Lifespan of a Chennette

I have been island-hopping this week, and you can expect little posts about that soon. But in the middle of the frantic rushes through hotels, and airports and planes and airports again, I ended up home for the weekend. Officially – I am not breaking biche. I have been instructed to remain in Trinidad, rather than return to Guyana and run the risk of not getting a flight out to the next meeting.

So, I found myself at la casa familiar, with Mom’s homecooking. Rice, dhal and saim. The rice was basmati rice, which is not typical, but a favourite of my mother’s. Dhal, (yellow split peas) nice and liquidy with garlic and chunkayed with whole geera/cumin and more garlic. And a dry curry saim with pigeon peas. My parents love this. They could eat it every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with rice, sada roti, dhalpuri…whatever. I love saim too, but there was a time when I was a teenager (during the 3 years when my mother decided to be vegetarian) when we had this more than once a week, making me lose my taste for it. But I like it again.

Lilandra doesn’t like it. Turns up her nose at it, saying it polluted the rice and dhal. But then she’s notoriously fussy. Strangely enough, when she came from Massachusetts to visit me in Edinburgh in 2004, she actually requested sada roti and bodi. I was in shock. Since when she ate that kinda food? Apparently homesickness can do strange things. So I had to go find long green beans and cook it with green chilli peppers and garlic and a bit of my hoard of Golden Ray, purchased from Queen’s Market (?) during a weekend trip to London.

Soon to come, brief posts thought up during my jaunts on planes, where I had nothing to do but think to myself.