Tears went streaming down my cheeks! I could see tears on my mother’s eyes too.
Hell no! We weren’t crying! We were just cutting onions to make our good ol’ Ema Datshi. Mom and I both sniffed and rubbed the tears off our checks with the back of our hands.
She started telling me the same story I have heard in the same kitchen every time I took time off work to help her cook. She told me about how she and her mother would go to the fields of Radhi to collect chilies.
Particularly, she always told me about the day she had to make the finest Ema Datshi that bonded my dad and her for a life time. “I had to impress him, he was then the only eligible bachelor who studied in a phoren country,” she told me.
But she also told me about the various thoughts that came to her mind when she saw my dad after more than a decade. “A thin guy with moustache with hair longer than her’s and skin fair like the snow, a cigarette in his hands and with the most expressive eyes” (which are now hidden behind his thick glasses), that’s what mom described her first rendezvous with dad after more than a decade.
“Did you fall in love with dad as soon as you met him?” I asked her. She said, she did but more than that she was already in love with him because she was told she was going to get married to him. Quite unusual huh!
As we moved on to cutting chilies now, she told me how dad and she would spend their time in the open fields of Radhi. Talking about phoren lands and learning to take her first puff from the cigarette and the first time she held hands with dad. Sounds very vague, but to my parents that was love.
And then she told me about the differences love they felt and the love we the younger ones felt. “Look at yourself and your brothers, every time you people meet someone exciting you think its love,” she said as she cut the chilies into four parts.
And here comes the best thing about love my mom told me.
“You fall in love only once, the day you find love is the day you know it’s for real and doesn’t only happen in movies and it lasts forever,” now wasn’t that sweet?
Then she told me about how dad and she finally moved to Thimphu, their first honeymoon in Paro and then to Manas (I don’t know why Manas).
She showed a totally different face of my father when my elder brother DG was born and how they lost DG’s twin. And then it was me and then my little brother (who is not so little anymore) Geley.
As she finally put all the ingredients into the pot finally she said, we don’t know what parenting and love is all about yet. “True love is what your father and I share. And parenting is everything the two of us have given the three of you and now to Wangyal (my son) and Kuenphen (Geley’s son) and to what we will be giving to Phuntsho’s son (yet to be born),” she said.
As we sit for dinner, dad looks at both of us and senses that mom and I had been bonding again. “I just heard mom’s story for the 158th time,” without telling him the details.
After dinner I am glad I helped mom cook Ema Datshi because that’s the time I get to be closer to the small realities which gave me LIFE!
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