Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son by Anne Lamott & Sam Lamott

Author:Anne Lamott & Sam Lamott
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781101561164
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-19T14:00:00+00:00

Thursday, January 21

The second day, Bill told the men at the front desk, “My former wife likes your dal very much. Don’t you, darling? Every restaurant we go to, she orders dal. But yours? Yours she loves best.” Dal is the ubiquitous lentil stew. It is one of my favorite foods here and a staple at home.

He told the man at the counter at a Jain bookstore that our marriage was “rocky” until the truth came out, that he was a major fruit.

He told each of our drivers about our divorce, plus the children and the bull whom I’ve brought to my room for chips, Cokes, and the BBC.

He is, everywhere he goes in the world, a trove of historical information, gleaned from travels and his extensive reading. He was here when Indira Gandhi was killed by two Sikh bodyguards in 1984, and saw the city devolve into smoke and riots. Floods of memories came back to him—his driver was Sikh, and people were trying to kill him. We spent several hours at the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum, the white bungalow surrounded by trees and a magnificent garden that was her residence. Mohandas Gandhi, Mahatma, was the reason Bill first fell in love with India; he saw in Gandhi and in India the uniquely divine that he had been seeking in the West. He had seen Gandhi on TV and in magazines: the dhoti, the sandals, the spectacles, the cane, his spinning, his love, and his defeat of the British Empire with the goodness, simplicity, and faith of the Indians. Bill came here to see this for himself, and he has kept coming back.

We passed by the crystal pathway in the museum’s garden, where Indira Gandhi was shot by her bodyguards. I sighed, and bowed my head to honor her.

India showed me reality: two concentric circles further from what life will usually show of itself, because India doesn’t have the extra energy to work on the surface or appearance or veneer. So you see how animal, how human, how divine and bodily and mystical we are, and how this is all swirled together.

I was eating some of the best food of my life, as good as the great food of France. It was tandoori and Punjabi food. Punjabi is what we are used to in the States, but I was enjoying original versions, every family’s greatest-hits versions. Food is usually served on thalis—plates with dividers to hold five or six kinds of food, with little condiment bowls around the edges for yogurt and bright hot sauces. You leave space in the middle for rice, and there are three kinds of bread, two kinds of dal, one sweet and one sour, plus a vegetable dish, my favorite being the crisp brown slices of cauliflower and blackened peppers. Chicken cooked in cinnamon, clove, paprika, and saffron; cardamom-flavored pudding, milk curd and semolina, which tastes somehow like delicious milky dish soap, the way cilantro tastes of deliciously soapy grass.

Babies were everywhere, part of the flowing saris, or peeking forth like baby kangaroos, eyes lined in kohl.

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