In my kitchen while pottering around I put the leftover rice from the curry last night into a bowl and pour hot water over it (I don’t know where I learnt this). I think it’s an interpretation of Japanese ocha-zuké, where you pour green tea over cold rice, adding some condiments to make it into a palatable refreshing gruel. It’s to decrease waste – my Obaachan absolutely hated wasting anything – a child of The War. If there’s rice stuck to the bottom of the pan then simply add water, put it on the heat and stir. Throw in chopped cabbage, ginger, maybe a dash of soy sauce, spring onions. Why not crack an egg? Don’t you worry, I know what to do with leftover rice.
I use both hands to lift my bowl and carry it surreptitiously into our garden, tiptoeing across the patio slabs so as not to get my feet dirty. I manoeuvre onto the wicker chair and listen to the birdsong trilling. Energetic weeds push up between the slabs – they must’ve gone through a growth spurt during this hot spell – peach coloured roses droop from their stems and the lavender is buzzing. I pull my spoon around the bowl and up to my mouth to get the intense salty taste of chicken stock, the spicy tang of curry cubes and the wholesomeness of white rice.
This is the first time I’ve stayed in London over summer. My world has shrunk enormously, just like everyone else’s and eating food has become an event. Slowly my mind feels like it’s being re-wired to approach situations differently, with more time and flex, simply, the world seems more bendy.
I’ve lived here all my life and still the habits of Obaachan bubble up inside me. For an eighty-six-year-old she moves pretty fast. She might be talking to you from the kitchen, but when you reply she’s already out in the back-garden sweeping the paving stones. I can never keep track of her movements in her own home because that is her domain. Her hair is tightly permed framing her robust face like a cropped lion’s mane; she usually wears an indigo smock with a fetching owl motif over her clothes when she executes her cleaning rituals. Every morning Obaachan gets down on her hands and knees and wipes the floorboards; vacuum-cleans the carpets, both upstairs and downstairs. I caught her once, astride the bath-tub in oversized wellingtons (to stop her feet from getting wet), reaching up to the corners of the ceiling with a mop. I told her to get down carefully and never do it again. What if she were to slip and crack her head on the side of the solid stone bath? She bared her teeth and laughed at me, saying she would never do it again. As if I believed her.
I speak to my grandma every Sunday, although since lockdown it’s been more frequent – it was the best thing we did getting her a smartphone. When I see her pixelated world on my screen it reaffirms for me that another reality can exist. I see the rice-grass spun rope hanging from the kami dana (shrine) in her living room. This small wooden shrine is a house for the many gods, or kami and is positioned just below the ceiling, so when Obaachan holds up her camera phone, the kami dana floats above her head in the background. On the altar stands two vases of freshly cut leaves, a cup of water, and salt on a white porcelain dish. It’s something special that over the many earthquakes her house has endured the kami dana has never come crashing to the ground. I examine the background while talking to her and occasionally I’ll convince myself that her world and my world are not contradictory. Even though our cultures are different, I perfectly understand us.
This physical distance that’s been imposed on us is not too dissimilar from how we used to live. I only get to see her once a year – meeting only once a year isn’t enough when you’re over eighty – we both know realistically there’s not many years left. But this virus has made plans uncertain, a mental breach of something we both held so dearly, the promise of seeing each other again. Missing someone like that isn’t something you can do every day, otherwise the pull gets too strong and becomes a strain. It wears you down and you start to lose hope. So, as long as Obaachan keeps cleaning and I stick to my work… holding the bigger picture in my head, we will share a meal together again. It will be alright.
We have a rice-cooker in Japan, which Obaachan uses every day. Usually she cooks 1 gō of rice for herself (approximately 1 cup) because rice doesn’t keep, but when I’m visiting, she cooks up to 5 gō a piece. ‘Rice tastes better when you are here’, she says to me because the grains become fluffier with a greater volume of water and cooking time. A pang of pity swells inside me because I am reminded, every day she eats alone. Obaachan who is such a good storyteller, captivating us with her funny asides and character voices. Why does she have to eat alone? Because her eldest daughter emigrated to England, her younger daughter married-out to another man’s family as is the way, and her husband died.
I think about her now as I eat my rice. The two of us separated by thousands of miles – it’s not impossible – we could be eating rice at the same time. Not in the same place but in the same present performing the same actions, as in a ritual, finishing off a half-drawn circle; stirring my spoon around the bowl’s edge, tasting the sacred white rice.
