Prena Poetry

1. somehow, how much ever farther we go, we always end up carrying our home in the depth of our bones. we pack our tradition, our hand woven clothes and our mountains in a suitcase with us. it so belongs to us and we so belong to it. it’s beautiful just how we can remember the details of how our mother’s garden looked like or the colour of the shoes our father always wears.

2. those days by the hearth, eating out of the steel plates and tapioca roasting on the embers are the now waves of nostalgia that forever lives in me. those hands that labored in the soil and chopped firewood behind a house made up of mud and bamboo—has raised me and sent me off to some place they only ever had the privilege to see on television. they have never known how pizza or Macdonald tastes like but they are always there ready to feed me dal and rice when i get home.

3. so yes, i figured out my coping mechanism is cooking, contradicting to all the modern ideas and multitude of hobbies. in the end, i still find peace and art in cooking. maybe it takes me back to the days i spent in the kitchen with the women of my family—chopping onions or sharing loud laughter with a sip of ginger and cardamom tea. there was a power; a certain divine energy about women cooking by the fire. i always loved the warmth that came out of my mother and my grandmother.

4. on days when i miss my home. i simply chop onions and chillies, and fry them in a kadai with turmeric and much more masalas i still can’t name properly. now that smell on my clothes afterwards—that’s the smell of home, nostalgia and family. that smell is where my life began and where it’ll end.

5. i will always find my way home.