What the Hands Know

Felix has been refusing his food. The kibble sits in his bowl untouched, so I reach for the treats he likes, the duck rounds. I pick two. They are circular, and they look and feel like cardboard. I have never had duck, so I cannot say, but if I were to eat one I imagine it would be tough and chewy. That is how it feels in my hands. I break the pieces into small chunks and work them through the bowl with my fingers, and set it down for him. The smell of kibble was overpowering one year ago, now it feels oddly familiar.

And as I am doing this I think about how much of what we like, what we dislike, what we recoil from in taste and texture and smell, is conditioning.

I grew up in an Iyer home. A Brahmin household. I grew up with rules, with do’s and don’ts. At the kitchen table, as children, we were not permitted to touch the food. It was served onto our plates. We ate with the right hand only, and the left hand was not to touch the plate. You could not touch the yogurt with the same fingers that had touched the rice. The rules were everywhere, how to wash your feet, which sun dried clothes you could touch or not, who could eat before the rest of the family.

God forbid someone brought in a cake, something with egg in it. You were treated like an outcast for eating, even for wanting, what had not been approved. The taint from those memories still remains.

At school I watched my peers, other Brahmin kids, pinch their noses and make faces when classmates opened lunchboxes with meat inside. It got bad enough that those children stopped bringing it.

The bench mate, someone I have fond memories of. Some days she brought a boiled egg, sitting in a bed of rice, and from the moisture you could see the membranes on it. Other days she brought half a piece of fish, a maroon fish, and I remember being fascinated by it. By its texture, by how it looked and how it smelled. I did not find it offensive. I just don’t think I would ever have had the courage to taste it.

Each month, on the days we bled, we were assigned to the corner of the bedroom, a fraying straw mat on the floor, an old pillow, stained, without a pillowcase. The food, when it arrived, was the last to be served, after the elders had had their share, for fear of the food getting tainted because we ate first. Sometimes it would arrive wrapped in old newspaper, lofted from outside the threshold, for fear that handing it over to us would taint the giver. For three days this would happen, as we writhed in pain on the hard floor, the mat an illusion of comfort. Contrast that with friends who showered the moment they knew their period had come, had their hair dried by their mom, tucked in bed, warm food brought to them. I certainly did not feel privileged then.

That was a long time ago.

Now we have gone through this whole meat-eating conversation with our own children. I have no problem with them eating it, so long as I am not the one cooking it. My husband sees it differently. He minds if meat comes into the house; though we have done it on occasion.

Lately we have been getting eggs for them, and they cook the eggs themselves. I used to find the smell so pungent it would bring on a headache. Now I go with it. The older two eat meat when they are out. The youngest hasn’t yet, though she says she wants to try.

All of which brings me back to the duck, to my fingers tearing it apart over the bowl, and to the thought I keep returning to: how much of this is real, and how much of it is in the head. If these are biases to unlearn, where would a person even begin?

There is the name too. Iyer. I think about what it carries, and what it means to keep it now, while we are working through who we are. The history of caste and class is built into it. Into the food, into the touching and the not-touching, into the things we observe inside the house and outside it. And I think about what it means to hand that name down.

I was watching a show called, I think, The Royal Nemesis. There is a scene on a beach. The two leads come upon a group of older fisher women, with clams and oysters. The women offer the female lead a clam. They open it for her and she scoops it out and eats it, just like that, straight from the shell.

I found the scene fascinating. I also found it uncomfortable. I was watching her mouth and thinking about the texture of what she was eating. It was another moment of wondering what is ours and what our upbringing decides.

At one of the film screenings there was a Q&A where the filmmaker spoke about class and caste. About how it felt to move through spaces that would have been closed to her parents or grandparents, and how she is in those spaces now, spending time there, documenting our lives.

I understood her. And still, part of me sat uneasy. The reckoning with privilege, the lottery of birth. We cannot wash our hands of it by saying we had nothing to do with where we were born.

The unease is not new. In high school, I watched wealthier friends with similar grades get into engineering while I did not. Affirmative action worked, and at sixteen it felt like grievance. It took me years to see what I had watched from the sidelines was centuries of people clawing toward a seat my ancestors had kept from them. A hard won seat.

Felix finishes the duck. Nobody taught him to want it.

I was taught everything. The right hand, the left hand, the yogurt kept apart from the rice, the cake no one would touch. It is a conscious decision to ignore the voices in my head. And now, piece by piece, I am deciding what to set down in front of my children.

What is the legacy I want to leave behind?

Today, I tuck my kids in with a warm water bottle, stock ube ice cream and dark chocolate with almonds in the fridge. A seat at the table is a wondrous thing.

This essay traveled further than anything I have written, and the response was not gentle. I wrote about what that taught me in The Mute Button.

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