Putting bread in the blender

My grandpa doesn’t have any teeth.

I guess it’s not that unusual — lots of older folks wear dentures — but for him it’s different.

He’s been wearing dentures since he’s a teenager.

As a kid, while he was playing cricket, he tripped over untied shoelaces, fell face first onto hard ground, and smashed the majority of his teeth. He’s been toothless ever since.

When he visited Louisiana during my summer breaks, he’d have to do things like throw rotis into the blender because they were hard to chew. (He convinced me it tasted better that way).

Dentures and all, those summers were special.

My favorite part of all was our garden.

Despite never having gardened, one summer my grandpa brought some lauki (“bottle gourd”, similar to zucchini) seeds from India and planted them in the backyard. He told me to water the seeds daily.

I have a bit of a hazy memory of this time, but I clearly remember the first day I saw seeds sprout. I ran through the house shouting and woke everyone up. Seeing something come from nothing just felt like magic.

And it was.

The summer went on, we kept watering, and the lauki grew. Our fence had all these old nails protruding from it, and the lauki seemed to know exactly where they were. Over the course of weeks, it reached out tiny tendrils, latched onto them, and pulled it’s way up the fence. I was amazed.

The thing is, for all of my life up to that point, plants were just things. They didn’t know anything. During that summer though, that lauki plant became something more. In a way that I hadn’t felt before, it was alive in its own right. I saw it’s nature, cleverness, wants, and needs. Hippie-dippie but true. Somewhere in that summer, my backyard came to life.

Grateful for that time — we ended up eating a lot of lauki. Me with plain rotis. My grandpa with blended ones.

Till next week,
Mayank