the lining of my pack. I brought Rockport shoes, ugly and thick; a sun hat; a small flip notebook with “RECIDEX Recipe Organizer” printed to look like cross-stitch on its front. I had written NINA MUKERJEE in all block letters on the inside cover of the four-by-three-inch notebook some years before and now I pulled it out while sitting facing my mother at the kitchen table in May 1984. Mom was folding laundry and I was sitting forward, concentrating, trying to get it all down before leaving the next month. I could have relied entirely on the native foods of Tunisia, or on noodles or peanut butter from the commissary at the US embassy in Tunis, where I heard volunteers had access, but I copied out six recipes as I sat at our Kansas table: a curry for meats, green beans with cumin, tomato chutney, dal, payesh, and oatmeal cookies. The Indian recipes, I realize now, were the same ones for which my mother had written frantic letters to Didu when she left India for Thailand in 1960. They had emerged from her girlhood in India and mine in Kansas: softball and Slurpees, ballet and tap, clarinet and piano, so far removed from her doings but a tether...

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