Oranges

I’ve been peeling oranges.

My hands still smell faintly of them.

It didn’t have to be oranges. It just happens to be.

I make the distinction because the “peeling oranges” theory of love already exists. I don’t want there to be confusion—that this is definitely not about oranges.

But it also technically is.

I was peeling oranges because I wanted to still watch the series I was watching, and being idle seemed wrong and lazy (but maybe I wouldn’t be a writer if I was right in the head), so oranges it was.

I had had this feeling before. I used to feel it fleeting just at my brow’s corner, but I would always tilt my head in confusion, meaning to understand, but only losing the moment, and also somehow not realising what I was losing. It doesn’t necessarily mean something but this feeling was stronger when I went back home this time.

I rarely feel loved. It is an established fact. I have written about it and thought about it and spoken about it and thought and thought and thought about it. Maybe it is human nature—the want to feel loved, the yearning—or maybe it is just a void that exists inside, constantly demanding and infinitely asking more from me. But the point remains—I rarely feel loved for longer than a second.

But it somehow felt different this time. Like it was different.

It felt like something had shifted or realigned, and because I do therapy now and I think about things I tend to think about, I thought. More like felt. Traced a single finger from the swirling in my brain to where I was feeling the feeling my body left.

And it hit me.

I was feeling loved. Taken care of. Like I mattered. Regardless. That there was some unspoken, unasked-for understanding (as opposed to a contract, signed and reciprocated) we had arrived on, where I could just exist and I would still be loved. I write this and I know it was barely a semi-permanent feeling. I write this and I want to backspace on everything because writing it would mean it is a possibility, and possibilities create expectations, which in turn only tend to disappoint. But I won’t. In the spirit of Virginia Woolf not having a backspace key and clicking away on a typewriter, I won’t. It was barely a semi-permanent feeling, but it was more than just a second. Even if it doesn’t mean anything, it does mean a lot.

Maybe you get it, but it is okay if you don’t—because for that semi-permanent moment, I will be loved regardless.

And maybe I felt it because it came from a place where the yearning and the void both exist so magnanimously and overlap so certainly that I become unsure if there exists more than one dimension in that space, but I think it was exactly it being her that did what it did and it wouldn’t have happened at all if it wasn’t her in that place. I would’ve always gone around with a raised brow or a tilted head, existing at the precipice of having felt love or having died only thinking that I can be should be am loved.

I had mentioned a few days before going home that I don’t even remember having bhindi (okra) in the last few months and on the day I arrived, my mother worked in the kitchen as I served myself lunch and it somehow didn’t hit me till I was at the table sitting, with my fingers barely holding to the piece of roti in my hand, that it was bhindi. She had cooked bhindi for me, for my first meal back at home (and very honestly, I was gone barely two months). I did not fully realise, but I know that my fingers now cradled the piece of roti I held between them.

There is a feeling of having been full after a very long time, and then there is a whole different feeling of having been fed. I had been fed. After a very long time. Looking outside from my magnanimously starving, yearning void, maybe for the very first time that I can remember.

And she kept feeding me the entire day, the entire week. She made milkshakes and chai and ended up somehow making amazing pasta from scratch. I had milkshakes every day. Sometimes twice. I wanted not to eat, but to be fed.

Absolutely and completely immersed (covered) in (chunks of) love

Maybe Freud would have a lot of things to say about it. But I also do not think I would deem him to be absolutely wrong, for a change. I did feel like a newborn infant.

I think that is what yearning in a void that does not seem to want to be filled twists and turns and contorts the desperation into. A newborn looking at the world—as if you had learnt to exist in a room with walls that protected you and fed you and took care of you and surrounded you (completely and overwhelmingly; suffocatingly), only to suddenly be snatched away from all of it, for your lungs to suffocate on the air of the world you were not meant to be breathing in.

Maybe that is why I keep fighting her. Because I think (fall back to thinking) that she is supposed to protect me and love me and surround me even when everything else is unable to (goes away, leaves, chooses to abandon my outstretched hands).

Maybe that is why the maas of the world are always looked at from a slightly higher pedestal (I tried to adjust for patriarchy and misogyny and gender roles, but I’m sorry maa—I wouldn’t italicise you; you are my least foreign word—I am still struggling to adjust to the realities of not being just your baby anymore).

Maybe that is why I feed myself when I am at my lowest. I don’t want to cook when I’m not doing okay, but I do want to be fed. Because that is the only love language that I can hold in my hands and look at and remember and carry, at least till the food is too spoiled to be eaten anyway (then I just cradle it in my arms till it rots and withers away).

Maybe that is why feeding someone with love is such a big deal to me.

Because only ever maa has done it for me—consistently, constantly, every single day—and now that I think about it, I do not know if I am being misogynistic, assigning a gendered role to her love and looking at her unpaid labour of summer sweat and winter blues from a patriarchal lens. I’d like to think at least that it isn’t just about that. Or at least that it isn’t anymore.

Or maybe, actually, it is. I do think of feeding as a gendered action. Maybe that is also why this quote has always hit me somewhere slightly deeper in the chest, has driven me (very slightly) to be such a misandrist: men are incapable of loving beyond a certain point, that is, in the ways a woman can—because their anatomy doesn’t allow it. After all, it is only a “woman’s womb that can expand at her expense to house you within it”.

Feeding does come from a gendered place for me. Deep underneath, hidden away in all the things that I hide away and do not want to trace back my thoughts to, but most of it now exists beyond its societal structuring—however much it can as maa cooks yet another meal in the kitchen.

I think that is why I go have matcha when I feel unloved and not okay. Maybe that is why I only cook rarely, and I hate making cooking as a task (gendered or not) because feeding cannot come from a place of chores, at least not while it carries love within itself. Maybe that is why I have a slight head tilt as I try to figure out why I feel so loved in this particular moment—being fed the first bite every single time, at every single meal, from a plate mine or not mine, without fail—than I feel in a lot of bigger, probably more loving moments. Maybe that is why I would have chai, even though it is too sweet and now curdled. Maybe that is also why I take my time to peel oranges for myself and pack them in a box—so that I can have them in another moment.

Because it makes me feel loved and taken care of by myself.

And, it doesn’t have to be oranges.

It just happens to be oranges that my fingers smell of right now and I cannot stop thinking of the love she is (I am) going to feel when I open the box and eat them later.