Free Anita and Me by Meera Syal

papa?’
    ‘I didn’t,’ I said automatically, blind to logic, to the inevitable fact that my crime had already been fretfully discussed while I’d been having the best day of my life being Anita Rutter’s new friend.
    ‘So now you are saying papa is a liar also? Is that it?’
    I pretended to take a great interest in a mossy crack in the yard concrete, running my sandal along it, deliberately scuffing the leather. I knew how I looked, pouting, defiant in the face of defeat, sad and silly, but I could not apologise. I have still never been able to say sorry without wanting to swallow the words as they sit on my tongue.
    Mama knelt down on the hard floor and cupped my face in her hands, forcing me to look into her eyes. Those eyes, those endless mud brown pools of sticky, bottomless love. I shook with how powerful I suddenly felt; I knew that with a few simple words I could wipe away every trace of guilt and concern ebbing across her face, that if I could admit what I had done, I could banish my parents’ looming unspoken fear that their only child was turning out to be a social deviant. ‘I did not lie,’ I said evenly, embracing my newly-born status as a deeply disturbed fantasist with a frisson that felt like pride.
    After my mother had retreated back into the kitchen, Mrs Worrall came out and stood in her doorway, wiping her large floury hands on her front, watching me kick mossy scabs across the yard. ‘Come and give us a hand, Meena,’ she said finally. I hesitated at the back door; I’d seen glimpses of her kitchen practically every day, I knew the cupboards on thewall were faded yellow, the lino was blue with black squares on it and the sink was under the window, like in our house. But I’d never actually been inside, and as I stepped in, I had a weird feeling that I was entering Dr Who’s Tardis. It was much bigger than I had imagined, or it seemed so because there was none of the clutter that took up every available inch of space in our kitchen.
    My mother would right now be standing in a haze of spicy steam, crowded by huge bubbling saucepans where onions and tomatoes simmered and spat, molehills of chopped vegetables and fresh herbs jostling for space with bitter, bright heaps of turmeric, masala, cumin and coarse black pepper whilst a softly breathing mound of dough would be waiting in a china bowl, ready to be divided and flattened into round, grainy chapatti. And she, sweaty and absorbed, would move from one chaotic work surface to another, preparing the fresh, home-made meal that my father expected, needed like air, after a day at the office about which he never talked.
    From the moment mama stepped in from her teaching job, swapping saris for M&S separates, she was in that kitchen; it would never occur to her, at least not for many years, to suggest instant or take-away food which would give her a precious few hours to sit, think, smell the roses—that would be tantamount to spouse abuse. This food was not just something to fill a hole, it was soul food, it was the food their far-away mothers made and came seasoned with memory and longing, this was the nearest they would get for many years, to home.
    So far, I had resisted all my mother’s attempts to teach me the rudiments of Indian cuisine; she’d often pull me in from the yard and ask me to stand with her while she prepared a simple sabzi or rolled out a chapatti before making it dance and blow out over a naked gas flame. ‘Just watch, it is so easy, beti,’ she’d say encouragingly. I did not see what was easy about peeling, grinding, kneading and burning your fingers inthis culinary Turkish bath, only to present your masterpiece and have my father wolf it down in ten minutes flat in front of the nine o’clock news whilst sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by spread sheets from yesterday’s Daily Telegraph.
    Once, she made the fatal mistake of saying, ‘You are going to have to learn to cook if you want to get married,