Lunch

by Sophia Khan

Lunch

0. Tarry slivers of opium, sucked from beneath your nanny’s fingernails

You have heard you were a horror: cried all night; failed to thrive. You want something ineffable. Nothing you are given ever satisfies. What is the poor woman to do? One evening when you are nine months old, you will not wake up. The doctor tells your parents opium is common recourse for the poor. Your American mother is horrified by the dangers Pakistan poses. By the time you are one, you’ve fled home for the first time.

3. Olives, brie, cocktail snacks from grocery sacks in the backseat of the car

You consider childhood an indignity. Raisins revolt you. Apply juice is insulting, peanut butter, a sticky, unnecessary mess. The things you love the most are delicate, complicated, and beautiful: dollhouses, nautilus shells, pastries with pink icing. You dwell in imagination, wondering if you are first person to have developed consciousness. Your parents are oblivious, and your sister has yet to show signs of sentience. When your son comes out supercilious, you wonder where he gets it from. You must go back to the very beginning to recall a time when you were not striving to become a vision of yourself that hovers eternally just out of reach.

6. Food is immaterial

You take your meals at the dining center at Vassar, where your parents are housefellows. You and your sister are cafeteria celebrities. You have a fondness for the salad bar because of all the pretty colors. Because a child eating salad is a novelty and you’ve learned novelty wins praise. You skip around in pinafores and pretty ribbons. You are adored simply for existing. You learn to understand that you, Little Girl, are an idea, but you never learn to mind.

9. Tomato, French’s mayonnaise, Continental white bread

You move back to Pakistan, where you quickly learn that the best way to fit in is to make no effort at fitting in. You read novels under your desk all day. You start a tomato sandwich cult at school. Everyone wants to exchange with you, so you accept monstrosities that contain cheese, onion, even olive loaf. When the owners ask you how their iterations measure up, you sadly shake your head. You school is rigidly stratified into burgers and bun kebabs. You, indisputably, are a burger. Your Urdu is appalling. You don’t live in a joint family (you will, just wait). Instead of the itchy wool stockings others have to bear in winter, you wear smooth tights bought during your summers overseas. You know better than to argue when the bun kebabs accuse the burgers of whatever you call internalized oppression before you’re old enough to read The Wretched of the Earth. It is a battle you know you’ll lose. When your life is a test you have no chance of passing you learn to reconfigure the rules. Many years later when you’re speaking at a literary festival, an angry audience member asks if it isn’t treacherous to write in a language other than that of your dreams. You ask whether it is reductive to boil the colonial legacy down to language politics. You do not mention that you dream in English. Tomato sandwiches reign long on your roster.

12. Leftovers, assorted

You and your friends have daily potlucks, containers uncapped between your legs. You take a bite of someone’s paratha, pass it on. Your friend commends your cook’s roast beef. Your best friend’s mother drops off steaming noodles every day at noon, packing extra because she knows you share. You sit on the floor with your legs intertwined and you cannot tell whose shoes are whose. You feel a sense of unity with the universe that you spend much of your young adulthood trying to replicate with drugs.

15. The adulation of the adolescent male

You find it endearing how the boys are always ravenous. They gobble down their lunches and ask who has food to spare. You are happy to sacrifice yours. You like to see them satisfied. What better reason to skip a meal? It will take tuberculosis to teach you that there is such a thing as too thin. You live in a time and place where the way to a man’s heart is still through his stomach. Girls like you are experts at confectionary. You’re good at things that can be learned from books. You don’t know where to find a waxing lady or what to wear to weddings or how not to be the kind of girl your music teacher knows will never tell, but you do know how to bake. Your sponge cake is impeccable. You date boys because it is what cool girls do. You break their hearts because you’re bored. The boy you will one day marry ties you up with your dupatta and tells you you’ll be his wife. You laugh because there is nothing he could give you that you don’t already have. By the time you finish your O’levels, you’re both a lesbian and a ho.  

18. 5 ritz crackers, sliced apple

You will get fat in America: everybody tells you this. You leave Pakistan after your dentist’s wife denounces your mother as an American spy in the newspaper. It is a complicated thing to be a spokeswoman for a country when your own is dropping bombs on it. For a while, your family stands its ground: guards armed with Kalashnikovs, broken glass atop the wall. In the end, the UN puts its foot down and you fly away on a summer night so hot the sun may as well be out. You’ve long known that you are not brown, not fully, but it has only recently come to your attention that you also are not white. The customs officials at JFK no longer welcome you “home.” They take you aside for random questioning. They confiscate your passport and put you in glass cubes. You long for a good tuphan. You long for the monsoon, for rain that flays you only to abate a moment later. You roam the streets in search of meaning. You read books you do not understand. You smoke strawberry blunts in bad parts of Brooklyn. You are looking for a self.

