Keerthi’s story

When I was in school, on the weekends or whenever either of us wasn’t doing our best, I would make packet soup and extremely buttered cheese sandwiches with only basic ingredients. We would then sit and read our books or draw. I specifically remember an afternoons spent reading and rereading The Sisterhood of Travelling Pants between us.

Please make an updated from-scratch, fancy version? Because after years she and I reconnected, during this pandemic. It was absolutely wonderful. We got to meet each other as the people we have become. It felt so familiar but so different like there was a new depth to it.

Keerthi’s soup and sandwiches

My experience making soup and sandwiches (from scratch)

  1. I think I discovered the secret to making perfect buns. Put water in a tray below the buns in the oven. And ask me for the best yeast in the world recommendations!
  2. I get extra sentimental hearing/writing stories of people I know. I find a little part of them I didn’t know before. It reminds me that people and relationships are constant discoveries and rediscoveries, like a garden, where just today I saw a flower on a plant I did not know capable of flowering.
  3. When Keerthi found out that I made her meal for the whole fam, uncles, aunt, dadi, babyr, she started crying. Purer things I haven’t seen. (When I was away from home, I used to latch onto families I knew. I would drink with A’s father, sit on the kitchen counter with his mum, and cry in his sister’s lap. I visited them after we broke up when he wasn’t around. I see in retrospect that I was looking for warmth and acceptance, even a moral arbitrator in parents of friends, partners, roommates because my family hadn’t been able to provide that through my childhood. I came back home when I figured what I wanted and how to ask for it from my family. I need to complete that part of me, to be able to be a fuller person. I never thought my dysfunctional family could be adopted the way I adopted the families who got me here, but this girl adopted us. She adopted us and made us see that we’ve got love to give in spite of the dysfunction, just like the families I had adopted)

I didn’t understand friendships, more specifically I did not understand how to be a friend until I was an adult. That may be one of the reasons I do not have friends from childhood; I dropped the friendships when I left the city because they did not serve a utilitarian purpose anymore. Making these sandwiches got me thinking about these people, who were my companions in the hard days of school and the tiny moments of assurance that I didn’t remember because I was looking at my childhood as a big cloud of sad. I would like to put in writing the colourful diary and mathcy ‘P’ pendents my friend at 5 shared, the chalk fights of teenage with a whole group, and the study partners that assured me I was normal during board exams.

Recipes

Recipe for the bun: https://gatherforbread.com/easy-perfect-yeast-bread/

Recipe for sour cream: https://www.biggerbolderbaking.com/how-to-make-sour-cream/

  1. In one of the buns, I used garlic butter, mozzarella cheese, and a handful of mushrooms and baby corn sautéed in olive oil. I wrapped the overflowing sandwich in a baking paper and put it in the over for 7 ish minutes at 180 degrees Celcius.
  2. In the other sandwich, I used a mix of Mayonnaise, lemon, and coriander. Put in as much lettuce and tomato it could hold, a slice of cheese and some mustard sauce.

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