Down Smede Road

by Shome Dasgupta

Pecan pie: once Ma peeled a mango, showing how sunlight saunters in through the balcony rails on a rusty Kolkata morning. I was twelve then, the skin—its complexion matched her Mama's walking stick: her uncle—the oil in his hair made me want to be proper. Proper—back in Lafayette, under a Louisiana rouge, I foiled my first attempt at baking: gathered pecans under tall speechless bark where sugar cane fields patched the earth, tall enough for hide and seek. Ziploc bags pierced and shredded—I could hear them cackling, at me. October winds and ashy glittered skies: a harvest moon lullaby told me to go back to sleep. Back. The juice—its juice, the soul of Bengali tongue: rivers down the wrists until a quick lick left a sticky scent of every plucked tree in Golf Green where my grandfather lived. My Dadu was alive then—Dida, her bright red bindi and green sari spoke for her as she sat in her wheelchair: a smile and a cough. Her daughter's hand just below the mouth—hinting for a tilt of the head—hinting toward childhood days of aloo bhaji and cauliflower on aluminum. “This is how you chew the seed," Ma said, holding the sun's core between her thumb and index. Its strands—the seed’s rays—flossing the teeth, a chin of yolk and gleam. One day I'll make the perfect pecan pie—one day I'll memorize its recipe without looking for ingredients: now, though—just for now, I'll keep this one on the kitchen counter to remind me of the first time I noticed the sun in India and how it sang about a family tucked away in a Kolkata winter, fresh of laundry and loss.