21. Lance sandwich crackers: cream cheese & chive

You do your shopping at CVS because you do not have a car. You were too young for driving classes in Pakistan and too old in America. During orientation, you are told that carbs are good to line the stomach. For dinner, you mix flavored sugar into vodka. The jocks briefly adopt you. They like to say that you can drink them under the table and serve them breakfast on it the next day. They pat you on the head and call you their little Paki. This might as well be who you are. You go through a piercing phase. Pieces of metal mar your pretty face. A waiter in an Italian restaurant tells the man you think you’ll marry that lunch is free if he can persuade you to take them out. He brings a pair of pliers to the table. Afterwards, the whole dining room applauds. You get drunk on free chianti. This might as well be who you are.

24. Hummus, olives, onions, tomato, tortilla

You put little value on the present. How can it stand up to the past, illuminated by its bright corona of nostalgia? The future, with all its glitter of possibility? You find secluded courtyards to hide out in between classes, attributing this habit to your smelly lunch. You make no friends during your MFA. Even though smart phones don’t yet exist, the man who will be your husband has an uncanny way of knowing if another male has spoken to you. Somehow, he can sense it if the skirt you are wearing falls ever so slightly above the knee. He grills you about everyone who friends you on Facebook because, if you have nothing to hide, why won’t you give him your password? You have read this story before and, on some level, you understand what it means, but there is something he can give you now, something you don’t already have. Even after all these years what you want, more than anything, is to go back home and you know your home is a place you can no longer own alone.

27. Nescafé with milk and sugar, Camel Lights, Adderall (10 mg)

You write a book about a girl searching for her missing mother. When it comes out, reviewers say it is a subversion of the feminine mystique. You google the feminine mystique. They say it is about the deep loneliness endemic to the diaspora. You google diaspora. You do not understand how either definition applies to you. Your present is a blip in time. You are getting married soon. Many years later, when you teach “Mrs. Sen’s” to a group of Midwestern college students, you are surprised that they find the ending hopeful. You begin to understand how very different understandings of America can be.

30. Marmalade, wheat toast, tea

You have never been a breakfast person, but you learn keeping your father-in-law company is part of your new job. You learn to skip your lunch instead. You learn to keep your head down. You learn to keep your mouth shut. You learn that when men solicit your opinion what they really want is acquiescence. Or argument. You learn that anger transcends both love and logic, that sometimes it simply needs a place to lay its head. You learn to seek refuge in the strength of women: your mother-in-law, who endures your clumsy ministrations as her body ossifies and she can no longer voice dissent, consent; your maid, who has lost three children for reasons positively medieval, but who maintains a cheerful faith in god; your lover, who has never learned to keep her mouth shut and spends her life paying the price. Your Urdu gets much better. You fall asleep a kilometer from where you were born. You learn not to look too closely at the life you have, for so long, longed to lead.

33. Whatever your child spits out

Existence reconfigures itself when your son is born. Things that once mattered are now moot. Things that never mattered now mean everything. You feel as though you’ve spent all your life reading a book about what the world is, and you are all at once alive in it. You tell yourself that things will be better by the time your son is old enough to remember. You tell yourself he doesn’t understand. The pandemic spares you having to make a decision but, eventually, travel restrictions begin to lift. You wake up one morning to find the vision of yourself that hovers eternally just out of reach is gone. There is only now.

36. Cheddar, gruyere, scallion, Kewpie mayonnaise, sourdough

You make cheese and onion sandwiches for a man you think you’ll love forever. The taste reminds you of the summer in London when you first saw your husband’s anger through others’ eyes. Your son was a baby and you’d set out for the day with only enough money for a sandwich. Sometimes not even that. Writers make no money—particularly when they haven’t time to write. You went to free museums. You breastfed in public parks. Anytime your child was asleep or engaged you scribbled down sentences. You have forgiven London its many inconveniences. It gave you the opportunity to always be gone. It is a small sliver of your past you allow yourself to miss. Cheese and onion sandwiches have the harmlessly transgressive air of stocking feet outside. You forbid yourself the far more dangerous nostalgia for the life you fled in the middle of the night, your son and a suitcase full of summer clothes in tow. You have learned that the past is a sovereign nation. There is no escape and no return. There is only this moment, this mouthful. You eat what is in front of you. You are grateful it is there.   

   

   

Author Sophia Khan is a Pakistani-American writer with an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently working on a PhD in fiction at Western Michigan University, where she is a nonfiction editor for Third Coast Magazine and the Assistant Director of First Year Writing. Her short fiction has been published in Arts & Letters, Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English, and Kestrel Magazine, among others. Her stories were shortlisted for the Commonwealth short story prize in 2022 and 2016. Her first novel, Dear Yasmeen, was published in 2016 and her second, The Flight of the Arconaut, came out in 2020.

Artist Jeri Lewis Edwards is a naturalist, published poet and visual artist. She resides along the Central Coast of California. She is a self-described ‘camp director’ to her two rescue dogs with whom she hikes and plays every day. View her faces on Instagram: @Jeri2ravensstudio.