My Mother’s Eggplant

I believe in eggplant. My mother’s eggplant.

Although I’d been fixing eggplant for many years, I didn’t stumble across my mother’s eggplant until my husband got a ceramic barbecue. One evening I handed over a shiny, purple eggplant for him to roast over the coals.

After the eggplant cooled off, I peeled the blackened skin, then mashed the pulp. I fried onions, garlic, chili peppers, turmeric, and cumin seeds. My big fancy kitchen took on the aroma of our tiny kitchen back in India. I added the mashed eggplant along with finely chopped tomatoes and cilantro. At the very end, I added a dollop of creamy yogurt. It wasn’t until supper, when I finally had a bite of it with my rice, that I started crying.

“What’s the matter?” asked my husband. My small children looked worried.

“It’s my mother’s eggplant,” I stuttered, the tears streaming down my face. “It’s my mother’s eggplant.”

“Really?” asked my four-year-old son.

I nodded my head. “She would love it if she were here with us today.” I sobbed. I missed my mother so much. She’d died over twenty years ago but at that moment I was missing her like she’d only just left this world. I cried because my son and daughter will never know her.

My husband rubbed my back until the wracking subsided. The children ate their supper of Tandoori chicken, peas, rice and yogurt. And I began to eat, slowly, with stories tumbling out of my mouth. “We were so poor growing up in India that we used our gas stove only for boiling water. We cooked our food on hot coals in a tiny barbecue, smaller than the teeny barbecue that we take camping.”

I spooned a tiny bit of eggplant into my son’s mouth. “Too spicy, Mommy,” he said. He took several big gulps of milk. I held back giving a taste of it to my two-year-old daughter, who still loved all her food completely plain.

Both my children are in elementary school now. They eat a wide variety of food. They adore American hamburgers with a crisp vegetable platter. They love my Thai-style chicken-noodle soup. They gobble up South Indian rice crepes dipped in spicy lentil soup. And they eat my mother’s eggplant with rice. All these foods are served with stories, some of them breathing life into my mother.

I imagine my grown children might one day bring home a shiny eggplant, roast it over hot coals and carefully season it. They’ll remember to add a dollop of yogurt at the last minute. And they’ll remember me, my mother, and my mother’s eggplant. This I believe.