The Horror Of Starvation
Paati’s love language is food, and low-key surveillance. She always wants to know where everyone is, and she always wants to feed them. Achchi is pushing 100 now and nearly deaf, so she just forces food on people. She doesn’t listen to anybody.
She’ll dig up old biscuits and pluck dusty, derelict ambarella and just shove them into your hands, both unable and unwilling to hear anyone say No, thank you. Please! No thank you! Achchi! Please. No more biscuits! Achchi!
Love down here is expressed through feeding. Taking away the ability to feed doesn’t just starve us. It amputates our soul.
Children are fed by hand here well into their twenties. Not all the time of course, but food somehow tastes better when Amma mixes it. My mother would occasionally feed me until I was a teenager, until she said my mouth just got too scary.
For birthdays, pre-COVID at least, we ceremonially hand feed each other cake. You take the first slice and then shove it in your loved one’s face, often non-consensually. We even do this in office. It’s a kinda gross custom, but kinda lovely. It’s how we showed that we cared for each other. By literally making other people eat.
